Commentary

Fed Gov Wasting Space

The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) reported that despite efforts to identify and eliminate underused or vacant federal facilities, the three civilian agencies owning the most government property still waste a substantial amount of space. Last fall, the GAO reported that the VA and the postal service was wasting 32.1 million square feet of unneeded or underutilized properties. All of this with a $100 billion backlog in maintenance. Maybe its time to give agencies more flexibility to divest unwanted and unneeded assets. Besides the influx of cash (that could be used to pay down the deficit), it gets expensive buildings off the books. Even the Russian government sees the value in this.