Last week the Government Accountability Office (GAO) publicly released its report titled GSA Should Inform Tenant Agencies When Leasing High-Security Space From Foreign Owners. The title pretty well summarizes the report’s conclusion – that GSA should determine if its…
Category: Agencies
The Supreme Court and the Rule of Two
In mid-June of this year, the US Supreme Court issued a rare unanimous decision directed at the Department of Veterans Affairs—but that may affect all federal agencies in time as they engage with private contractors for…
Who Really Has Leasing Authority?
Which federal agencies are authorized to lease property from the private sector? If you had asked that question of any federal official before last month, you might have drawn no more than an educated guess, if…
Spotlight: Farm Service Agency
If the Farm Service Agency (FSA) sounds as if it might be some forgotten holdover of the alphabet-soup New Deal of nine decades ago, there is good reason. Although it was formally instituted only in 1996,…
A GAO Report Calls for Heightened Building Security
Last August 21, federal workers in the heart of Lower Manhattan saw a terrible situation: A disturbed man with a gun entered a building in which passports were issued and immigration cases decided. He killed a…
FBI Field Office Sales Revisited
In November 2013, I published a brief analysis looking at the cap rate trend for FBI field office sales tracked from the end of the Global Financial Collapse. FBI field offices are a good subject for this…
Spotlight: Secret Service
How much office and other space does the US Secret Service occupy? That turns out to be a difficult question with a simple answer: It’s secret. Its Washington headquarters, a building on H Street, looks nondescript,…
Spotlight: SBA
“The chief business of the American people is business,” said President Calvin Coolidge, speaking before a convention of newspaper editors 90 years ago. (His bon mot is often shortened to “the business of America is business.”)…
Reining in Lease Extensions: A New GAO Report Promises More Oversight on Federal Leases
The federal government spends too much money, and it doesn’t keep tabs on what it’s spending money on. That’s the constant complaint, especially from critics in an election cycle—but it’s also a refrain that’s coming from the…
Emerging Building Technologies and GSA
Earlier this month, the US General Services Administration (GSA) and Department of Energy (DOE) issued a joint request for information calling on vendors to propose innovative building technologies in support of federal guidelines and goals, or, as…