One Federal Agency’s Unused Office Space Costs ‘Hundreds of Millions of Dollars’ Per Year
In one of his first day’s actions, President Donald Trump ordered Require all executive branch agencies to “terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to in-person work at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis,” barring individual exemptions.
Despite this one new report found that one department’s office space was “significantly underutilized,” costing taxpayers a fortune.
“The Department of Transportation (DOT) and its component agencies
According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), they are underutilizing office space across the department.”
Using Space Efficiently and Improving Technologies (USE IT) Actpassed in 2023, to arrange It mandated a required minimum occupancy rate of 60 percent for all federal agencies and authorized the government to “consolidate federal agency headquarters buildings in the National Capital area” to meet that benchmark, if necessary.
According to the report, when GAO auditors inspected DOT facilities between August 25 and September 19, 2025, “they found that 89 percent of DOT’s 189 office buildings, including DOT and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) headquarters complexes, were underutilized” by the 60 percent threshold.
As it turns out, these buildings aren’t just underutilized, they’re heavily used: “Our analysis found that average occupancy rates between owned and rented buildings are similar at 37 percent and 41 percent, respectively.”
The DOT and FAA headquarters buildings are by far the department’s largest and most expensive buildings: They total 1.8 million square feet of space and have an estimated employee capacity of more than 12,000; annual lease costs are over $100 million and annual operating costs are approximately $25 million. However, when investigated, each building was found to be only about a third full on any given day.
The DOT’s third most expensive building is One Aviation Plaza in Queens, New York. Although its estimated capacity is under 1,000 people, the building’s annual lease cost is over $15 million, and only 13 percent of the building was occupied during GAO’s research period.
The report divided all DOT buildings into four categories based on size; Among these, the only category with an average occupancy rate of more than 50 percent was the smallest facilities, with an average capacity of only 16 people.
But this is about more than sparsely populated offices: As with most things involving the federal government, it’s about a massive waste of taxpayers’ money.
“DOT’s underutilized office space costs hundreds of millions of dollars annually to lease, operate and maintain,” GAO said. “Of the 189 DOT buildings included in our analysis, we found that 168 buildings were underutilized, with annual lease, operating and maintenance costs totaling $370 million.”
Unfortunately, this problem is not new and is not limited to the DOT. In 2023, GAO surveyed 24 agencies that use the majority of federal government buildings, showing annual operating costs of about $2 billion. It found that average occupancy rates were 25 percent or less at the low end and 49 percent at the high end.
At the time, DOT was in the second-lowest quartile among agencies, using only 16 percent of its available space on average.
One of the points the report makes is that DOT has made no effort to maximize its available space, especially at any of its secondary locations. For example, DOT operates a number of lower level organizationshowever, neither currently shares office space with each other. In practice, this means that a number of similar agencies in the same department occupy separate, half-empty offices.
The report also notes that some DOT offices may adopt a desk sharing system. Although agencies are required to work in person, many employees in DOT field offices “conduct investigations or investigations at off-site locations such as airports or aircraft manufacturing facilities” and as a result “spend approximately half of their time working off-site.” But still the department provides each of them with a special desk that is empty half the time. GAO notes that a table reservation system, which the department resists, could free up currently vacant space.
It is true that the DOT has taken some steps to address this problem. last year episode announced The FAA plans to move its staff to DOT headquarters and return the FAA building to the General Services Administration (GSA). By doing so, GAO stated, it would “allow DOT to avoid paying $56 million annually to GSA for rent, operations, and maintenance” as well as “an estimated $131 million in deferred maintenance costs” depending on what GSA does next. (Ideally, it would sell the building and others, allowing valuable commercial real estate to be used in the private sector, saving taxpayers money in the process.)
But right now, those savings are theoretical: GAO notes that not all FAA staff will be moved to the DOT building, leaving 950 FAA employees that the department hasn’t yet figured out where to put.
Considering the FAA employs more than 45,000 people in total, maybe they could also be placed in the private sector?
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