Utilizing Space Efficiently and Improving Technologies Act of 2023

Floor Speech

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Ms. HAGEMAN. Mr. Chairman, I rise today in favor of my amendment No. 3 to H.R. 6276, which expands on the bill's reporting requirements to have the Federal agencies also evaluate whether occupancy and utilization rates are affected by the agency's remote and telework policies.

The underlying bill, as drafted, requires Federal agencies and the General Services Administration, or GSA, to measure and report on occupancy and utilization in public buildings and federally leased spaces.

My amendment builds on this reporting requirement and forces the agencies to measure how telework and remote work impacts the utilization of its physical office space.

Telework and remote work have long been available to the Federal workforce, but the wide scale and regular use of such policies drastically increased during COVID.

Two priorities of this majority have been to return the Federal workforce to work and to understand how remote and telework impacted the efficiency of the Federal Government and the services it is required to provide to our constituents.

The Committee on Oversight and Accountability under the leadership of Chairmen Comer and Sessions have done great work to accomplish this goal.

Mr. Perry's bill and other bills reported by the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee measuring the usage of Federal office space make further meaningful steps in achieving the goals of this majority.

Yet, the agencies have been anything but fully transparent. My amendment seeks to build on this great work by requiring that the agencies measure the new age of remote and telework on the usage of physical government space.

With telework and remote work so widely used in 2024, any study on the usage of office space would be incomplete without measuring it against the number of employees which only sometimes or never have to physically report to work.

This would help Congress understand how much of the Federal office spaces are actually being used on a regular basis in the post-COVID world, which would also help us to determine if we need to divest of physical office space to save taxpayers' dollars and streamline the Federal Government.

Mr. Chair, I urge all my colleagues to support my amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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Ms. HAGEMAN. Mr. Chairman, I again urge my colleagues to support the amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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Ms. HAGEMAN. Mr. Chairman, I rise in favor of amendment No. 4 to H.R. 6276 which clarifies that the General Services Administration, or GSA, should use PIV badge swipe data isolating the first credentialed use of the day for each cardholder as a tool to measure utilization of Federal office space.

The bill, as currently drafted, explicitly directs GSA to use sensors and other technologies in public buildings and federally leased space to measure occupancy and utilization.

The GSA states that occupancy data has proven to be a vital tool for agencies to accurately evaluate space utilization and to manage property accordingly.

As part of this effort, the GSA is piloting occupancy data collection technologies. Another method GSA uses is badge swipe data which relies on Personal Identity Verification or PIV card swipe data at building access points.

PIV data is broken down into unique credentials and isolated to the first usage of the day. In short, it uses a Federal worker's PIV card to check attendance at the door.

My amendment would clarify that badge swipe data is and should be a tool GSA uses as part of the measurement of office utilization space.

While occupancy sensors measure the utilization of specific rooms, according to the GSA, badge swipe data can provide a historic daily count of the number of unique credential individuals in a space or building, daily building density based on square foot per person, and annual rent per person occupying the space.

This is absolutely the type of data we need to achieve the outcomes of the underlying bill.

The collection of the daily attendance to each Federal office building, which is then reported to Congress, will also help further our majority's goal to measure the impact of agencies' telework and remote work policies.

Again, my amendment is simply to clarify that this important data collection technology that GSA is piloting is utilized to the extent it can be in this mission to measure usage of government office space.

I urge all of my colleagues to support this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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Ms. HAGEMAN. Mr. Chairman, just one final statement. This amendment is to clarify that Congress intends for GSA to use all occupancy data collection techniques.

Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to support this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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