In written testimony on March 7th before the House, Dr. Dorothy Robyn, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, Installations and Environment, confirmed that DoD has embarked upon a formal initiative to review the Department’s anti-terrorism/force protection (ATFP)…
Author: Kurt Stout
House Committee (Finally) Approves 11 Prospectuses
The House of Representatives, Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, convened this morning in a mark-up hearing to finally approve 11 prospectuses, nearly all of which have been languishing on the Hill for more than a year. In…
USPS Closing, Consolidating More Facilities
Facing a projected budget deficit of more than $14 billion, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) announced last month (on February 23) that it will slash the size of its mail processing network by almost half. Of…
GSA’s Revised Energy Star Policy
One of GSA’s unique challenges is that it must adapt its leases to accommodate a vast array of laws, executive orders, federal regulations and other agencies’ policies. That’s a hard thing to do and it’s made…
Authorization and Appropriation – What’s the Difference?
Each year, the House and Senate authorize each federal agency, department, or program to spend a specific amount of money, and the President signs the bill into law. But this money may not be spent until…
GovSpeak: “Continuing Resolution”
What happens when Congress fails to pass a formal federal appropriations bill, and/or the President fails to sign it into law by October 1st? (We ask “when” rather than “if” because this has happened every year…
Understanding the Federal Budget Process
Surprisingly, the U.S. Constitution makes no provisions for a federal budget and, in fact, the federal government operated without a comprehensive budget process until 1921. The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, which has been amended…
Join Colliers International in “Everyone Gives”
With today’s post we take a break from our usual review of government real estate to instead focus on a unique social giving campaign: Everyone Gives. This event—the most inclusive initiative of its kind—enables charities, companies and public…
The Bow Wave
Ever wonder why each time you see a graph of GSA lease expirations, it seems like the expirations volume in the upcoming year is the largest ever? Well, there’s a logical, and unfortunate, reason for it:…
GSA’s Largest Tenants
One of the more intriguing charts in GSA’s recent Congressional Justification is its “Summary of Billed Inventory” or, to put it another way, its largest tenants. It’s not a universally understood fact that GSA is the…