Here's a good place for the DOGE Boyz to start (UPDATED — that's billions, not millions)
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Waste Watch: Federal government spends billions on empty office space
Over $81 million is wasted every year for the underutilized government office space
alone, the report states. Furthermore, billions of additional dollars have gone toward buying brand-new furnishings for the abandoned offices. Though federal employees worked from home during the COVID emergency, Open the Books found that agencies continued to spend upward of $3 billion on furniture.
UPDATE: Convinced that no governmental body could possibly limit its losses to a mere $81 million, FWIW’s fact checker (that would be Gideon) went to Open Book’s actual report and found this:
“The government owns 7,697 vacant buildings and another 2,265 partially empty buildings. Maintaining and leasing government office buildings costs $8 billion every year, and another $7.7 billion is spent on the energy to keep them running.”
It turns out that the DoE is one of the biggest offenders when it comes to wasting fossil fuels and energy itself, exemplified by that very building. Built for a capacity of almost 4900 people every day with nearly a million square feet of usable square footage, the average daily number of folks utilizing that massive structure in 2023 was?
8
...The Department of Energy is the least utilized building, with just eight employees counted for the daily average in 2023, though office management reportedly refuted the attendance estimate. Other agencies with the emptiest office spaces include the Agency for Global Media, the US Department of Agriculture, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
