| What: | Issuing of OMB Reduce the Footprint memo |
| When: | OMB issued its “reduce the footprint” policy in March 2015, after ordering a freeze of federal office space two years earlier. |
| Why it matters: | This policy was the first time OMB set a government policy to use property as efficiently as possible, and for agencies to set annual reduction targets. |
Politics
Reducing the footprint: The push to optimize government office space
The federal government remains the largest owner of real estate in the country. The General Services Administration, which oversees office space for most agencies, manages more than 360 million square feet of building space.
Multiple administrations have spent more than 20 years trying to rein in the size of the federal real estate portfolio and the cost of maintaining it. Those efforts gained momentum under the Obama administration. In 2013, the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo freezing the federal real estate footprint.
Two years later, it released a “reduce the footprint” policy, focused in part on the disposal of excess and underutilized federal property. This 2015 policy was the first time OMB set a government policy to use property as efficiently as possible, and for agencies to set annual reduction targets.
Former officials who oversaw federal real estate said the Obama administration’s policies reflected decades of previous efforts to address a growing sprawl of real estate, and reflected how technology was reshaping the work of federal employees.
Many of the same office-space debates that happened under the Obama administration are still happening in the present day, as agencies readjust their office space needs to federal employees accustomed to workplace flexibilities like telework.
Norman Dong, former Public Buildings Service commissioner in GSA under the Obama administration, said the government’s growing office space portfolio got more attention in 2003, when the Government Accountability Office added federal real property management to its High-Risk List.
“They recognized how the federal real estate footprint was just continuing to grow, and something else they recognized was that the government doesn’t even know how many owned and leased properties it has, so it just seemed to be out of control,” Dong said.
Bob Peck, another former PBS commissioner under the Obama administration, said federal occupancy of federal office buildings hovered around 70% when he joined government during the Clinton administration.
“Even then, we knew there was more square footage per person in the GSA inventory than was warranted by the number of people we had,” Peck said. “In the federal government, people don’t necessarily get paid what they’re worth. But one way you can express your status is by the size of your office. People aspire, over the course of their career, to getting promoted. And one thing about being promoted is you get an office — or you get a bigger office.”
The George W. Bush administration launched the Federal Real Property Council, comprised of senior leaders at OMB and GSA, as well as GSA agency senior property officers. The administration also required agencies to keep an inventory of their office space holdings through the Federal Real Property Profile.
“Even before 2012, when the Freeze the Footprint memo came out, you saw almost a decade of activity before that, where the federal government was just struggling to get its arms around this issue,” Dong said.
By 2015, federal civilian agencies held more than 300,000 buildings requiring $21 billion in annual operation and maintenance costs, as well as $6.8 billion in annual lease costs.
“The federal government must continue to improve its management and use of federal assets to maximize the use of scarce budgetary resources in order to improve the efficiency and reduce costs associated with federal office and warehouse usage,” OMB wrote in its 2015-2020 national strategy for efficient use of real property.
Dong said the Obama administration’s efforts created “heightened awareness across the federal government about the need to improve space utilization.”
Agencies accelerated the disposal of federally owned buildings after the “reduce the footprint” memo. In 2015 and 2016, the federal government disposed of nearly 6,000 buildings. However, those disposal efforts diminished in the following years.
“The surplus property that we really have in the federal government is not what’s designated surplus or underutilized in the federal real property inventory that GSA maintains. It’s in the buildings that we call occupied,” Peck said.
Those policies also came at a time when more federal employees received cell phones and laptops, and were no longer tethered to their offices to do their jobs.
“A lot of federal office space looked like the 1950s, and the world had moved on. We were in a digital world,” Peck said. “It was a very different world. We started talking about, ‘Let’s take a look at how much of the space we really use.’”
But downsizing federal office space doesn’t happen overnight. Peck said it became a challenge for agencies to explain to OMB that they needed more money upfront to move into consolidated spaces.
“The thing that was really successful about it was that it got people into a different mindset about what are the right numbers,” he said. “If a space request came up through the bureaucracy, and landed on somebody’s desk and it said, ‘We’re going to get 250 square feet person,’ somebody would say, ‘You know, probably not going to happen.’”
Under the Obama administration, GSA set a limit of 136 usable square feet per person in federal workspaces. Peck, however, said the policy set a “one-size-fits-all policy” for a wide variety of jobs across the government.
“This is my regret about what with Freeze the Footprint: People say, ‘There’s a number that we should just make everybody adhere to.’ But what works for a courthouse doesn’t work for laboratories. Some agencies — let’s take law enforcement agencies — they don’t spend much time in their office at all.”
Dong said agencies generally complied with the Obama administration’s policies, as intended. However, he recalled once visiting a GSA field office in the Midwest that was following the standard to the detriment of its day-to-day work.
“They took pride in meeting the 136 square foot per person space standard. However, they no longer had sufficient space to support the employee badging function in that federal building, nor did they have any space to take a private phone call. So you met the space design standard, but you lost sight of good judgment and common sense. So I think part of it is sometimes when there’s such a rigid adherence to government policy, just for the sake of compliance, you see some things that don’t make sense,” Dong said.
The post Reducing the footprint: The push to optimize government office space first appeared on Federal News Network.
