Institutional and commercial facilities nationwide are struggling with twin — and often competing — challenges related to their facilities portfolios. They want more workers to return to offices, and they face mounting pressure to dispose of unused or underused facilities with the goal of rightsizing their portfolios.
The federal government’s landlord — the General Services Administration, (GSA) is no different. In the latest package of spending bills for fiscal 2026, members of the House and Senate appropriations committees are calling on the GSA to accelerate its plans to offload underused federal office space, according to the Federal New Network. But the spending bill falls short of the amount GSA officials have said is necessary to address a multi-billion-dollar maintenance backlog.
The spending bills allow GSA to spend $9.7 billion from the Federal Buildings Fund, which includes rent payments GSA collects from agencies working out of GSA-owned facilities. From those funds, GSA receives $166 million in funding for new federal construction projects and $934 million for federal building repairs.
GSA has about $24 billion in deferred maintenance projects and says about $6 billion is urgently needed in the next two years to address the maintenance backlog.
The Public Buildings Reform Board, which advises GSA on underused federal properties it should sell or offload, says the GSA will need about $50 billion to address a backlog of maintenance and repairs in federal buildings. GSA gets about $600 million annually to address those needs. Given those spending levels, the board estimates GSA’s portfolio would have to shrink by 80 percent to keep up with its maintenance backlog.
Dan Hounsell is senior editor for the facilities market. He has more than 30 years of experience writing about facilities maintenance, engineering and management.?
