DOGE Subcommittee Chairwoman Greene Opens Hearing on Reducing the Federal Real Estate Portfolio

WASHINGTON— Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) Chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) today delivered opening remarks at the panel’s hearing on “Federal Foreclosure: Reducing the Federal Real Estate Portfolio.” In her remarks, Chairwoman Greene highlighted that the U.S. federal government spends billions of dollars annually to maintain outdated and underutilized office buildings. She also noted that federal real property management has been on the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) High-Risk List since 2003. Additionally, under the Biden Administration, the federal government spent billions on office furniture, even as many federal office spaces remained vacant due to lenient telework policies. Chairwoman Greene emphasized that the Trump Administration is taking action to address this abuse of taxpayer dollars, including the elimination of hundreds of unnecessary office leases. She concluded by affirming that the DOGE Subcommittee will work with the Trump Administration to right-size the federal government’s real estate footprint.

Below are Subcommittee Chairwoman Greene’s remarks as prepared for delivery.

Welcome everyone to today’s DOGE subcommittee hearing on federal real estate. 

This is an area where the Trump Administration is taking long overdue action.

The federal government owns a massive real estate portfolio of more than a quarter million buildings. No one knows how much of this real estate is actually being put to use, or what its worth on the open market.

Here’s what we do know: Taxpayers spend about $10 billion dollars annually just to operate and maintain it all.

American taxpayers have been drowning in debt, inflation, unaffordable grocery prices, high interest rates, and have been suffering to get by, all while the federal government is pouring billions of dollars into wasteful empty office buildings and luxurious, high-end furniture, which they –the American taxpayers – can’t even afford for themselves.

The Government owns several hundred million square feet of office space alone. But these office buildings are generally old, underused and falling apart. That includes the building in whose auditorium we now sit. We’re in the Cohen Building, in Washington, DC, which is on prime real estate just a stone’s throw from the National Mall and the U.S. Capitol. The building has been partially empty and deteriorating for decades.

Taxpayers pay billions annually to maintain outdated, underused office buildings like this — both here in DC and around the Nation. This dismal situation has existed for decades.

That’s why federal real property management has been on GAO’s High-Risk list since 2003, which our GAO witness will discuss today.

While President Obama agreed that this was a problem area, he did nothing to fix it and thus, the situation got worse. Under Joe Biden, the situation was exacerbated and bottomed out.

Under Biden, the $6 billion taxpayers spend annually to lease office space for federal employees to work in was largely wasted. The employees stayed home but we kept paying for the leases–many in pricey, big city office buildings.

These buildings sat largely empty during the entire Biden Administration, which kept federal office workers at home long after the Covid-19 pandemic ended. 

Here in DC, GAO found in 2023 that the vast majority of federal agency headquarters buildings were less than 25% occupied—some much less.

Meanwhile, from 2022 to 2024, the backlog of deferred maintenance on the aging buildings the government owns grew from $216 billion to $370 billion. That’s more than one-third of a trillion dollars it will cost to restore them—if we don’t sell them.   

What’s worse, aside from paying for useless leases and allowing federal buildings to decay, the Biden Administration spent billions on high-end furniture for empty buildings during the pandemic. Our witness from Open the Books will testify to that.

It is only now, under the Trump Administration, that we see a light at the end of the tunnel. This Administration is taking historic action on reducing the size of the government and with it, a significant reduction in the useless office space that is claimed to be “essential” for the government to operate. GSA has established a goal to reduce the size of the federally- owned real estate footprint by 50%.

The President issued an Executive Order instructing agencies to update their property inventory, and to determine which of their government-leased or government-owned space they don’t need.

In just the few months since Inauguration Day, DOGE and the General Services Administration have sold off several federal properties and worked with agencies to eliminate hundreds of unneeded, taxpayer-funded office leases.

More specifically, they have cancelled nearly 700 federal leases of 7.9 million square feet of space, saving taxpayers around $400 million.

One of the canceled leases was a nearly quarter-of-a-billion dollar, 15-year lease at a luxury office building on Pennsylvania Avenue to house Voice of America and the United States Agency for Global Media. The Biden Administration signed the lease late last year, sticking taxpayers with the tab.

It’s one of the fanciest office buildings in this city — you can see pictures of the building on this poster board.

Furthermore, this beautiful building had zero broadcasting capabilities, a capability one would think would be essential for a broadcasting media agency. The cost to taxpayers to build out the building with broadcasting capabilities?? $130 million.

The Biden team wanted to move USAGM and Voice of America from this building into that luxury space. Instead, the President is shutting down that whole state-run media operation. And taxpayers will be spared a quarter-billion dollar lease and millions more for renovations and security measures.

This is just ONE example out of countless, egregious abuses of leases and contracts being paid out across the Federal government.

Another egregious abuse of taxpayer dollars regarding federal property was the $200 million the FBI received last year for a new headquarters in Maryland. While the FBI was going after the American people, our federal government gave them hundreds of millions of dollars of American tax dollars for a brand-new beautiful headquarters. 

Federal agencies shouldn’t be maintaining empires at taxpayer expense. That’s why GSA, the federal landlord agency driving this reform process, plans to lead by example. It intends to vacate its current headquarters building in downtown DC and co-locate with another agency. Then, it will sell the GSA headquarters.

Before I close, I’ll note that Congress also acted on this front in January. We passed a law requiring federal building occupancy to be tracked, and for low-occupancy buildings to be sold.

But it will take a willing partner in the White House to implement that law, and to take other steps to shrink the federal real estate empire.

We now have that partner, and I look forward to working with the Trump Administration and DOGE to finally right size the federal real estate footprint.

And, with that, I yield to Ranking Member Stansbury for her opening statement.