Once people got over the shock of the Maryland bridge collapse, the long-term questions started to arise. Like, what about the nation’s supply chain, given that the Key Bridge is the entrance to an important shipping port. For analysis, The Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with Dr. Philip Evers, University of Maryland supply chain management professor.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin What are the supply chain effects? I mean, everything I’ve heard seems to indicate that some automobile shipments will take longer in parts. But is there more to this port than that?

Philip Evers Well, the Port of Baltimore is a mid-sized port relative to other ports in the country. So the port is very important, in the region. But if you look on a national scale, it’s much smaller than a port like, Los Angeles, Long Beach or the Port of New York, New Jersey. So I see a lot of short term issues that arise. Long term, I don’t see major effects outside of the Central Maryland area.

Tom Temin Interesting. So any indications that we have yet. Shipping will return more than we’ll talk about the surface transportation, which is a much longer term effect, but it’ll take them probably months to get the pieces of metal and so forth out so ships can come and go. Fair to say?

Philip Evers Absolutely. But in that time, the freight that would be coming to Baltimore, could, for the most part, be easily diverted to another port.

Tom Temin Yes, because Florida has a couple of big shipping ports, too, right?

Philip Evers Well, there there are ports all up and down the the East Coast, recognized that practically every ship that goes to Baltimore passes in Norfolk. The Port of Virginia is right there. So again, there’s lots for most items, especially for containerized freight, such as the freight that was on the ship that had the incident. Those containers could be offloaded somewhere else. Some of the more specialized freight might be a little bit harder to handle in the short term.

Tom Temin So then again, outside of automobiles, then we don’t really know what is important to the rest of the world coming through Baltimore, because containers on a ship can have everything from computers to whiffle balls.

Philip Evers Sure, absolutely. And we’re kind of thinking about this in terms of imports, but there’s also the export activities. And that I think is going to have maybe a slightly larger effect. Port of Baltimore certainly, handles a lot of export automobiles, but they handle some other export products as well that might affect other places in the world.

Tom Temin For federal government supply chains. Yes, the government buys vehicles, but they buy all of these other commodities, a lot of military gear. It doesn’t seem like this would have that much effect on what the federal government is acquiring.

Philip Evers I can’t imagine that it would have that big of impact, obviously some secondary impacts, but I don’t think anything major.

Tom Temin Now the port will get cleaned up and operational, presumably long before the road over it gets put back together. And that is, as people locally know, part of the Baltimore Beltway, which is a circle, a complete circle. And so when you take out a segment of a circle, you can’t get from point A to point B without going backwards around the long way. What about surface transportation?

Philip Evers I think you hit on the main point. I think the longer term the big issue will be with surface transportation, not with ocean transportation. Because as you say, they will be able to clean once a search and rescue mission are finished. They’ll be able to get onto the removal of the debris in the water, but it’s going to take a long time for that bridge to get rebuilt. And if you think about it, there are four. Well, there were four interstate paths through Baltimore, the two tunnels, the bridge and the other side of the beltway. And now one of those is missing. The Key Bridge certainly handled the fewest automobiles of the four, but it handled a lot of trucking because the trucks that carry hazardous materials are not allowed to go through the tunnels. So that’s one thing that’s going to put more, possibly more trucks around the other side of the beltway jamming that up more.

Tom Temin And you can get off I-95 through Baltimore and go down to a short highway called 395. But within moments you are on narrow surface streets.

Philip Evers Exactly. So for long distance truckers, and of course, anyone driving, let’s say from DC to New York, you’re probably not going to do much of that cutting through the town.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Dr. Philip Evers. He’s associate professor of supply chain management at the University of Maryland’s business school. There’s a third mode here called rail and the Baltimore Tunnel coming out of the city, going south toward the East coast. That’s long been an object of attention because the bridge, it’s a really old tunnel, and the double piggyback containers that come off of ships sometimes can’t fit two up on a train and get through that tunnel. And wasn’t there infrastructure money at long last to rebuild that tunnel?

Philip Evers Yes. Some of the the very initial work on that is is starting to happen. There’s two tunnels in Baltimore. There’s the Amtrak tunnel, which is an extremely old tunnel, and there is now money and there’s now work progressing on that. And that’s at the very initial stages. There’s also the Howard Street Tunnel, which is a CSX, line. That’s freight only. But that line is now also being expanded, to allow for double stack.

Tom Temin Expanded, meaning they have to scoop it out bigger.

Philip Evers  Exactly.

Tom Temin And that’s not a minor engineering thing. I know you’re not an engineer, but that’s not a minor undertaking, is it?

Philip Evers No. In neither of those two tunnels, it cases is that minor. They’re both going to be major project. Much as I’ll point out, and you may recall in in DC, the Virginia Avenue tunnel expansion 10 or 15 years ago was a significant undertaking, but it was done relatively quickly.

Tom Temin And let me ask you about a bigger question. And that is people that are doing procurement on behalf of organizations, in our case, contracting officers. Shipping was something that you consider. Do you think that in the future shipping, shipping methods, shipping costs, shipping warranties should be a bigger part of the thinking of people that are trying to get things acquired and delivered?

Philip Evers Let me come at that in a slightly different perspective. One of the things that occurred during COVID was firms started to really think about the resiliency of their supply chain, especially after 2021. And there were all the problems on the West Coast, in L.A. and Long Beach, firms really started to take resiliency seriously. And so a lot of firms have started to put supply chain backup plans into place. Now we know that plans are always off, but at least firms are now starting to think about these things. So I think in this case, this would be really our first major experience with resiliency planning since firms have really started to kick around this idea. So I’m sure everything won’t go swimmingly, but it will give us experience and I think we will recover better and faster than had firms not been thinking about this to begin with.

Tom Temin And so probably the most critical aspect for the government might be military supplies and deliveries, which are often heavy items or coming by train or full size truck. Therefore, that resiliency would be something military acquisition people should be thinking about.

Philip Evers Sure. Now, again, I don’t know how much military cargo comes directly into a Baltimore.

Tom Temin Probably none.

Philip Evers Probably none. And again, Norfolk is right there. I don’t see this being as big of an impact on the military is more on the commercial side out of Baltimore.

The post Will that bridge collapse in Maryland affect federal supply chains? first appeared on Federal News Network.

The bills for facility maintenance that federal agencies have decided to put off until future years are ballooning. The Government Accountability Office looked at four big agencies: GSA, HHS, Interior and Energy. GAO found the collective size of their deferred maintenance backlogs grew 80% over just the past five years – and agencies have not done a great job of explaining the reasons to Congress. David Marroni is an acting director for physical infrastructure issues at GAO. He talked about the problems with Federal News Network’s Deputy Editor Jared Serbu on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin. 

Interview Transcripts: 

Jared Serbu Okay, David. And I think I think the most obvious place to start is from what goes been able to determine what are some of the reasons behind these huge, huge increases in deferred maintenance expenses or estimates, I guess we should say.   

David Marroni Right. So there’s a number of reasons. Funding constraints as one agencies would, they don’t have enough funds to do while the repair and maintenance needs defer those repairs. So that’s one of the reasons for the increase. Also, as I think anyone knows who’s done a renovation in the past couple of years. Material and labor costs have increased substantially due to inflation, and that affects the deferred maintenance backlog to its terms, the size of that estimate. And then a third reason is simply that the vast size of these federal building and structure holdings, this is a large and aging portfolio. The average age is about 50 years of many of these buildings at this point. And older buildings just cost more to maintain and repair. They deteriorate more. And so that also contributes to the increase.   

Jared Serbu Yeah. And it seems like it’s really government wide. I know you really only looked at detail at four large agencies, but you also found, I think, a 58% increase government wide in these in these deferred maintenance expenses. It sounds like what you’re saying is there’s no like singular policy across the government that caused this. It’s a lot of economic factors and a lot of other things.   

David Marroni Yeah, that’s a fair take. It’s economic factors and then it’s just progressively increase in these maintenance backlogs over time for civilian agencies. This was focused on civilians, right?   

Jared Serbu How reliable can we say these estimates probably are? Because it seems like by definition this is work that wasn’t done. So I’m going to guess in a lot of cases, agencies really never went out to bid to get reliable cost estimates on what the work would have taken. So again, how reliable are these estimates?   

David Marroni So they’re reliable enough for accounting purposes, but that does not mean that when you actually conducted this project, it would be this exact number. So I think that the number we’re talking here about $80 billion of a deferred made up backlog. That’s a good estimate of where things stand. It may be higher what you got into the actual projects themselves, but this is reliable enough for accounting purposes.   

Jared Serbu And I want to dig into one of your other major findings was, which is that in their budget materials and other communications that Congress agencies need to be communicating more information about this deferred maintenance. What are they not telling Congress that they should be telling Congress?   

David Marroni So a couple of things. First, they are including information on what’s the you know, at a big level, what’s our deferred maintenance backlog, which is good, but they haven’t been explaining the reason for major changes from one year to the next, which is important context for Congress to understand. They also have not been including information on what is included in these numbers and what is it. So, for instance, in some cases you may have a building that isn’t the deferred means backlog, but you’re planning to get rid of it the next year. And so it doesn’t really make a lot of sense to invest in those repairs. But in the information being communicated to Congress, agencies aren’t being clear about what exactly is in that bucket or not. And then lastly, the agencies are not communicating what portion of the deferred means backlog is mission critical, Like what are the most important pieces of this backlog versus some things that might be less urgent? So those bits of information are important for Congress with this making funding decisions to really understand the full context of what these numbers be.   

Jared Serbu Right. And the consequences of those deferrals, I guess, would be one of the most important things you’d want to know, because there’s a big difference between a deferral that, you know, would prevent the failure of a building versus something that you can reasonably put off for a few years with no real consequences to Agencies have that kind of information that they could be sending to Congress.   

David Marroni Oh, they do. The agencies actually internally have a fairly good at least the agency’s looked at a fairly good process for prioritizing projects, understanding where they deferred maintenance, urgent, urgent needs are. So we’re simply saying, well, you should communicate that more wholly to Congress so they can understand as they’re making funding decisions.   

Jared Serbu And considering how long federal budget cycles normally take. I’m imagining that that sort of added information is probably not going to start showing up for a few years. Is that a fair expectation?   

David Marroni I think that’s a fair expectation. Obviously, we’re in the midst of the next budget cycle right now. So the agencies all accepted our recommendations, all agree with our recommendations. DoE said they were going to take a look. So hopefully by say FY26, we’ll start to see this information in the budget submissions.   

Jared Serbu There was a little bit of discussion in the report on using models. Can you go into that a little bit how our agency’s doing that? And does it seem to be effective?   

David Marroni Yes. So of the four agency we looked at, which were Department of Energy, Department of the Interior, Health and Human Services at GSA, only one had a fulsome model, GSA, which they use. And it’s an important tool. It allows them to say, okay, we have a number of deferred maintenance projects. Let’s use the model to find out what the best return of our investment would be. We have a limited number of funds. How can we get the most for our money using this model? The other agencies, two of them, had some modeling capability, but not a fulsome capability like GSA did. And the Department of the Interior didn’t use a model for this purpose. So we actually recommended that all three of those agencies take a look see the cost benefits of adopting this type of modeling, because we think it is a potential way to get some cost savings. Maximize the use of your resources to get these backlogs down. It’s just an important issue, both for mission reasons and for financial reasons. Right. If these structures aren’t holding up over time, it could affect their ability to do what the agencies need them to do. But in obviously for the fall government overall, these are large potential financial costs that are coming due. So important to get our arms around this now.  

The post A big uptick in federal agencies’ deferred facility maintenance backlogs first appeared on Federal News Network.

But first, federal websites. What’s the connection? Websites, like the J. Edgar Hoover building, require a lot of improvement or else replacement.

That’s a generic statement. In fact, every web site everywhere needs a lot of improvement. The better the website, the better your business’s or your agency’s customer experience. Web sites have in common with buildings the need for perpetual maintenance and improvement. As it grew functionally obsolete, the FBI building in Washington D.C. deteriorated physically. So, too, do websites come to the point of reckoning.

Federal Chief Information Officer Clare Martorana underscored websites and customer experience at ACT-IAC’s big annual conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania. She urged federal tech attendees to get back to the U.S. Web Design System. Hosted for a long time by the General Services Administration, the system states its own purpose right on the home page: “We make it easier to build accessible, mobile-friendly government websites.”

Martorana complained that too few federal sites have been optimized for mobile devices. And, she said, they’ve become fragmented to the point where, at least as some sites, a visitor can’t feel totally assured it’s the legitimate site of the agency.

As someone who visits dozens of federal sites each week, I can confirm they’re not perfect, but they hold their own in the vast sea of websites. A few are stellar.

And yes, while there’s always work to do on a web site, millions of people around the world live under governments that don’t care quite so exquisitely about customer experience.

I’m about to visit a couple of Southeast Asia countries, and I need a visa for one of them. You can only obtain one from the country’s “evisa” site, which looks as if it was designed in 2003 or so. Lots of picky rules about how to upload a picture of your passport, mug shot of yourself and fill in several pages of personal data.

Did I say picky?  No less than three times, I received an email that something was wrong. Each time, I’d correct the data field, only to get another email two days later that something else was wrong. Whomever or whatever was looking at the incoming applications seemed to look no further than the first error it encountered, rather than finding all the errors and issuing a single corrective bulletin. Better yet, do what the best contemporary sites do and not even accept the submission until everything is correct.

What should have taken two days extended to two weeks thanks to the crazy serial application examination system. My wife had even more problems, and it looks like we could jet off with only one of us having a visa.

Will they actually build a new FBI headquarters?

Greenbelt, Maryland. The FBI, if it actually moves there, would join NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as a major federal installation. A big IRS center operates out of nearby New Carrolton, Maryland, so it’s not as if Maryland’s Prince George’s County (don’t call it “P-G”) is some sort of federal wasteland. It’s a rather nice area, actually.

The FBI will move there presuming the Virginia congressional delegation doesn’t throw up obstacles. Rep. Gerry Connolly, who’s eternally grumpy in a jovial sort of way, sounded particularly ill-humored after the decision. As Jory Heckman reported, Connolly issued this outburst: “GSA has shamelessly caved to political pressure, putting blatant politics over the merits and amending the weighting of long-established criteria to make this decision all but predictable.”

Politics can be brutal, especially blatant politics.

Connolly added, “GSA’s reputation for objective procurement free from politics has taken a mortal hit today from which it will struggle to recover for years into the future.”

That sounds like some tough hearings and budget fights for years into the future.  I’m taking a wild guess, though, that the GSA decision will ultimately stand, if only because people are getting tired of the argument. FBI will likely still have its training operation in Quantico, Virginia. The loss goes to Washington, D.C., and even that’s questionable, given the District’s strong condo and apartment market.

An idea: Replace the FBI building with a smart, good-looking new general purpose office building and move all the agency fragments scattered around D.C. into it.

The decision by GSA only kicks off a long process. Who knows, what if someone discovers a latter-day snail darter in Greenbelt? The environmental donnybrooks would take a decade.

Architectural and other critics have often declared the existing FBI building ugly. In the heart of downtown, it offers a cold shoulder to the public, being essentially a law enforcement headquarters with all the charm typical of police stations. Plus, it’s designed in the – wait for it – Brutalist style, which has earned the “ugly” sobriquet for the  Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development structures. An earlier column on that prompted a strong response from HHS that, well, they like their building.

If and when its new headquarters is completed, the FBI will certainly occupy a structure totally unlike the one where it now lives. HUD and HHS are going to be in their “ugly” buildings — designed by no less than Marcel Breuer himself — indefinitely.

But old, Brutalist buildings can get new leases on life, no pun intended. I recently visited my collegiate alma mater, the Rochester Institute of Technology. Back when I attended starting in 1973, it occupied about a dozen brick-clad Brutalist buildings constructed all at once in 1966, when the school moved out of downtown Rochester, New York. RIT still called it a new campus.

Now, the building housing, among other things, my photojournalism major is all new, inside. Gone is the ubiquitous smell of sodium hyposulfite, an odor that still provokes fond memories. It looks the same from the outside. But, gutted and redesigned for the digital era, the interior has become more open, airier and better lit than in the 1970s. It features more collaboration areas, outdoor patios, cafe spots and, of course, all of the technology that goes with digital imaging.

As Kamara Jones, HHS acting assistant secretary for public affairs, told me back in August, “If you don’t think the building’s beautiful on the outside, there are a lot of beautiful people and beautiful things happening on the inside.”

The FBI doesn’t call its J. Edgar Hoover headquarters Brutalist. It obliquely refers to the architecture thus: “It echoed a major architectural style of the 1960s.”

By the way, don’t go speculating on adjacent land just yet in Greenbelt. According to the FBI’s own account, the idea for a new FBI headquarters floated in 1939. Congress first appropriated money for design and engineering of the FBI building in 1962.

What happened next? Groundbreaking in 1967, five years later. Then came delays, arguments, strikes and cost overruns. The first cohort of employees moved in during June, 1974 — 12 years later after Congressional approval and 38 years after the idea.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Michele Sandiford

The first two female FBI recruits following J. Edgar Hoover’s ‘no women’ policy were Susan Lynn Roley, a Marine Corps lieutenant, and Joanne Pierce, a former nun.

Source: FBI.gov

The post New FBI headquarters? Don’t hold your breath first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Government Publishing Office this week confirmed its plans to maintain 100% telework and remote work options for all eligible agency employees — and plans to reorganize its regional office structure around that decision.

After conducting a pilot at its Chicago office, GPO rearranged all of its regional offices into seven different teams that are no longer tied to physical location.  Those team members, who are teleworking and working remotely, can work from anywhere in the country, GPO said in a press release Monday.

GPO, a small legislative branch agency with just a couple thousand employees who handle the government’s printing and publishing services, said the decision to restructure comes on the heels of major success teleworking during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since early 2020, the eligible one-third of the agency’s workforce has been entirely teleworking.

GPO first implemented its current telework and remote work policy in July 2021, and now, the agency said that policy will remain intact for the some 500 telework-eligible feds at GPO. On the other hand, GPO production staff, roughly 1,000 employees total, will continue to work completely on-site, as these employees have to report in-person to produce U.S. passports and other printed materials for Congress, the White House and agencies.

“I believe if something is working well for our customers and teammates, we need to do more of it,” GPO Director Hugh Nathanial Halpern said in a press statement. “By vacating physical regional offices, GPO is able to better serve our customers, reduce costs and enhance the work-life balance for our teammates, all by refocusing our customer services teams on meeting our customers where they are, rather than where GPO is.”

Beyond keeping customers and employees satisfied, GPO Chief Communications Officer Gary Somerset said telework at the agency is saving $1 million annually in taxpayer dollars, since the agency is no longer renting physical office space for its regional teams.

More broadly, in a report last month, the Government Accountability Office found that agencies were, on average, utilizing just 25% of their headquarters offices. GAO officials said it’s time for agencies right now to start making “hard decisions” about how they’ll be using their office space in the future — and reduce that space as needed.

In contrast to GPO’s latest decision, many executive branch agencies have started announcing upcoming increases to their requirements for employees to work in the office. Federal News Network has compiled a running list of what we know so far about agencies’ return-to-office plans.

GPO is unlike other federal agencies, Somerset told Federal News Network. Consequently, the Office of Management and Budget memo from April does not apply to GPO. Still, the agency is continuing to measure productivity in its workforce, similar to executive branch agencies.

“GPO runs as a business, so our primary measurement of productivity is revenue,” Somerset said in an email.

The agency’s customer services business unit, for which all employees either fully telework or work remotely, has seen orders from agencies increase by about 15% in the last year. Somerset said the telework program is highly successful for handling the influx of orders.

“Productivity is up, our customers are happy, our employees are happy with the work-life balance and GPO can recruit nationwide for regional team job openings,” Somerset said.

Put simply, he said, “telework works for GPO.”

The post GPO vacates regional offices, embraces 100% telework for all eligible employees first appeared on Federal News Network.

Thanks to that extensive survey by the Government Accountability Office, we know just how empty federal offices really are. None of them is more than half full. That fact has depressed the market for certain commodities a lot of vendors counted on each year as a kind of annuity. To take a fuller look at the empty offices,  Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with sales and marketing consultant Larry Allen.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin And we’re talking furniture, desks, that kind of stuff, which was always a good living for those that figured out how to sell it to the government.

Larry Allen Tom, these are things that are good livings for the people that sell them, whether it’s office furniture, whether it’s things like office supplies, multifunction devices, what we used to call printers, things of that nature. It’s a significant part of the federal market when you think about the fact that the federal furniture market’s a little over a billion dollars a year. It doesn’t always make headlines. But the old saying is that all adds up, right? And then when you particularly look into the office supply part of it that’s shrinking, know that’s got a socioeconomic part to it as well, because we’re talking about a lot of small businesses that do significant business with the government. But we’re also talking about the AbilityOne program, places like the National Industries for the Blind that traditionally are heavily invested in providing those commodity type office supplies and other things that make an office function. But if you’re not in that office or if you’re not in that office very much, then the market for those things is certainly going to be depressed.

Tom Temin Yes, I can remember when agencies like a lot of businesses went through a big process to consolidate everyone. So every manager didn’t have a printer in his or her office and they went to network printers. So it’s unlikely that the government is buying printers for everyone that is working from their house. They’ll say, Well, print the PDF if you want to print it, and otherwise you’re on your own for physical output. So it’s fair to say fewer printers are going in.

Larry Allen Well, that’s certainly right. And that’s the evidence that I’m hearing from some of the companies that I work with as that the demand for that type of product and the demand for print management services is on the decline. And when you look at the numbers, not just the vacancy numbers, which, as GAO pointed out, are pretty substantial, even if people are going back into the office, it’s probably only for two, maybe three days a week in many cases. So even when you’re there, you’re not printing out as much as you were. You can further consolidate that office space, which is kind of what GAO was saying, which means that you can do things like share desks, share workstations, so you don’t need to buy as many of them. You might need to buy some one-off stuff to keep everything current. But these large scale buys and again, they have ramifications outside of industry. Another mandatory source status for federal agencies that is in this areas, federal prison industries that for decades has made a significant part of its business selling office furniture to federal agencies. So there are a lot of things here that go beyond the mere vacancy issue.

Tom Temin Yes. The  AbilityOne, the federal prison industries, these have social value as well. And those people are simply not. I mean, the pens and all those supplies that came from the AbilityOne program that’s got to be way off.

Larry Allen You know, I think it is off. And there is a trend in that part of the  AbilityOne program, Tom, to get more into professional services. I think the statistics such as these are only going to hasten that transition into the provision of services. It’s definitely a different model for some of these organizations that are used to selling physical products. But the times are changing and people are going to need to keep pace.

Tom Temin Yeah, probably Amazon is the big beneficiary. If somebody wants that box of big sticks, it’s just easier to get it on Amazon for $3.99 than to figure out how to get it from your agency.

Larry Allen Right? Right. Well, I think we’re going to start to see some of the figures roll in here towards year end on GSA commercial platform initiative that Amazon, Overstock Government and Fisher Scientific are all part of. And I’m expecting that we’re going to have some pretty sizable increases in those sales numbers, Tom. And that could be this could be one reason why.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Larry Allen, president of Allen Federal Business Partners. And there’s a lot going on on the scene. We are in the final quarter of the fiscal year. And so there’s a big buying to the extent that this year can produce a buying bonanza at all. And it’s all pretty much and we’re looking at Bloomberg numbers here, the big GWACs, the IDIQ contracts that are governmentwide.

Larry Allen Yeah, I thought this was really interesting, Tom. A few weeks ago, Bloomberg Government came out with initial projections showing that maybe 60% of all fourth quarter buys would go through a standing indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts, things like NIH’s CIO-SP program, the GSA schedules, NASA’s SEWP, what have you. And then they revise those numbers. Bloomberg came out just last week and said not 60, but maybe as much as 66%, two thirds of all Q4 spending going through these IDIQ vehicles. That’s pretty significant. I think some of the reasons for that are obvious. One, they’re fast and easy to use. Second, they’ve got easy competition features built into them. Third, there’s a substantial amount of small business presence on most of these IDIQs. And for agencies that are trying to meet their end of year small business use numbers and do it in a fast and cost effective way. IDIQ contracts just make sense.

Tom Temin And so that gives a clue to what vendors should be concentrating on, which is whatever vehicles you have existing. And forget about the new open competition starting fresh from scratch type of activity. If you want to have a chance of making your numbers this year, work your vehicles.

Larry Allen I think there’s a lot to that, Tom, and certainly there are always going to be open market procurements that the government does. That’s kind of the backbone of the system. But at fourth quarter, there simply isn’t enough time to start every new acquisition from scratch. You need to get yourself halfway through the process at least. And that’s another reason why IDIQ contracts are popular. So if you’re a contractor, you definitely want to have some of these contracts in your portfolio or at least work with companies that are partners that do so you can sell through them. Not every contract has that feature, but many of them do. You want to make sure that you know you’ve got your IDIQ channel tuned up and ready to go, because that’s clearly where the business is. That’s this year. And it was last year. Ironically, Tom, you and I have spent a fair amount of the time last several months talking about delays in getting new IDIQ contracts put in place. Most recently, that’s been on the GSA Polaris program and also NIH’s CIO-SP4. IDIQ contracts are popular. We know they drive business. This is proof positive of that. And yet because they’re so popular, companies are looking at this as a do or die. And the result is that the time it takes to put these new programs in place keeps expanding. So we’ll have to see if there’s some sort of a tipping point in the future that says these are great vehicles, but we can’t get new ones in place or we’re going to have to figure out something new. But for now, IDIQ contracts are certainly a very significant part of any company’s government business.

Tom Temin And briefly, I wanted to ask you about something else you’re commenting on this week. And that is what you call the two pronged compliance battlefront for contractors, including dealing with the Justice Department’s procurement collusion strike force, which sounds like, wow, they’re coming for me one way or another.

Larry Allen It kind of sounds like Darth Vader’s leading the procurement collusion strikeforce Tom. You can almost hear the Empire music playing in the background, but that’s just one prong that contractors need to be aware of in terms of compliance. Certainly the government’s tools, not just DOJ, but agency IGs, things like the Defense Contract Audit Agency, but you also need to look on the other side and sometimes the other side is in your own backyard or maybe in your back office. And that’s whistle blowers. The whistleblowers, typically disgruntled employees, former employees, even competitors. And I find that while there’s always a risk of audit for a contractor, a lot of the bigger False Claims Act cases and a lot of the ones that certainly in terms of the sheer number are initiated by whistleblowers. And so if you’re a contractor, you really have to pay attention to this two-front compliance battlefield. Yes, you need to make sure that everything’s squared away for the auditor when the auditor comes knocking. But you also need to make sure that you’ve got the processes in place for people to be heard, for complaints to be heard and processed so that people don’t feel like the only way out is to file a whistleblower complaint. So it’s both formal government and informal from your colleagues and industry. As always, I think compliance is pennies on the dollar, but you really do have to look at it as a two front war.

Tom Temin Yeah. And if a whistleblower comes to you first and says, hey we’re overcharging on this contract, take it seriously, look at it before you end up in a False Claims Act situation where you could have punitive damages.

Larry Allen It’s far easier, Tom, to address issues when they come up and as opposed to just letting them sit. It’s great to have money rolling in, but if you know or should have known that you were overbilling on a contract, somebody calls it to your attention and you do nothing about it, You’re kind of setting your company up for a multi-year entanglement with all kinds of the oversight community. Lost revenue, fines potentially to pay, legal bills to pay, and then even up to and including loss of key personnel. If you want to show people how you take these things seriously and prevent yourself from being suspended from doing future business.

 

The post Empty federal offices are bad for the economy first appeared on Federal News Network.

The space-to-occupancy ratio at agency headquarters has worsened in the last few years, as many agencies embraced hybrid work and increased telework for their employees.

It would be easy to blame underutilization of office space entirely on the spike in telework after the COVID-19 pandemic, but years of reports from the Government Accountability Office have shown that the problem is more complicated and long-term. Federal property management has been an issue for agencies for decades — and has remained on GAO’s High Risk List since 2003.

After surveying 24 agencies about their headquarters offices in D.C. between January and March this year, GAO’s preliminary results, published Thursday, showed every single one of them had excess space — and 17 of them were at or below 25% occupancy from staff members.

The new findings from GAO sparked heightened criticism from lawmakers on the House Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency Management Subcommittee.

“I’ve been a firm believer that if agencies aren’t using their space, they’ve got to give it up,” Chairman Scott Perry (R-Pa.) said during a subcommittee hearing Thursday. “We need to get a handle on this and push agencies … If they won’t do it, we’re going to have to help them do it. And I don’t mean help in the good way.”

The hearing Thursday followed after a subcommittee roundtable in March, when Perry said the growth of telework over the last several years meant agencies must “shed unneeded real estate.”

Now, GAO’s new numbers, coupled with a timely crossroads for agencies, present a “unique opportunity” to downsize federal office holdings imminently, said David Marroni, GAO’s acting director of physical infrastructure.

“It takes time to consolidate space, to dispose of space, so there is a tail to this as well, which is why decisions soon are important,” Marroni said during the subcommittee hearing Thursday. “We have a particular need now to refocus and potentially make some hard decisions about what space we need.”

Agencies have been holding onto too much space for years, Marroni said. Many decades-old headquarters buildings are not configured efficiently, and as technology has improved, agencies have fewer employees doing the work and less need for big offices, which has led to an increase in unused space.

“They have administrative spaces, storage spaces and some libraries that aren’t as relevant in modern workplaces, but that takes up the usability of your space,” Marroni later told Federal News Network.

Some subcommittee members pointed to the new GAO report as good reason to return federal employees to the office. Many agencies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, have already started announcing return-to-office plans, after the Biden administration in April called on agencies to submit updated work environment plans and increase in-office work where necessary.

OMB’s guidance is a key way for agencies to decide how much space they’ll need going forward, but Marroni said it’s not a full solution to the challenge of office holdings. Because of outdated configurations of office space, even if an agency had 100% attendance of staff assigned to a particular building on a given day, by GAO’s calculation, it would still only be about two-thirds utilized.

“It’s not just because of telework that we have these low levels of utilization, but it certainly has driven numbers lower than they were prior to the pandemic,” Marroni said. “There’s a particular opportunity right now to say, ‘How much attendance do we want staff in the building going forward? What does that mean for these spaces? Do we need all this space, or can we consolidate? Can we dispose of space we don’t need?’”

Still, many agencies have yet to make their return-to-office decisions, which leaves office holdings up in the air, too.

“The truth is, we’re still in the middle of this shift in the real estate market, and this could take a long time to play out — we need to recognize that,” Subcommittee Ranking Member Dina Titus (D-Nev.) said during the hearing. “But returning to work is only part of the issue at hand.”

The other part of the equation? More than 50% of the General Services Administration’s building leases will expire within the next five years. Even though it’s years away, agencies need to start making decisions now, Marroni said. Aside from how long it takes to get through the process, there are also significant financial, environmental and opportunity costs to holding onto too big of a physical footprint.

“Every dollar an agency spends on unneeded space is one dollar that can’t be used for other priorities,” Marroni said during the hearing. “How much economic benefit do buildings used at a quarter of their capacity really provide to the local economy? Housing, hotels and other uses could provide more local benefits.”

But at the same time, it’s not easy or cheap to work toward reducing the federal footprint, said Nina Albert, commissioner of GSA’s Public Buildings Service.

“It does cost money to save money,” Albert said. “We need to move agencies from one location to another — that costs money. And where they’re moving to needs to be improved. Either in our own buildings, or into even a leased space, there’s improvements or changes that need to be made to the physical footprint to accommodate a new agency and how the new agency functions. All of those activities take money.”

To make it happen, Albert said GSA’s budget proposal will help modernize and fix the program. The fiscal 2024 budget request includes $2.3 billion for GSA’s capital program. Without stable funding, Albert said it forces the government to lease out of necessity, while still carrying space it no longer needs. She also emphasized the need to streamline GSA’s authority to maintain and dispose of real property.

“The expanded authority is not a request for additional funds,” Albert said. “Instead, the proposal allows GSA to use existing funds on analyses and activities that support agency identification and preparation of real property for disposition.”

Lawmakers also questioned the right capacity for federal office spaces, and whether there should be a set goal for agencies. There are no set standards for agencies to determine how much office space they need, but traditionally, GSA has maintained a benchmark of 180 square feet per staff member to measure the office space agencies will need.

“Especially now that we have a more hybrid work environment, those existing measures, even the 180 may not make sense going forward,” Marroni told the subcommittee members.

The Public Buildings Reform Board (PBRB), created under the 2016 Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act, was created with the intention of fast-tracking the sale of excess federal properties, but the board is falling behind on its goals.

Though it was able to sell $194 million worth of properties, PBRB is still hundreds of millions below its targets. The board has since faced rejections from OMB of additional property sales, and lost quorum after two PBRB members vacated their positions at the end of 2021. PBRB regained quorum in November 2022, and is preparing its final round of recommendations before the board ends in December 2024.

And with return-to-office plans still undecided for many agencies, many have been reluctant to give up the space they already occupy.

For Marroni, the preliminary results from GAO were not surprising, but there is a bigger takeaway for agencies. To start downsizing, agencies should look at how much space they have, how many employees they’re expecting to come to the office and how often.

“The numbers themselves, they jump off the page, but we expected to find low utilization,” he said. “If you walk around the D.C. core, I don’t think that’s shocking to anyone. But the numbers do highlight … that we do have a utilization issue right now. It’s important for agencies to assess where things stand and assess where they want to go in the future.”

GAO plans to release more studies in the coming months, including one with recommendations for how agencies can more specifically address office space underutilization, and another looking at the effectiveness of telework for federal employees.

The post With most agency headquarters at 25% capacity, ‘hard decisions’ coming for federal office holdings first appeared on Federal News Network.

Over 150 lighthouses have been sold or transferred out of federal ownership since the implementation of the General Services Administration’s National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act of 2000.

The NHLPA allows for lighthouses to be transferred at no cost to federal agencies, state and local governments, nonprofit organizations and educational organizations. Lighthouses that are not transferred can be auctioned off to the general public.

GSA currently has five lighthouses in New England available for transfer, and is putting up four lighthouses for auction. Scroll through the gallery to see some of the lighthouses.

The post GSA’s ‘2023 lighthouse season’ features new lighthouses for sale first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Office of Inspector General at Housing and Urban Development is boosting efforts to end sexual abuse and unsanitary conditions in HUD-backed housing. For details,  Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with HUD Inspector General Rae Oliver Davis.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin And you’re doing a couple of things here. Let’s start with the sexual abuse. There was a horrifying case in public housing that the Justice Department just took care of. Tell us what happened. And is that in your sense, emblematic of what can happen in public housing?

Rae Oliver Davis Sure. Thank you for that question. We opened that matter in May of 2018, and it started out with just one agent and one victim. And we zeroed in on a New Jersey landlord. He had been receiving about $1.2 million in housing choice voucher HUD assistance annually. And what we discovered were allegations spanning about 15 years, allegations that included quid pro quo, sexual contact for rental assistance. If you do this, you can stay here. If you don’t do this, you might be evicted. Those sorts of things, pretty horrible conduct. We did work that with the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office, you mentioned that, and they charged him in August of 2020. Then in March of 2021, the local New Jersey Union County prosecutors charged him with multiple counts of sexual assault and criminal sexual contact. So we had a number of things going on there. This resulted in a settlement, though, in about December of 2021 for $4.5 million, which is the biggest settlement DOJ had of this kind with this particular kind of conduct. About $4.3 million, Tom went back to the victims. And the big thing here, for my agency, is that this individual had to sell all of his properties. He had hundreds of units. He had divest himself of all of that. And he had to agree not to be a residential property landlord going forward.

Tom Temin All right. So that was a particularly egregious case. But do you have the sense that it’s not the only one?

Rae Oliver Davis Absolutely. And unfortunately, we do not believe it’s the only one. It’s hard to put numbers on these things, I think, precisely because it’s difficult for people to come forward. I think, maybe until now, HUD beneficiaries who had suffered at the hands of this kind of misconduct didn’t even know that there was any kind of recourse or that it was a crime or a violation of the Fair Housing Act. So that’s something we’re really trying to do, is get awareness out to the public on this. But when we talk to HUD, when we talk to DOJ, we talk to the locals, we all get a sense that this is unfortunately quite pervasive. I said that that last case started with one victim, but sometimes we get up to 60 victims. So it’s out there, it’s a thing. So we’re really trying to combat this terrible conduct.

Tom Temin And what are you doing from the IG standpoint to help combat this?

Rae Oliver Davis We are partnering with just about everyone. There’s something here for all of government. It’s kind of a whole of government approach, all hands on deck. For us, working with our DOJ partners, getting bad actors out of the program. That’s what we do best, that’s what we want to do here. Each of these victims could potentially also have a fair housing claim. They have to bring that within a year. So we definitely make sure they’re on that path to filing that with the department, that’s something HUD can do. We work with the state and locals on these misconduct, criminal sexual conduct cases. And frankly, these start out, they can almost be a he said she said sort of thing. But by the time we investigate them, and we’ve got 60 victims, we really boost the state case against these bad actors as well. We also are driving complaints to our hotline. Like I said, right now, we fear that we have people that don’t even know that this is a crime or something they can do anything about. So we’re really trying to get the word out that way.

Tom Temin And you have some public service ads running, too, right?

Rae Oliver Davis We do. We have some public service ads running. There’s a video of me, hopefully educating people about what to look for. If your maintenance worker said this to you, if your landlord did this, just really educating potential victims on the conduct that we’re aiming to target.

Tom Temin And what about the HUD housing program officers themselves that actually do the payouts certify the landlords and run these programs?

Rae Oliver Davis Well, certainly that’s a good question. And we’re always looking to do oversight there. And this really is something where if we can get a conviction, if we can get a settlement like we had in that New Jersey case, we would then refer them for disbarment. So they wouldn’t be able to participate in any HUD or government programs going forward. That’s something we would work together with HUD to do.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Rae Oliver Davis. She is inspector general of Housing and Urban Development. And let me ask you about the other matter that you are concentrating on, and that is substandard conditions. I guess there’s still lead paint, even this many years after no lead paint in the market, and other problems with housing that are physical in nature and make for unsanitary, unhealthy conditions. What’s the extent of that and what are you doing about it?

Rae Oliver Davis Well, Tom, you hit the nail on the head and you listen to the news like I do. We hear every day about landlords who don’t hold up their end of the bargain. They get the housing assistance payments, but they’re not providing safe sanitary housing. It’s a big problem. Housing stock is old. There’s a capital needs backlog, I think you and I have talked about this before that contributes to the problem. The age of the housing stock contributes to the fact that there still could be lead in the property. So there’s a lot to do here. We are using our entire toolkit to really look at unit conditions on every level. We’re certainly looking at HUD oversight of the department itself. We’re looking at the inspection process. You and I think it talked about the [Real Estate Assessment Center (REAC)] inspection process before, that’s the main tool for looking at unit conditions. It’s been flawed for a while. It’s pretty complex. HUD has been looking to revamp it with new standards. There was a bit of a backlog during the pandemic. So we’re doing oversight there. We’re seeing how that implementation of the new standards are going, and have they really been able to attack the backlog and look at unit conditions in a timely manner? We’re looking at [Rental Assistance Demonstrations (RAD)] conversions, that’s been the department’s answer to aging public housing stock, give them access to equity, and perhaps the conditions will improve. We’re going to look at, are the conditions actually improving and certain rental assistance demonstration properties. We’re also looking at emergency health and safety issues. The timeline there is usually 24 hours to address those, we’re looking to see if HUD’s doing proper oversight of that. And then we’re doing targeted reviews beyond the HUD and program level. And we’re looking at entities. We see all the time HUD will finally abate a contract and basically have a landlord exit the program and they have to relocate tenants. So we’re doing some target reviews there as well.

Rae Oliver Davis And you mentioned Lead, absolutely. We’re looking at Lead from the HUD perspective. Does Lead have a plan for holding [Public Housing Agency (PHA’s)] accountable? Are they making sure the Lead-safe housing rule is being enforced? And then we’re looking at high risk properties? We’re looking at the Philadelphia Public Housing Authority. We just did an audit there where we found they didn’t have any documentation whatsoever pre 2019 on lead disclosure. So we couldn’t say for sure whether tenants were even being notified there were lead in the property. So for us, the big takeaway here is if you don’t have the right controls at the program level, at the partnership level, so the participant level, then that leaves you vulnerable to bad actors. So that’s where we come in, it’s another part of our toolkit. We just had a case in Indiana where a contractor took hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for doing repairs and renovations, didn’t ensure that any of that was done with, let’s say, practices in mind. And we already had a child in that unit with lead blood poisoning. So we’re doing things like that as well.

Tom Temin Do you also look into the finances of operators of this housing, to understand, is what they’re getting sufficient? Is there money left over? Do they put away capital expenditures such that they can maintain the properties? Because often, rent controlled types of properties tend to be often the least cared for.

Rae Oliver Davis That is something we were discussing everyday, Tom, and it’s a really good question. For instance, like I mentioned, a property in Pepper Tree right now where we’re doing some research. So we haven’t actually opened anything there, but we’re looking at what happened there. We have properties that just aren’t being maintained. So what’s happening to the funding around that? And we’re looking at how is HUD overseeing that as well? Are they looking at the financials? So often with these RAD conversions, they have to put forward a financial plan. So what happens there? How is that successful? How is it not.

Tom Temin A RAD conversion means what? Rental assistance Demonstration.

Rae Oliver Davis Well, it’s really complex. There are many different avenues for RAD, but essentially it’s the answer to this capital needs backlog and public housing. So it could be a public housing authority that wants to convert to RAD. There are other properties that convert to RAD too, but essentially it’s the answer to getting the properties back in better shape and better condition.

Tom Temin It doesn’t turn them into condos or anything like that.

Rae Oliver Davis I am not aware of it turning over to condos. But like I said, it’s really complex and there are many different avenues.

Tom Temin All right. And while the IG is doing all of this investigative work, again, I have to ask, where are the housing program people in HUD, outside of the IG’s office, but in the HUD program offices?

Rae Oliver Davis These are good questions, and I’ve cited several examples of our oversight of HUD in these areas. And a couple of things. First of all, we just partnered with HUD, we did a civil remedy against a landlord for $1.2 million. That’s a good partnership for us to do with HUD. I want to see more of that. I want to push for more of that. We’re going to commit those resources. I have to say, there are areas where HUD still could improve lead compliance. I cited several examples there. We really want them to be able track lead in the housing authorities. But to be fair, Tom, there’s 3300 housing authorities. So we have to talk about the capacity of HUD. In order to carry out their mission, they have to deal with tens of thousands of partnerships, and they have to do oversight of those partnerships. So we have to acknowledge the capacity issue there as well. There’s some areas, where I should point out has made progress. When we talk about lead and hazards, that’s not the only hazard. We have contaminated sites, we’ve done work around that before. They have a plan in place now to assess properties who are close to contaminated sites and do environmental reviews, that’s because of our recommendations and our work. They’re very close to a departmental wide policy on radon, something that would address testing and mitigation where they find radon, that’s also part of one of our evaluations. So there’s some areas where they’ve made strides, certainly.

Tom Temin And I guess, just getting back to the lead paint, because it’s emblematic of this. The fact that lead paint was banned, I think, more than 40 years ago. That’s testimony to the age of a lot of the public housing. And if there are still lead paint there that attests to the lack of capital investment in it, if you still have window panes and window sills that have lead paint on them.

Rae Oliver Davis That’s right. That’s absolutely right. We find that lead dust, lead paint chips is definitely one of the vulnerabilities when it comes to having children in public housing. And the old stock, certainly.

Tom Temin And then you’re also getting some wind in the sales from Congress, it looks like, for these efforts. There was a hearing not long ago.

Rae Oliver Davis Oh, absolutely. Yes, they did a hearing. And we get questions from our congressional stakeholders all the time about this. I just had a hearing on the Hill in advance of the secretary’s budget hearing, and I got questions about these issues. Yes, all these initiatives.

Tom Temin So it’s ongoing, no end really in sight.

Rae Oliver Davis We’re going to keep putting resources to it. One of the things we hope to see, especially in the sexual misconduct area, is deterrence, that’s a win for us, too. I think, initially with these PSA’s and its focus, we hope to see more complaints, more people coming forward because we want to raise awareness where maybe there hasn’t been. But in the long run, we’ll be doing data analytics, will be seeing where to commit our resources. But deterrence is also a win for us, definitely, especially in the sexual harassment arena.

Tom Temin And by the way, do you ever do site visits?

Rae Oliver Davis We do. That’s an important part of the process. A few years ago, we did kind of a systematic review in certain cities of housing conditions. I mentioned a few audits that were in the process of launching, those will be boots on the ground. When I say we’re going to look at the unit conditions, we’re going to go out and look at the unit conditions. That’s definitely what we’re going to do. We don’t do the inspections, that is a HUD REAC inspire inspection process. That’s not us. But certainly, in conjunction with our oversight work being on site, seeing what there is to see, talking to people is certainly very important.

The post HUD’s inspector general takes on two of the worst public housing problems first appeared on Federal News Network.

The future look and feel of your office space isn’t just going to be filled with movable furniture or whiz-bang technology. It likely will include federal employees from other agencies.

The latest trend the General Services Administration is hearing from agencies is the desire to share buildings, conference space and training rooms as a part of reducing costs and improving the employee experience.

Nina Albert, the commissioner of the Public Building Service at GSA, said federal office space will continue to evolve over the next few years as more agencies get a better handle on their short and long-term needs.

“Agencies are willing and interested in having the conversation about when is the appropriate time to share space? What types of spaces are you willing to share?” Albert said in an interview with Federal News Network after speaking at the Shared Services Summit sponsored by ACT-IAC and the Shared Services Leadership Coalition on Tuesday. “We’re engaging with agencies on those topics. There’s no clear decisions yet. But I just think about conference space that’s going to be of greater need in the future as people pull their teams together in off sites, or what we’re now calling on sites. Those types of conference spaces are in high demand, so are those the right types of spaces to be sharing? There’s other kinds of spaces like training labs that agencies could be sharing too, and as a result, they could garner some additional space efficiency. I think everyone’s looking for that now.”

Albert said the sharing of space could mean having multiple agencies in the same building, but on different floors. Or it could mean having a small number of employees from different agencies working on the same floor, but in different office space.

GSA believes it has a huge opportunity to help agencies and employees save money, whether around consolidating office space or reducing the commute time of employees when they do go into the office. GSA owns or leases office space in 2,200 communities around the country.

At the same time, approximately 50% of GSA’s lease portfolio is expiring in the next five years, putting some additional urgency on top of these plans.

Agencies submitted their office space plans to the Office of Management and Budget in December detailing their needs through 2028. OMB, however, has not publicly released those agency plans.

Workplace 2030 continues to evolve

Albert said GSA is meeting with agencies at least two years before their leases are set to expire to understand their needs and begin developing plans for the office space.

“We really work with them to determine what their longer term needs are, whether we should be reupping or taking on a new lease, or what we’re trying to promote as reuse or use of our existing federal space to consolidate those leases, and you’re seeing that activity, it’s really what I call blocking and tackling,” she said. “The model that’s becoming interesting to agencies is what I’ll call federal co-working, which is, in fact, shared space, where we would have all the amenities of flexible space in one suite. Maybe multiple agencies who only have a small team, for example, in city X, and they still want to have access to the safety, security and access to an office, but they don’t need an entire suite to themselves. They’re willing to share with another agency that might also have a small team need.”

Albert said a lot of these discussions about trends and federalwide needs has driven conversations in the Federal Real Property Council as well as through GSA’s own Workplace 2030 initiative. The council is focused more broadly on federal real property that includes land, science labs and warehouse space. The Workplace 2030 initiative, launched during the pandemic, is more focused on the future of office space.

Part of the Workplace 2030 initiative is GSA’s Workplace Innovation Lab, launched in January, to let federal agencies and others test out new and different approaches to configuring office space.

“We have a backlog, I think of about 120 tours, with different agencies wanting to come and see the lab. It’s not limited to the federal government. This is the first workplace innovation lab of its kind in the country so we’re seeing private sector partners wanting to come and take a look at it and see what we’re doing. We’re also hosting other governments to come and check it out,” Albert said. “Why are they so excited about it? I think it’s because people really want to understand how flexibility is manifesting in space. Usually, when you’re building out real estate, there’s something fixed about it. The furniture manufacturers and the technology, providers are all really trying to figure out how do you build in as much flexibility as possible because we know that the next several years are going to require that?”

Asking for extra funding

Albert said GSA will continue to showcase these new furniture and technology configurations as well as closely watch its six-month pilot around federal co-working space at the innovation lab and at two other sites around the country.

She said the six-month pilot is “what we’re really testing for to see what the demand, the interest, and the need would be for that kind of space because I think that that could be a truly innovative approach for federal real estate in the future.”

A key piece to the future of federal office space is a legislative proposal GSA submitted as part of its fiscal 2024 budget request.

Albert said GSA is asking Congress to give GSA full access to the Federal Buildings Fund and to increase GSA’s prospectus threshold from $3.5 million to $10 million.

“That would allow us to save two years’ worth of process time, as well as $50 million a year in cost, just based on process alone,” Albert said. “A lot of the conversations that we have are really about how GSA is getting access to the Federal Buildings Fund, how that would support agency moves, consolidations and facility modernizations, which is really important because we have a lot of deferred maintenance problems that we’re dealing with. All of these consolidation opportunities are really reliant on our getting full access to the Federal Buildings Funds.”

The post Agencies coming around to sharing office space as future plans come into focus first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Mayor of the District of Columbia recently urged the federal government to get its people back in their offices or give up millions of square feet. The city has ambitious economic goals that could, in its view, make better use of the space. For details, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with John Falcicchio, D.C.’s deputy mayor for Planning and Economic Development.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin And just maybe, if you would, zero in with more detail on what the city would have in mind potentially for, I guess, mostly the leased space that the federal government now occupies. That is to say, pays rent on but doesn’t have any people populating.

John Falcicchio Absolutely. So first and foremost, our ask is for the administration to bring federal government workers back, and do so by having an enterprise wide policy on return to office. So Mayor Bowser is a chief executive herself. She has 37,000 employees. During the pandemic, 40% of those employees were in-person. They had to do their work in person. So that means 60% of her 37,000 person workforce, is able to have a flexible work schedule. And what we’ve done is we’ve set enterprise-wide, three days in the office and up to two days of telework. What we want the federal government to do is have a similar enterprise wide policy, so that every agency isn’t trying to leave it to itself. Now what we know, is that the federal government hasn’t brought people back in the same way that we have. And so that leaves a lot of office space, that isn’t being utilized, that we can either utilize ourselves, work with nonprofits to fill it. And so we get that vibrancy, that you would have, in having more workers in the office.

Tom Temin Right. There’s a couple of issues. One is the space itself, that could be repurposed for the types of businesses and nonprofits you want to kind of engender in the city. And the other is the street traffic itself, with the food vans and the small restaurants. It’s kind of a wasteland, in many ways in some stretches, because there’s nobody to have breakfast and lunch at these places.

John Falcicchio Well, we know that the federal government, in our central business district, accounts for 25% of the office space. Whether that’s owned or leased. And when you think about having that much of the economy sit on the sidelines, it does have an impact on our businesses and our small businesses. And that really has an impact on the number of D.C. residents and residents from the region that they can hire. So for us, this isn’t about just seeing if we get workers back in the office, for the sense that they should be working in the office. We do think it’s a better environment, more collaborative when people are working together. But really, it also has an impact on those small businesses and those frontline workers. During the pandemic, we said, we’re all in this together, we’ll get through it together. And now it seems that we’re through it. We’re saying to folks, well, you get back to work and we’re going to kind of hang back and work from home.

Tom Temin And do we have any statistics on small business closures or how many fewer restaurants or any kind of metrics on that particular issue?

John Falcicchio Yes. So in the District of Columbia, before the pandemic, there were about 800,000 jobs. That’s total, 800,000 jobs. And because of the pandemic, we dropped to about 712,000. Now we’re actually cresting about 775,000 jobs. So we’ve almost made back all the jobs that we lost during the pandemic. But what we know is that the jobs that are still missing, in the city, are primarily in hospitality, food service and attraction. And so what we’ve seen is tourism bounce back with the leisure traveler coming back. But we don’t see that same activity in the business traveler. And that business traveler isn’t coming back, because the economy in the district is dominated by the federal government. And so we need the federal government to come back to draw back that business traveler as well. That will help our small businesses and help our small businesses employ more D.C. residents and residents from around the region.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with John Falcicchio. He is deputy mayor for Planning and Economic Development for the District of Columbia. And when having these discussions or urging the government, who do you talk to? Because that is a highly decentralized decision, from what I understand.

John Falcicchio So far it is. But the federal government also has ways to implement government wide policy. And so we talk to partners at the Office of Budget Management, Office of Personnel Management, [General Services Administration (GSA)], because those are really kind of the three organizations propensities that will help the president make this decision. And so what we’re really asking for, is that enterprise wide policy that makes it clear for agencies. Now, even with our policy in the District of Columbia government, the policy again, three days in the office, up to two days work from home. Each agency director is allowed to implement that in the way that they can still carry out their mission, but give workers flexibility. So the better normal that we’re all hoping for, after the pandemic, can still be realized by bringing people back. We don’t need everyone to come back all the time, but we do need them to come back most of the time.

Tom Temin And what is your sense of how the government compares to the other big occupiers of D.C. space? And I’m thinking primarily of law firms. There’s a few of those down there. And then also, the big non-profits, the [American Enterprise Institue (AEI’s)], the Cato’s, the ones that occupy big buildings, the Brookings, those kinds of groups.

John Falcicchio Yeah. So over the last couple of months, we’ve actually seen a couple of indicators that show that there is activity happening. So we track that in metro ridership, whether it’s rail or bus. We also have some indicators of office utilization, and that’s kind of ticked up over the course of the fall and into the albeit mild winter that we’ve had been experiencing. And so really what’s missing is, that rush of people that can only come back if there’s an enterprise wide policy by the federal government.

Tom Temin Got it. And just a quick question on the number of job, you say you’re cresting around 775,000. The population is around 700,000, I think. So, do we know how many of that come and go? Because you don’t have 725,000 to send on the city every day. What’s the number that balloon in and out each afternoon?

John Falcicchio Yeah. So pre-pandemic we actually, of all major American cities, we were the one that grew by the most during the day, per capita. And we really need to experience that again, in order to realize our economic potential. And so the federal government could be a big partner in that by bringing workers home. And really, what we’ve heard from, we’ve heard from some of our partners in labor. Labor unions who represent office cleaners and office security officials and others who are in that space, real frontline workers. And they’re being impacted by fewer office workers coming back.

Tom Temin Yes in fact, the [Service Employees International Union (SEIU)] itself, to name a few, to name one of a few, has a really big building in the district. And those are not the people they represent that work in that building. I wonder what their population day-to-day is of people in there versus their teleworkers. Do we know?

John Falcicchio Yeah. So I don’t have that data in front of me. But what I do know is one of the things that, kind of going back to what the mayor said in her inaugural address, was that there is an opportunity to for us not just to talk about bringing folks back. But if folks are not going to come back and there’s less federal office space needed, we have a great opportunity to partner with the federal government, like we have on big real estate projects. Like Saint Elizabeth’s and Walter Reed and Hill East, to do kind of a scatter sight approach across our downtown to take sites that are underutilized and bring them back to productive use.

Tom Temin Yeah, like the southwest too, that area.

John Falcicchio Yeah. And one of the sites, and I know this is a site of contention in the region, but where the FBI lands. Wherever it lands, and it seems like it’ll land in Maryland or Virginia, with an executive office being here in Washington, D.C. That tract of land on Pennsylvania Avenue, creates a great opportunity for us to do a mixed use development with our partners in the federal government and draw more residents downtown. One of the mayor’s goals in her comeback plan is to attract 15,000 more residents to the downtown to make it more viable.

Tom Temin Yeah, because right now that FBI headquarters, the way it’s situated, you’ve probably walked by that building, as I have. And in the winter, it’s like walking in Pyongyang. It’s just an empty, windswept, forbidding place with concrete rising on either side.

John Falcicchio Well, we are just a few blocks away from the FBI headquarters. And one thing I will tell you is that it does seem that a lot of their folks are in the office and working. I know it, because I see them at the lunch counter often, and they make the lines a little bit longer because they come back. That’s the kind of leadership we need to see of the federal government agencies. And a lot of that, I think, is because that’s a mission that you can’t carry out by everybody being separate. You got to bring people back together to collaborate, to work together, to mentor. And that’s what we think more federal government agencies should do.

Tom Temin And what about traffic and automobile movement? I know everyone has this great ideal of green inner cities, but the fact is, lots of people drive down and it’s getting tougher to get through some of these areas. Even the outlying counties are taking some of these measures. And that really mitigates for people to stay home.

John Falcicchio Yes. What we’ve seen is some utilization actually, of our bus is starting to come back. Actually, it’s at about 77% of pre-pandemic levels, where we see a lack of ridership is on the Metrorail. So we’ve got to do more to attract riders back to Metrorail. That will help us with the traffic issue. The other thing is that Metro is doing a great job over the last few weeks of bringing more cars into service and that allows them to run more frequent service. And so as that progresses, we think that the riders will come back as well.

Tom Temin No chance of bringing back 14th and a half street.

John Falcicchio So we think, we got to get more people onto Metrorail. That’s the best way to kind of take some pressure off the roadways.

 

The post Why the District of Columbia wants the federal government to fish or cut bait first appeared on Federal News Network.

The ongoing question of whether federal employees with offices in the District of Columbia will return four or five days a week, is not just a matter of restaurants and retail stores. The commercial real estate industry, which houses all of these elements, is also looking at a cloudy crystal ball. To get that point of view, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin  spoke with Howard Traul, the senior managing director of the commercial real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin  Just give us a sense, if you would, of how big a footprint the U.S. government has in the district, in terms of number of leases and square feet.

Howard Traul Right now, [General Services Administration (GSA)] has 184 active leases within the District of Columbia. Those 184 leases account for about a total of 17.5 million square feet.

Tom Temin Wow. Is that the biggest lessee in the district?

Howard Traul I believe it accounts for about 20% of the total square footage of office spaces in the district.

Tom Temin Probably a little bit more than law firms even, which is a big footprint.

Howard Traul Yeah, absolutely.

Tom Temin All right. And just generally, commercial real estate in the district, since the pandemic, came and mostly went. What is the state of the health, would you say, of the commercial real estate industry?

Howard Traul We’ve been up and down. Vacancy is still very high. I can tell you that for sure. The highest it’s been in quite and while and it remains high, relative to pre-pandemic levels. But you caught me on a good day, because there actually has been, in the last, let’s say, month or two, a decent amount of activity, In the GSA world at least. Active procurements. I’d say, right now GSA is out in the market with over 30 leases, 30 active procurements. That’s great for the market.

Tom Temin Well, then, I guess to a building owner and to a broker, such as yourself, it really doesn’t matter whether people come in or not. As long as the lease is being paid, it might even be less headaches if fewer people are in there.

Howard Traul I wouldn’t exactly say that, Tom. No, a lot of these leases are much smaller than we’ve seen that 30. That is a lot of churn, I’d say. But I’d say before that, it was quite quiet. And I think what you’re seeing is the GSA coming up with a plan for some of these leases and actually executing on it, which is great to see. But to your point, no, I mean, a lot of these deals, like I said, are smaller and they’re becoming less and less. You’re seeing these active procurements when leases expire, go away instead of renew or be completed.

Tom Temin Yeah, that was my question. Does it look as if the government is actively trying to shrink the number of square feet that it has and maybe consolidate agencies that might have had separate leases in separate buildings, or even multiple zones in a given building, and squeezing the people that are there closer together?

Howard Traul Yeah, the short answer is yes. With the large leases that you’re seeing in that area. Prospective size leases, leases that the GSA has to request from Congress to move forward on, they’re shrinking by 20%, if not more. We’re seeing up to 50% of consolidation with these shrinking footprints. So the short answer is there’s a lot of square footage that will be disappearing from the GSA footprint. And I think we’ll continue to see that, quite frankly, as well.

Tom Temin And that’s mostly Class A space, too, isn’t it?

Howard Traul Class B, Class A, yes. Class B plus, but absolutely. Yes. And but GSA is moving, trying to move, I would say, to a flight to quality. And based on some of their minimum requirements that they have for base building, I think you’ll start seeing that as well.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Howard Traul. He’s senior managing director of the commercial real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle. And do you have visibility into the types of buildouts that they want for these new leases? Can we tell that is, whether it’s cubicle farms for lots of people or is it more of that hotel drop in type of space, which is a different design and different build out requirements? Do you have that picture?

Howard Traul Yeah. You’re seeing it across the board. A lot of the build out are driven by the mission of those different agencies. And there are instances absolutely, where GSA is building out hoteling and pod desking areas. But there’s also, if you go into a [Department of Justice (DOJ)] or [United States Attorney Office (USAO)] kind of thing, you’re seeing kind of the typical large offices with the open floor plan in the middle. It’s really all just driven by what the agency needs to accomplish in that space.

Tom Temin But the trend is less space as leases expire and you are seeing consolidation.

Howard Traul That’s right. Absolutely.

Tom Temin And as you know, Muriel Bowser, the mayor of D.C., has said that she would like to see more space freed up for other purposes to, I don’t know, develop entrepreneurs or whatever. And so if a building has 100,000 square feet of government and now under the new consolidation, it’s got 75,000 square feet of government. That leaves a fresh 25,000 square feet. Who’s coming in? Or who could potentially come in there?

Howard Traul I don’t know that you’d see buildings multi-talented with mixed uses, a residential and an office building. Not certain you’re going to see that, almost very unlikely. But should some of these buildings that are of a certain vintage, and maybe, less useful as office buildings get converted,  you are seeing that across D.C. in several instances. But I think really, the attention needs to be paid to just getting workers back downtown in the office space. The life and vitality of downtown D.C. really depends on workers being downtown, the restaurants, all the retail that you can think of around the city. And quite frankly, one of the bigger issues I think that you’ll see down the road, are tax revenues dropping. All the municipalities around the DMV run on these tax revenues from commercial and residential buildings. And a lot of those owners, if they don’t have tenants paying rent, they’re not going to be able to pay their taxes or the tax revenues are going to be severely depleted.

Tom Temin Yeah, this is kind of a nationwide phenomenon if you follow real estate. And just out of curiosity, we mentioned law firms earlier. You’re the government side of Johns Lang LaSalle. But what do you hear from the rest of the companies? That is to say, law firms have gone heavily into remote working. From my experience, because I talked to a lot of them. And is that similar type of consolidation happening for that type of tenant?

Howard Traul I think you’re seeing a little bit different firm the firm. And I think for the new associates, I’m being told, they do wish to work from home. But I do also hear the being in the office and being able to collaborate with those senior partners, is something that they do wish to do. There’s this meeting in the middle, I think, within the law firm practice right now.

Tom Temin But the objective then of the real estate industry is to be tenant agnostic. You just want the square footage leased, one way or the other. The reason I ask, is there’s a little bit of a disconnect between having a building fully leased and that street vitality, because they may lease it, but not everyone is coming in of the population of that given lessee on a given day.

Howard Traul Yeah, and I think what you see there really, Tom, is once the leases expire, that’s when you see a decrease in the occupancy of the building. But yes, there’s a lot of leases that were, maybe, ten year leases that were signed right before the pandemic. A lot of that leased space hasn’t been occupied since then, and there might be four or five years left on those leases. But that’s really why,  getting people back downtown and figuring out, really from the GSA agency perspective, what is the long term solution. Because I can tell you, in my dealings at least, things are taking longer. And I think that you’re seeing that frustration, not just in my world, by any means, but you see it on the Hill with different acts being proposed. You see it just from a consumer basis, I think. A lot of the customer service, if you will, from a government standpoint, they’re just not meeting the grade right now. And that’s really what I’d like to see, is some actual direction from our commander in chief, quite frankly, to kind of get everybody back in and figure out what the long-term solution is and not, these kind of kick the can temporary solutions.

Tom Temin And just a final question. Have any building owners, that you’re aware of or have they talk to you about this, considered just kicking all the tenants out that are commercial and converting to housing or condos or apartments, if that’s even physically feasible?

Howard Traul No. Like I mentioned before, there are absolutely buildings of a certain vintage where those office building owners look to sell to a residential developer, but not if you have decent occupancy and you’re a class B, class A trophy building.

Tom Temin Now you’re speaking to me from Washington, D.C. Jones Lang LaSalle is a national company. JLL. What are you seeing in terms of federal occupancy and general occupancy in other cities?

Howard Traul From the federal standpoint, I speak with government employees and brokers and building owners. And I do see outside of the D.C. metropolitan area, a lot more people in the office working. Regardless, if it’s a very vanilla office job or something that, maybe, is more mission related. For whatever reason, outside of the DMV, I’m just hearing and talking to people more that are in the office versus out of the office.

 

The post Washington D.C.’s commercial real estate industry is also wondering whether feds will return to work first appeared on Federal News Network.

The federal office of the future will not be done to employees, but will be led by employees.

That is the General Services Administration’s goal with its new Workplace Innovation Lab, unveiled Jan. 25 in Washington D.C.

“The innovation lab is one of the many ways that we are seeking to create the magnet, not the mandate, for people to return to office and to re-experience the benefits of shared culture, idea exchange and camaraderie,” said Nina Albert, the commissioner of the Public Building Service at GSA, during the grand opening celebration. “What you’re going to see today are just innovations: innovations in furniture solutions, innovations in conferencing, how really can we experience hybrid in a way that feels seamless and effortless as opposed to a burden.”

The year-long project brought together five furniture vendors and one technology provider to offer agencies the opportunity to test out and provide feedback on new and different office space designs, a key piece of the broader Workplace 2030 initiative. GSA is accepting reservations for agencies to test out the lab and to provide tours.

Albert said the difference between Workplace 2030 and previous attempts prior to 2010 and 2020 is the focus on the user.

“There’s an interesting history of what the assumptions were back in the 1950s, and how people wanted to work. Then we moved to a density model where everybody’s packed in and cubicle stations and open areas,” she said. “Now the future is about choice. People can work in an enclosed office. We call it a focus room when they need to do kind of heads down work or one-on-one work. Or they can work in an open office space because your day shifts and what you need at that moment shifts even on a daily basis.”

When GSA launched workplace 2020 in the mid-2000s and started shifting employees and tenants to the open office concept, employees felt the change was being done to them versus with them.

Many employees withdrew behind earbuds or pushed for more pre-pandemic telework to get away from the person who wears too much perfume or the person who eats tuna every day at their desk for lunch.

Planning began two years ago

GSA changed its approach to Workplace 2030 by meeting with more than 100 employees from 18 agencies starting in 2021, to discuss what the future of federal workspace would look like.

Albert said GSA created the lab to show how the pandemic spurred innovation in the office space sector, as well as for agencies to see what is possible without having to spend any money.

“There’s a section of the innovation lab that I think is pretty cool. It showcases home technology solutions. But really, the majority of the lab is focused on office solutions,” she said. “Specifically, the themes that I keep looking at and keep resonating in every conversation that I have about what the future workplace might be is around mobility and flexibility. You’ll see movable, modular furniture that reflects that need to experiment in the next couple more years until people figure out what that new normal mode of working is for their team. You’re also going to see furniture that’s a little bit more relaxed, so that people can bring that living room comfort to the office. There’s lots of different varieties of space and that’s because the future of the workplace is about providing employees with a lot of different choices.”

That choice that Albert described was on display in the lab in several different ways.

The vendors brought in desks on wheels that can be moved from one person, who is in heads down mode, set up to a two-person collaboration session.

There are nearly sound proof booths, similar to the phone booths of old, where a worker can hideaway to take a personal call or do a quick video session without disturbing others.

There also are couches, stools and assorted other types of seating and tables that one may find at home or at a coffee shop.

Each of these workspaces have leading edge hardware and software. Touch screens to make reservations for a conference room or a desk area, details about heating or cooling of that specific space and multiple screens, and speakers and cameras to make it easy for the employee to participate in online meetings.

Technology integration

Chuck Hardy, GSA’s chief architect, said each of the five vendors approached their part of the 25,000 square foot space differently.

“There’s a lot of touchscreens that you can log in to whatever your brand of meeting is, whether it’s Zoom or Google or Teams or whatever, it makes it an easy one-touch activity,” he said. “The other thing you’re seeing in some of these products is sound cancellation. We can be in this room having this conversation in an open area, so if you think about your AirPods that cancel out the sound around you, these technologies do that as well. It focuses on the three people in the meeting and the 10 people that are next door, blocks out and cancels their sound. We showed a demonstration where it actually canceled out a firetruck going down the street while you’re having a meeting.”

Hardy said GSA expects the participating vendors to continually innovate these spaces over the next year based on the feedback they receive.

“We’re looking for feedback. We’re looking for the vendors, if they choose, to do those contemporaneous adjustments to the space to see if they can improve it by just moving the current product around or, potentially, even bringing in additional product to solve whatever those issues are,” he said. “We want the folks using the space to say, ‘this is what we like about it. Let’s keep this. Or this is something we probably wouldn’t use.’ That’s what will be challenging the industry to see what they can do.”

Hardy said GSA will collect feedback about the innovation lab set-ups in several different ways. The reservation system will ask users to take a survey. GSA plans to do follow-up calls as well with users.

“Over the year, we’re right now in discussions about having roundtables of people that use it to say let’s bring some people in and have a conversation about how it worked or not. So we can elicit some in person feedback,” he said. “The vendors are also looking in their way of gathering research and data that they do on a regular basis as well. It’s all about improving the product and improving the experience.”

Unique opportunity for GSA

GSA also is making it easy for agencies to take part as there is no cost to work in the lab. Federal employees also will find it less complicated to visit the lab because GSA is simplifying how non-agency federal employees can get into the building.

GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan said with more than 8,600 buildings around the country and 370 million square feet of space, the innovation lab will influence the way GSA creates the office space of today and the future.

“I could not be more excited because the timing of this is perfect. Because every agency across government is right now is thinking about their space needs. They’re rethinking what this is all looking like,” she said. “So for GSA to be able to be out front, provide what’s possible, provide these options in a way that’s very flexible and easy to use, I think it’s just another example of our team leading the way in this important change.”

The Office of Management and Budget required agencies to submit by Dec. 16 their capital plan for 2024 to 2028 that detailed how much and what types of properties and office space will be necessary to meet their goals around the future of work.

Carnahan said more than 200 employees from across the government already have come through the workplace innovation lab. And she expects the traffic only to increase in the coming months.

“We know that because our federal agency partners have so many different missions and people that they serve, it’s going to look different for each agency. What is going to be the same, though, is it’s empowering our teams so that they have the tools that they need to do their best work for the people that we serve as our North Star,” Carnahan said. “The platforms, that the technology, that the setups all are going to matter, that we’re going to have to be intentional about making sure that we have spaces that create meaningful interactions for people to come in to offices. It’s not going to make a lot of sense if we just have the same old configurations and people sit in an office by themselves on a call video with worse internet than they have at home. We have got to have a setup that encourages this kind of collaboration and empowerment, that creates those flexible workspaces, that they can do those jobs.”

The post Test out what your office space of the future could look like at GSA’s new innovation lab first appeared on Federal News Network.

If you don’t want your office back, the District of Columbia would like to turn it into a nice condominium or apartment.

That’s the gist of what freshly reelected Mayor Muriel Bowser said the other day. She wants more people to live in “downtown” Washington, or establish businesses there. And she specifically called on the White House to either get agencies to fully re-occupy their “vast property holdings” in the city, or give it up.

I’m presuming Bowser meant leased space. The General Services Administration’s Federal Buildings Service lists 55 government buildings in D.C., but it’s hard to tell from the list which ones are leased. The Jackson Place White House Service Center isn’t likely to go condo, say, nor the National Archives (great lobby, though). But the big, fancy “Constitution Center” building at 7th and D Streets Southwest is privately owned and leased to the government. It houses people from a half dozen agencies and encompasses 1.4 million square feet and lots of parking.

A Government Accountability Office report from last September showed that the GSA has in fact steadily trimmed both the number of leases it manages and the square footage — a process that’s been happening since around 2014. That reduction accelerated after the pandemic cleared out many offices. Now GSA manages fewer than 8,000 leases, down from a high of around 9,600. It has 175 million square feet under lease, down from nearly 200 million.

Beyond that, it’s impossible to really know how intensively the government uses a given leased office. Do 80% of the staff telework 40% of the time? All that’s really out there are vague surveys and guesstimates as to precisely how much space the government will permanently need in a given location. It’s never static, but what will the average be?

In 2023, every organization is going to have to decide once and for all what its work location policies are going to be, and adjust its real estate to fit. With a fussy labor market, still-frequent cases of various viruses, and lots of people preferring telework, that’s not going to be easy for management.

Published reports I’ve read, though, say that the upper hand seems to be sliding back to management. One story, in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, quoted the chief executive of Goldman Sachs: “We have nudged, cajoled, evolved. But the bottom line is, we generally are operating pretty close to the way we operated before the pandemic.”

One of the local D.C. newspapers back in March published an editorial, urging the re-population of federal offices, mainly as a way of helping the District and the D.C. region’s mass transit Metro system economically. The Washington Post quoted President Joe Biden: “It’s time for America to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again. We’re doing that here in the federal government. The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.”

Well not quite. Most employees come to the office sometimes. Which means most employees telework sometimes. Eventually the government will have to face the question of how much space it really needs. And of how it manages the space it does have. That is, if in a workforce of 1,000, 500 are in their offices on a given day, do agencies continue to pay rent on 1,000 seats, or do they switch to the drop-in “hotel” model and permanently give up space?

Madame Mayor is waiting.

The post Uh oh! The mayor of DC wants your cubicle! first appeared on Federal News Network.

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The General Services Administration buys many things. Since 1972, it has commissioned some 500 works of art to hang in — or otherwise adorn — federal buildings. To find out the latest in the 50-year-old Art in Architecture program, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked with the director of GSA’s Center for Fine Arts, Jennifer Gibson.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: At cocktail parties, when you say fine arts and General Services Administration in the same breath, do you get a lot of eyebrows?

Jennifer Gibson: Absolutely. And generally, what I go on to explain, it’s a little like being a director of a museum that’s all over the country, with one work in every city, and the federal government has this amazing collection. And we continue to add to it, and that always causes people to pause, they’re amazed that their government does this and then tend to get very excited about it.

Tom Temin: And this program dates back to an executive order from the Nixon administration, which built on I think, the general architecture program that was established in the Kennedy administration. So there’s a long, proud history here. But tell us about how the program works.

Jennifer Gibson: Basically, anytime the federal government, GSA is building a new building, or doing a major modernization of a building that we already have, we have by regulation, one half of 1% of the estimated construction cost to commission a site-specific artwork. So over the course, as you just mentioned, over the course of the past 50 years, we’ve commissioned over 500 works. And we’re continuing on with the many new projects that are coming up.

Tom Temin: When you mentioned site-specific, that means it could be a hanging painting, but more often than not, it’s maybe what sculpture or murals?

Jennifer Gibson: It can be a painting. Basically, what we’re doing is commissioning civic art. This is art intended to be seen by the public, and be in publicly accessible parts of the building. So it’s outside, it’s on a plaza. It’s in a lobby, it’s someplace where people, the general public can see it. And the work is, tends to be large scale. So we’re not looking at small easel size paintings, or portable sculpture. We’re doing large scale permanently installed works. So yes, we have paintings, but the paintings may be 90 feet long and 10 feet tall.

Tom Temin: Interesting. And tell us the process for first of all commissioning, which artist is there a competition and how the decisions get made on what you’ll end up with? Because I imagine that’s fraught with a lot of opinions.

Jennifer Gibson: Yes, art tends to elicit strong opinions. It is the art and architecture program is a federal procurement process. So we have to obey all of the federal regulations on acquiring services and products. And for each commission, we set up a specific panel, we don’t have a single body of people who are making the selections. That panel includes seven members, it’s the primary federal tenants. So if we’re working on a courthouse, one of the federal judges sits on the panel for working on a border station, somebody from Customs and Border Protection is a participant, we also have the lead designer. So this is the person who knows how the building is going to work, the materials, the spaces and can provide guidance, and who often has worked with artists in the past, we involve the community both with through the federal tenant, and then with a community representative. This is somebody who really knows a community and can provide insights into what’s important to that community. We have an arts professional also from the area. So this is a person we’re hoping is really tuned in to what artists are around and can perhaps participate in this project. And then we have a national arts representative in GSA. This panel will meet several times; once to just learn about the project to learn about what the agency that’s going to be occupying it does. Most people don’t know how a federal courthouse works, or what’s really going on at a border station. And those kinds of things get discussed. The agency representative also explains what’s important to that agency. The community member talks about the community so you learn a lot about the site that panel’s then responsible for thinking about ways art might be incorporated into the project, and they can recommend artists to be reviewed. We will do a solicitation just as all government solicitation so an artists who might be interested in being considered can submit materials. And we have something called the national artists registry, which is available online or any artist who’s a U.S. citizen or a lawful permanent resident can participate in the national artists registry. Once they submit their materials, which is basically images of past work and a resume, they can be considered for any project anywhere in the country, all of those potential candidates are reviewed by criteria that the panel has set. And they meet again to look and sort of, they rate potential artists, then we do procurement. We go through all everything that’s been stated by the panel, what’s important to them, we then go through all these various evaluation factors to make a recommendation, the artists who is selected is under contract, and then they start to work on the design that’s shared with the panel, we seek their comments and approval before proceeding.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Jennifer Gibson, she’s director for the Center for Fine Arts at the GSA. So in many ways commissioning the art is similar to commissioning the building, you need functionality, but you also need design and tastefulness. And something that the community can accept.

Jennifer Gibson: Absolutely, it’s important, we want the community to embrace the art both the community outside the building and the tenants of the building. So it’s, it’s not a process where we’re, it’s anybody’s coming and saying, this is the art that’s good for you, or this is what we need. It’s really a collaborative process. And the artist becomes part of the design team. They’re totally integrated, both as far as their schedule, and how they are, their work is incorporated into the building, because as I mentioned earlier, these are permanently installed buildings. And they tend to be complex installations that require the support also of the building design.

Tom Temin: And just a quick question on the regionality you mentioned that the national, the artists registry is national, but how much does the region come into play? Say, for example, would you show a and I’m just making this up a snowy pine forest in New Mexico and a sunny orange Adobe scene in Maine?

Jennifer Gibson: Generally not, but it could happen. That would be part of the discussion, there actually is a work in Alaska of diving pelicans that everybody is convinced was actually intended for Florida. And it wasn’t, it was Alaska artists who designed that work and pops up in the press every once in awhile in the last year. But it’s in that back and forth, the work that’s created tends to be appropriate for the function of the building and for the location, the geographic and regional character of the site.

Tom Temin: You know, increasingly, art is becoming politicized. And there’s political content. And sometimes people derive political content from old art, because the sensibilities now are different from 50, 75 years ago, and so on, does that ever come up in the change things out, some group of people decide, you know, this doesn’t work anymore.

Jennifer Gibson: It’s a challenge. And it has certainly, in the past two, three years become ever more of a challenge. It’s rare that we remove an artwork, we have very specific criteria for when we do remove artworks. And generally, if it’s the artworks endangered, if it endanger somebody else, we could have a situation where something has become fragile, and could potentially we’ll say, fall off its pedestal. The content, we can’t control how people perceive things. And there can be something that was certainly intended as benign that now is not seen that way. We try to address that through interpretation, and just working to explain what this art is. Because, you know, I recognize you’re never going to make absolutely everybody happy. But our intents are always to be open to the general public. And to address their concerns.

Tom Temin: A question about the art itself, say, is a sculpture or a large mural. This doesn’t instantly happen overnight. And in the case of a mural, you’re I’m guessing it’s created on site. Once the artist is agreed to and the subject matter, or the general idea of the art is agreed to by the commission, the artist is free to go and finish that I mean, you can’t say wait a minute, can you make that one a little bit bluer, that part? And can you kind of sort of lighten up that section raise that statues handle a little higher? I mean, that doesn’t happen.

Jennifer Gibson: It doesn’t quite work that way. Basically, the artists as soon as they’re under contract, the artist makes a visit to the site. So they get to talk to the people who were participating. They get to talk to community members, and try to learn more. We share the information that the panel has discussed, so that artists are aware of what the goals of the project are, they then go off and does do a preliminary proposal. They are basically showing us what they want the artwork to be and it’s it’s not fully developed, but at that point we would know OK, it’s going to be a painting. They’re envisioning it being x number of feet. This is the content. These are the materials. We will bring in conservators or other specialists along the way to provide additional support so that we know the artist is working with materials and methods that will allow the work to have a long life because once we commission it, we retain it and have to take care of it. They then do a the artist as a final proposal that pretty much looks the way the art final artwork will look. Because we always have to keep in mind, the artist has a budget, these are fixed price contracts coming into it. They know they’re doing everything from their travel, all their meetings, any specialists they have to hire, fabrication, installation and final photographs and documentation. So they have a set budget, and they are tied to the schedule of the building. And we try to have the artwork installed and most artists don’t paint on site anymore. During the 1930s, there are a number of murals that the government commissioned that were frescoes, those had to be done on site. But for the most part, the artist is creating the work and bringing it they might have to do assembly, but they’re not for the most part not doing the actual painting on site, though. Just in the past month, we have an artist … who’s done a mural for the Sylvia Rambo Courthouse in Harrisburg, which is still under construction. Much of the work was done over the course of several weeks while she was there painting with crews. But that’s sort of the reception.

Tom Temin: By the way, is that the 90 foot mural?

Jennifer Gibson: Yes. Well, it’s actually longer I think, somehow I think it’s 200 feet, it’s it’s a very long mural, which is currently protected because the construction is still going on. And so we don’t want damage to occur to the artwork. But for an artist, this is easily start to finish five to seven years.

Tom Temin: Wow. Well, I guess that’s how long it took to do the Sistine Chapel. So why should modern day be any less? And also, I wanted to ask you about the infrastructure bill gave a big expansion to the art in architecture program because of projects that are being launched under that?

Jennifer Gibson: Yes, yeah, as I had mentioned, whenever there were doing construction, we have half a percent of estimated construction costs, which is a penny of every $2, if you think about it that way. So with the all of the land ports of entry, there are 26 projects that will be going on, some of them are starting already. So we’ve already had a panel for two of those projects. This is going to provide a wonderful opportunity for artists who might often not participate in our programs, we encourage artists to join the registry. Many people don’t know about it, or they think oh, I’ll never get a commission. In an average year, we do maybe five new commissions, you know, we initiate them, because we’re based on congressional authorization for construction. But with this funding, with all of the new land ports of entry, we’re suddenly going to have many more projects, and many of them are projects that have lower value in that the budget for the art is 80,000, 100,000, which sounds like a lot of money. Except as I had mentioned, this is the everything that an artist is going to have to do to deliver that artwork. And if you’re delivering the artwork to northern remote border station, there’s a lot of effort and costs involved in that we have to be able to justify that the artist’s capacity to do the project. And to show that they’ve had similar experience. With these lower budgets, it allows us to reach artists who might normally not receive a commission because they don’t have that kind of experience. So we’re excited. And we’ve have a memorandum of understanding with the National Endowment for the Arts, and have been promoting this art and architecture, celebrating the 50th anniversary and doing outreach to communities so that we can reach underserved communities and artists who would not normally be, never stop and think, oh, maybe I will have an art commission in a federal building and it’ll be there for the next 100 years.

Tom Temin: I guess if you’re going to have a sculpture delivered to a distant northern post, you’re gonna get aluminum, probably not bronze.

The post GSA marks 50 years of making federal buildings special with art first appeared on Federal News Network.

HERSHEY, Pa. — The General Services Administration is offering agencies a glimpse of what the future of work could look like.

Starting in early November, GSA will open up its shared work spaces in three cities as well as its future of work headquarters laboratory.

Robin Carnahan, the administrator of GSA, said Oct. 24 at ACT-IAC’s 2022 Executive Leadership Conference that GSA is helping agencies envision how their employees will work differently in the coming years.

“We have an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) [contract] that has been set up for just over a year with private co-working spaces to be able to provide these offerings to federal employees. But we want to shine a light on that,” Carnahan said in an interview with Federal News Network. “So the week of Nov. 14 is going to be a week where teams can show up, work for free in these private co-working spaces and just see what see what they think of it, see what the tools are that really make a difference for them and that might be effective going forward. We’re excited about that. We expect to learn a lot from that, and then we’ll take those learnings and figure out what to do next.”

GSA signed a deal with four companies — DeskPass Corporation, LiquidSpace, Novel/Expansive/Level Office Management, The Yard Operating Company and WeWork Commons — in August 2021 to provide space-as-a-service for federal employees. The contract is part of GSA’s Workplace 2030 initiative, a strategy that rethinks federal office space in light of the widespread adoption of telework during the pandemic.

Carnahan said GSA will provide these test runs of these co-workings only in three cities during the week of Nov. 14, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Denver. She said GSA has plans to expand it to other cities if this initial effort goes well.

“The important thing is all of what we need to be doing is focusing on is how do we empower our workforce to do their best work?” she said. “We know that the world has changed. We know that workplace flexibility is a thing that’s important for our teams and both to retain talent and recruit new talent. It’s the thing that’s very serious for all of us. Every agency is dealing with it as well as the private sector.”

Future office space plans due

The one-week test also is about the future of office space for agencies. About 40% of all leases that GSA oversees will expire by 2026, forcing every agency to rethink their office space needs.

Carnahan said agencies are putting together their plans outlining their office space needs over the next five years. They are due by the end of 2022.

“Our teams working really, really closely across all of the cabinet agencies to work that out,” she said. “We also know that agencies are thinking more about sharing space, which you’ve been around for a long time hasn’t always been a thing on people’s minds. But now it is because they want to have an effective optimized footprint for the space that they have. We also know that all of this is going to look a little bit different depending on each agency. It’s not going to be a cookie cutter.”

In addition to leased space, GSA also is reviewing federally-owned properties, and analyzing where it makes sense to keep those buildings open and where it makes sense to consolidate them.

“What are the buildings that we really think we need to have in our portfolio and want to keep and want to invest in and make them places where people want to come and work and which ones we need to dispose of? The level of seriousness of that conversation right now is very real,” she said.

In addition to the reviewing current office space needs, GSA is helping agencies rethink what the office space of the future will look like.

It is opening up its Workplace Innovation Lab at its headquarters building in Washington, D.C. for agencies to come in and test out different office configurations.

Carnahan said GSA is working with different office space furniture and other vendors to provide this opportunity.

“We know there’s going to be an important role for offices. We also know it’s going to have to look different than it looked in the past because people were just using office space in different ways and for collaboration spaces and other things, so to be able to have people try before you buy on that, I think is pretty smart,” she said. “We’ll see what people say. What I’m trying to encourage is the culture of experimentation to understand we’re living in some uncertain times right now, but we don’t have to be hamstrung by that. We can use it as an opportunity to see what new products can serve our agency partner customers well, and just begin to test those out in lightweight ways. So I’m really excited about that.”

The post Want to see the office space of the future? GSA wants to show you the way first appeared on Federal News Network.