At a House DOGE Committee hearing before the Congressional recess, Rep. Michael Cloud (R-TX) spoke about federal properties.
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00:00The gentlelady yields, and I now recognize Mr. Cloud from Texas for five minutes.
00:07Thank you all for being here.
00:09Appreciate you, Chairwoman, for holding this hearing on this topic.
00:13It's certainly one that we've talked about before, but one that we've seen very little action on.
00:20One of the reasons and discussion points surrounding those who were proponents of teleworking
00:27were that we would save all this money on not needing these federal buildings,
00:31and yet what we've seen was in the business world, what you would do is you'd lose a little productivity
00:36with people maybe working remotely, but you would gain that from less cost and overhead
00:42of maintaining buildings and facilities.
00:45But, of course, in the nature of the federal government, we sent people home,
00:49we got less productivity, and we continue to grow our assets and property portfolios
00:55and now are maintaining empty buildings to the tunes of millions and millions and millions
00:59and billions of dollars even.
01:03Biden had, as Mr. Fallon mentioned, committed to getting the workforce back to work in person,
01:11in offices, and, of course, we know that didn't happen.
01:13This has really been a bipartisan issue, even Obama in 2011 in the campaign to cut waste laid out what you could
01:21almost describe as the goals of DOGE, but we saw very little progress over that.
01:27And so our friends in the left right now are kind of complaining about how this is being done,
01:31but one would have to ask them.
01:33They had all three, the House, the Senate, and the White House just three months ago.
01:37So why didn't they do anything about it then?
01:42And so now we continue to – I'm sorry, you're right, a couple years ago.
01:48But nonetheless, you had it a couple years ago and didn't do anything with it.
01:53And so now we find ourselves to the point where President Trump and the Trump administration
01:58is finally doing something about this, and this is good for the American people.
02:02We must find savings for it.
02:04As Mr. Fallon mentioned, the vast majority, I think 17 of 24 agencies, were almost vacant, it seems,
02:11using 25 percent less, and then we have a backlog of $370 billion in maintenance costs backlogs.
02:20And so we have to do something about this.
02:25And I think it's worthy to know, you keep mentioning selling properties in a down market.
02:29Who would benefit from that?
02:30Well, that would be the American people who are buying it.
02:33These businesses who could buy it up and turn it into a profitable asset,
02:37create a property that would bring tax flow to Washington, D.C., for example,
02:41income, as opposed to a vacant building sitting there being a burden on the American people.
02:46So there's a lot of reasons to continue to move forward on this.
02:50Of course, we want to make sure this is done the right way.
02:52Mr. Moroney, could you speak to kind of the decision-making process that you look to bring?
02:56First of all, thank you for being willing to take up this fight that so many administrations have been willing to talk about and bring little action to.
03:04But could you talk about kind of your decision-making process and apparatus as we continue to look forward
03:09and how you will evaluate what properties are valid and which ones are not for sale or off leasing?
03:16For owned properties, GSA and the administration in general should take a look at first, sequencing makes sense.
03:22Take a look at the properties.
03:23There are already a number of properties that have been previously identified as properties that should be gotten rid of.
03:29Oftentimes, these are buildings that are underused, have been for a long time, and have large deferred mains liabilities.
03:34So it makes sense.
03:34Start with those.
03:36Get those out the door as quickly as you can and get those savings.
03:40And then as the new data that we're going to have on utilization, which is going to start rolling in in July, comes in,
03:46you can use that to further assess where are there additional properties that are underused.
03:50We'll have that data for the first time for many buildings.
03:53And assess what makes next sense in the next tranche to sell off and consolidate.
03:58This all is going to take money.
03:59It does take money to move out of spaces, to build out consolidations, to reconfigure spaces.
04:04But at the end of the day, you save, not only do you potentially get proceeds from the sales,
04:09but you also save the operation and maintenance costs, which have a very long tail,
04:13and save a lot of money over time by getting rid of buildings that are just too costly to maintain now.
04:19Now, more than half of GSA's leases, I think it's 4,108 out of 7,685 are set to expire between, well, 2023, but in 2027.
04:32How much of the federal government can save by allowing these leases to expire that are not needed using properties that we already own?
04:40Right. Well, from a pure financial basis, we spend about $6 billion on leases each year.
04:45So if you're reducing whatever the math is, I can't do the public math, but it's a substantial amount you can get from lease savings.
04:52You just want to make sure you know what your end state is going to be.
04:54How much space are you aiming for at the end to make sure you're sequencing things in a way that makes sense?
04:59I only have eight seconds left, so I will yield back to the chair one.