Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, 2024

Floor Speech

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Mr. BRECHEEN. Mr. Chairman, this amendment is going to return funding for the General Services Administration, GSA, real property activities of the Federal buildings fund back to fiscal year 2019 levels. It is a modest cut of $12.7 million.

For context, this amendment would cut 0.5 percent of the entire bill. I will repeat that: 0.5 percent is what this amendment proposes. This is one-half of one percent.

This amendment returns spending for this specific funding back to pre-COVID discretionary spending levels. To my colleagues, discretionary outlays by our Federal Government totaled $1.7 trillion last year, and last year's deficit was $1.7 trillion.

That means 100 percent of discretionary spending is borrowed from our kids and our grandkids. That means 100 percent of all that we are discussing these last many weeks is borrowed money. We have to start cutting significantly.

Can we not go back to fiscal year 2019 as a start? Is that not enough government that we experienced in 2019?

This amendment cuts a modest $12.7 million from a $5.7 billion allotted amount for rental space that is not even being fully utilized by our Federal agencies.

The Government Accountability Office, GAO, released a report titled Federal Real Property Preliminary Results that show Federal buildings remain underutilized due to longstanding challenges and increased telework.

This report assessed 24 different Federal agencies' and departments' use of building space. The review was conducted between January and March of this year, long after the COVID-19 pandemic ended.

Mr. Chairman, 17 of those 24 agencies the GAO identified and listed utilized only 25 percent or less of their headquarter building capacity. Even on the higher range, these agencies only used between 39 to 49 percent of their headquarters on average.

For one agency the GAO did not name, GAO calculated that even if all of its agency staff were physically present in its headquarters, only 67 percent of the facilities would be occupied.

The same report detailed that underutilized office space cost 24 agencies mentioned in the report $2 billion a year--$2 billion a year-- lost due to wasted office space, and that was only for maintenance and operation costs. These agencies spend over an additional $5 billion on leasing space.

At a January 2023 meeting between the Federal Real Property Council, more than half of the participating agencies acknowledged that their headquarter buildings had excess space even prior to the pandemic. These are the headquarter offices. Not much less do we need to talk about the satellite offices.

The GAO report also mentioned that all 24 agencies have reduced their in-office work and have not returned to prepandemic levels because of remote work.

Even before the pandemic, Federal agencies struggled to determine how much space they needed to fulfill their missions.

Retaining excess and underutilized space is one of the main reasons Federal real property management has remained on the GAO high-risk list since 2003. For 20 years, GAO lists this problem among its high-risk list. It is a 20-year problem.

The GAO high-risk list seems to identify and help resolve serious weaknesses in areas that involve substantial resources.

More than half of GSA's leases, which account for 83 million square feet, are set to expire between 2023 and 2027. Therefore, the time to reduce this inefficiency must be now. This amendment can help achieve that.

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Mr. BRECHEEN. Mr. Chairman, let me reiterate that, this last year, GAO said 17 of the 24 agencies that they surveyed used only 25 percent of their headquarters office space. That means 75 percent of office space in the headquarters of the largest agencies is vacant.

This is just returning back to 2019 levels. We are talking about $12 million in cuts for what the GAO says is a $7 billion problem.

For 20 years, they have been talking about this, so much so that it has been on their high-risk list for years.

If we are going to account for a $1.7 trillion deficit, can we start by cutting millions out of billion-dollar problems?

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

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