The General Services Administration, the federal agency that manages government property, should create specific, targeted goals for selling real estate as it works to save taxpayer dollars, a new report found.
In the report published Thursday, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said the GSA's 2026 performance plan "does not include goals for reduced timelines or avoided costs."
The federal government has sought to slim its real estate portfolio for more than a decade. As that initiative has intensified under Trump's second administration, the past few weeks in particular have seen heightened federal property disposition activity, especially in the nation's capital.
Establishing goals "could help GSA better define the approach, simplify disposals, and gain greater cost savings from avoided operations and maintenance costs," the watchdog agency said in its report. The GSA agreed with the report's recommendations and said it is working to address them.
Set up when President Donald Trump retook office last year, the accelerated disposition program is designed to expedite the disposal of federal property via "proactive planning, dedicated staffing, streamlined processes, and targeted marketing," according to the GSA.
"Generally speaking, GSA is indicating they would like to move more quickly but it's unclear exactly what that means or how they're going to achieve it," Dave Marroni, director of the GAO's physical infrastructure team, told CoStar News in a phone interview.
GSA's latest efforts
The federal government owns hundreds of thousands of buildings that cost billions annually to operate and maintain. Disposing of them can take several years.
The GSA has sold more than 900 unneeded federal properties since 2013, generating $1.4 billion in revenue, the GAO reported. As of March, the GSA had identified 47 federal properties for its accelerated approach. Of those 47 properties, 41 are commercial office buildings.
At the end of March, the government sold the roughly 940,000-square-foot building at 301 Seventh St. SW for $24.26 million to a group that is considering turning it into a mixed-use development. A few days later, a pair of government departments said they intended to relocate their headquarters within Washington, moves that could add another property to the chopping block.
Other properties, such as the headquarters of the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, have been added to the accelerated disposal list.
"We've made tremendous strides delivering on President Trump's priorities of fortifying the federal real estate portfolio and delivering seamless acquisition services on critical programs and emerging technologies," GSA Administrator Edward Forst said Thursday in a statement.
The watchdog agency conducted its performance audit from August 2024 to April and separately noted in its report that the GSA should evaluate the effectiveness of using private real estate brokers compared to GSA-led sales, including in terms of sales revenue generated and the timeliness of completing sales.
Last year, the GSA reduced its staff involved in property dispositions by one-third and hired private brokers to lead the sale of public properties. The government must act to ensure the best possible outcomes from property dispositions, the GAO's Marroni said.
"The federal government simply has too big of a footprint and a lot of it is in bad shape. Spending large sums of money to preserve that existing footprint just doesn't make sense," he told lawmakers last month. "Instead, Congress, GSA and other agencies need to ensure current efforts to dispose of underused property lead to results."