Is Remote Work Draining the Swamp?

T he government office buildings in and around Washington, D.C., are mostly empty, a report from the Government Accountability Office has found.

The report looks at the headquarters for 24 federal agencies. It includes historic buildings such as the Treasury and the Federal Triangle complex along with more modern office buildings. It found that 17 out of the 24 agencies use 25 percent or less of their headquarters’ capacity in a given week. The agency with the highest utilization only used 49 percent. They aren’t even close to using the space they have.

Federal agencies, the report makes clear, have had excess office space for a long time, and past efforts to downsize have not been successful. “We calculated for one of the headquarters in the lowest use quartile that if all assigned staff entered the building on a single day, it would still only use 67 percent of the building’s capacity based on its usable square feet,” it says.

Federal headquarters buildings are, on average, quite old, and they aren’t built for modern workplaces. Agency officials cited the costs associated with retrofitting buildings as an impediment to more efficient space usage.

“All 24 agencies said that their in-office workforce has not returned to pre-pandemic levels due to increased use of telework and remote work,” the report says. The agencies said that they completed their back-to-the-office plans in early 2022, so the current levels of building usage should be typical.

There’s also some bureaucratic pettiness at play. One way to use space more efficiently would be to have multiple agencies share office space in the same building. “One official said their leadership is reluctant to share headquarters space with other agencies because it could lower their perceived standing as a cabinet-level agency,” the report says.

The federal government owns 511 million square feet of office space, which costs about $2 billion per year to maintain and operate. The government spends another $5 billion leasing office space. The report says over half of those leases are due to expire in the next three years, so there could be ample opportunity to downsize by not renewing them.

In a positive sign about the quality of the analysis, the report also notes the opportunity cost of holding on to unused buildings. (Opportunity costs are sometimes ignored in government work.) Selling off old properties would allow for more money to be spent on needed maintenance at the necessary properties, and private-sector uses of buildings currently owned by the government could add new value in the communities in which they are located.

The federal government should downsize its office-building holdings. The budgetary impact may be negligible compared to what the government spends in total, but there’s no reason to pay for space that isn’t being used now and is unlikely to be used in the future. The shift to more remote work only made plain the existing problem of underutilized federal office space.

To supporters of small government, the idea of empty federal office buildings sounds like a good thing. But these vacancies have come alongside the largest federal budgets in American history, and the number of federal employees has not declined.

The number of federal employees is about the same today as it was in 1970, at about 2.9 million. The total civilian labor force has roughly doubled over that period, so that means federal employees have declined from about 3.5 percent of the U.S. labor force in 1970 to only about 1.7 percent today.

That’s a good thing. The U.S. shouldn’t be like some other developed countries, where sometimes 20–30 percent or more of the workforce is employed by the national government. But it also illustrates that simply counting the number of federal workers isn’t a good measure of the size of government. The federal government uses many contractors who aren’t included in the employee tally, and the federal employees today are in charge of far more pages of regulations than were their counterparts 50 years ago.

One positive aspect of the empty federal buildings, aside from the modest fiscal benefits, could be a reduction in the tendency towards groupthink in government. Living scattered around the country might make federal employees less likely to think of themselves as a class, with unique interests contrary to good government. This could become truer as staff turn over and fewer employees remember the days of everyone living and working in Washington.

Concentrating the entire national government in one city used to be more necessary as a practical matter. Technology now allows people to work together from around the country, and as the empty office buildings demonstrate, many federal employees are using that newfound freedom to work remotely. It would be too much to hope for remote work to trigger a massive shift towards smaller government. But perhaps, on the margin, getting these workers out of “the swamp” will make them a little less prone to bureaucratic groupthink.