Buildings and Structures

https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/privatization

The federal government owns or leases 275,000 buildings, including offices, warehouses, and health facilities. The government also owns or leases 481,000 structures, such as parking lots and bridges. The annual operating costs for the buildings and structures is $30 billion. The replacement value of federal buildings and structures was estimated at $1.5 trillion in 2007.

The federal government is a poor asset manager. The GAO has had federal real property on its "high risk" waste list for years and found that "many assets are in an alarming state of deterioration." A House committee examining federal building mismanagement found that buildings in prime locations in some cities have been left empty for years. The committee also found that agencies grabbed excessive office space, wasted money by not coordinating with each other, and incurred excessive lease costs.

The GAO noted that the government has "many assets it does not need." The Obama administration found that "agencies have accumulated properties in excess of what the government needs to effectively meet its mission. This has resulted in a large number of excess properties and underutilized or unutilized properties in the portfolio." 

According to one estimate, the government has 77,000 buildings that are unused or underused.

Excess federal buildings and structures should be sold. That would put them into more productive private uses, and boost overall efficiency in the economy. Selling assets would reap a short-term revenue gain for the government, and it would broaden the property and income tax bases — to the benefit of all levels of government.

Unfortunately, there are bureaucratic hurdles to selling federal buildings. One problem is that the government does not know exactly what it owns. The GAO says that the federal government has a "lack of accurate and useful data to support decision making" on its properties. The government's property database held by the General Services Administration is riddled with inaccuracies, such as faulty data on building conditions, costs, and valuations. 

Oddly, the database is also apparently withheld from Congress because it is "proprietary."

Another problem is that the process of selling properties is lengthy, convoluted, and costly. Legally, properties must meet standards of repair and environmental remediation before sale, but agencies often do not have enough budgeted funds for that. Another hurdle is that all surplus property must be evaluated for possible use by homeless persons, and that evaluation believe it or not can take two years to complete.

As a result of such hurdles, many agencies put little effort into selling unneeded assets. One solution would be for Congress to mandate that agencies sell a certain dollar value of assets by a specific date. To give agencies an added incentive, they would keep a modest portion of sale proceeds. That approach was proposed in a bill introduced by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT).

There is hope for bipartisan reforms. President Obama issued a memorandum in June 2010 that encouraged agencies to identify excess assets and sell them. He argued that privatizing unneeded federal buildings would be good for both taxpayers and the environment. Obama noted, for example, that private data centers had become more energy efficient over time, but government data centers had not.

Obama administration official Jeffrey Zients said that hurdles to federal property sales include a culture of inertia, lack of funding in agency budgets for sales transactions, politicians who prefer ribbon-cutting on new facilities over selling unneeded ones, and 20 different laws that govern federal sales. Nonetheless, the administration has reported some progress on property reforms, and in 2015, it released a "national strategy" to continue the progress.

Those efforts are positive but too modest. With a general downsizing of the federal government, most federal buildings and structures could be sold. For example, the Department of Agriculture owns 21,000 buildings and 18,000 structures, which have a market value of $30 billion or more. If the government were to abolish farm subsidy programs and devolve the food stamp program to the states, most of that infrastructure could be sold. The government would also create savings in the department's building operating costs, which are $600 million a year.

In the United Kingdom, the government launched a Right to Contest initiative, under which citizens who think that particular plots of government land or buildings are not being used efficiently can ask for an official review. The government also created a website for citizens to examine the status of particular government properties across the nation. When those initiatives were launched in 2014, the official in charge said government "should not act as some kind of compulsive hoarder of land and property."We need less "compulsive hoarding" by government on this side of the pond as well.

https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/privatization

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader