Honey, I shrunk the regulation

Don't say in 240 pages what you can say in 22. When the General Services Administration's regulation massagers are finished with the government's federal real property management rule, they will have shrunk the policy 11 times over. "The new rule gives our tenants what they need to know, removing extraneous information and enabling them to spend their time on their agencies' missions," said Paul Lynch, director of GSA's Office of Business Performance. GSA, the government's landlord, provides policy guidance for the more than 30 federal agencies that own land and buildings. The real property regulation explains the ABCs of federal facility and real estate management. The new rule, published Jan. 18 in the Federal Register, uses the question-and-answer format that plain language advocates favor. Regulations throughout government have been rewritten in Q&A style over the past several years. Of course, it would be tough for the federal government to manage its 423,000 buildings and 631 million acres of land with just 22 pages of regulations, so GSA is creating handbooks and customer guides that provide more detailed instructions for managing real property. But for answers to basic questions about the rules, federal property managers now have 218 fewer pages to slog through. GSA has yet to cancel the 240-page Federal Property Management Regulation. As soon as GSA officially takes the regulation off the books, property managers will have to look exclusively in Subchapter C of the new Federal Management Regulation to find the property rules. Once it's complete, the Federal Management Regulation will be a single source of regulatory policy for real and personal property management, travel and transportation, telecommunications and administrative programs.