The government’s real estate czar calls the post-pandemic building underutilization “concerning,” but warns agencies will have to spend money to save money.

The Biden administration on Tuesday pledged to ramp up its efforts to unload underutilized federal buildings as agency employees spend less time in their offices, though it cautioned it will first need additional funding from Congress.

The current underutilization of federal buildings is “concerning,” the federal government’s top real estate official told a panel of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, who said the administration is hard at work to “optimize the portfolio.” The Government Accountability Office last year found a majority of agencies maintained headquarters buildings that were filled to just 25% of their capacities or less.

The General Services Administration, which manages federal real estate, is working with agencies to provide new solutions such as coworking spaces, private-public partnerships and utilization reviews, Public Buildings Service Commissioner Elliot Doomes told senators on the Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee. The agency is also asking for a tweak to its funding mechanism that would grant it access to revenue from its leases, as well as an additional $425 million appropriation into a new Optimization Special Emphasis program, that Doomes said would allow the agency to engage in federal building consolidation.

“That’s something as a part of our national portfolio plan that we’ve been working on to identify buildings that have a significant amount of deferred maintenance, underutilized, and looking at other federal space there to say, ‘where can we do this consolidation?’” Doomes said.

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