Bush administration steps up oversight of federal property

An executive order issued last week provides a strong framework for improving governmentwide management of federal property, a General Accounting Office analyst said Tuesday.

The order, signed by President Bush on Feb. 4, requires agencies to designate a senior real property officer to oversee federal assets. These agency officials will sit on a new property council administered by the Office of Management and Budget.

Under the executive order, the OMB council will create a set of common measures that agencies must use to mark their progress on property management. The General Services Administration is responsible for relaying these measures and for maintaining a "single, comprehensive and descriptive" database of property held by executive branch agencies.

GSA will not include classified information in the inventory. The database also will not capture national parks or Indian trust land.

Property management is a long-standing problem for the government. Much of the government's roughly $328 billion worth of real estate is in a state of disrepair, GAO researchers have found. The government also faces at least a $100 billion backlog of maintenance and repair projects, GAO has estimated.

Many federal facilities sit vacant. The Defense Department, for example, spends $3 billion to $4 billion annually to maintain buildings that are not in use. The government could find uses for vacant property, sell it for profit or exchange it for other assets, GAO has reported.

Last week's executive order establishes a "more aggressive and systematic" approach to addressing these problems, said Bernard Ungar, a property management specialist at GAO. Legislation might be necessary to fully resolve the issues, but "on balance, it seems to me as though [the order] is a step in the right direction," he said.

With a common set of property management performance measures, officials will have an easier time seeing how agencies are faring relative to one another, Ungar said. GSA also will be able to maintain a more accurate central database, he said. To date, statistics on federal property have not always been reliable, he explained.

Some agencies will be better prepared than others to meet the standards set in the executive order. For instance, some have already designated senior property managers and maintain trustworthy data on their assets. "We know from our research that it's a mixed bag out there," Ungar said.

The establishment of a property management council at OMB should "shed some light and focus more attention on the issue," Ungar said. Council members should not find it too hard to create uniform performance measures, he said, since such measures exist in the private sector. Private companies track vacant space and the cost of operating a square foot of real estate, for example.

OMB also plans to begin grading some agencies on property management. By the end of this year, administration officials expect to score the major landholding agencies using a traffic light system. These ratings will appear on OMB's quarterly management score card. By issuing such scores, OMB would further motivate agency managers to use assets more efficiently, Ungar said.

But to fully reduce wasted space, federal property managers would need more flexibility, Ungar said. For instance, agencies should have broader authority to lease property to private companies and collect some of the revenue, he said. Agencies also would benefit from the ability to purchase some facilities outright, rather than leasing them over a number of years, Ungar said. The current method of budgeting makes it hard for some agencies to do this.

Lawmakers have introduced legislation that would grant some of these flexibilities. A bill (H.R. 2548) approved by the House Government Reform Committee in July 2003 requires GSA to create an inventory of all federal property, streamlines property disposition processes, and gives agencies the flexibility to lease, exchange or sell property. But that legislation has not yet made it to the House floor.