Central Valley Congressman Wants Taxpayers To Know What Empty Federal Buildings Are Costing
Los Angeles Times | March 3, 2016 | Sarah D. Wire
The federal government spends more than $1.7 billion a year to maintain 770,000 empty buildings while other agencies are leasing or buying new space, and Rep. Jeff Denham is fed up.
“This is something that hasn’t been handled in Republican or Democrat administrations because it’s too big of a bureaucracy,” Denham (R-Turlock) said in an interview in his office. “There’s no incentive for the agencies to sell.”
He said if politicians are going to talk about cutting government waste, selling empty buildings is a good start.
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We have very little communication between agencies,” Denham said. “We’ve seen agencies that will put out to bid huge pieces of property for the next big expansion, the next new thing that they need and only after it gets approved, then another agency goes ‘Hey, wait a minute, we’ve got half of a building here.'”
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The federal government has tried for decades to get a handle on its hundreds of thousands of office buildings, storage warehouses, courthouses, hospitals, parking garages and other structures. In California, the federal government owned more than 271 million square feet of property in fiscal 2014, according to the General Services Administration. How much of that property is not being used is not clear.
Those shields look like soft targets to me. Seriously, these overbearing agencies need to be reduced to nothing. The BLM and EPA need to be completely disbanded and the Forrest Service needs to go back to the service portion of their name. They’ve abused the service part just like the IRS has.
All that takes is a President willing to reign in his agencies and a Congress willing to pass specific legislation rather than amorphous and ambiguous laws that leave it up to the agencies to set their own missions.
… and buildings . . .
Own the land, own the people.
Those shields look like soft targets to me. Seriously, these overbearing agencies need to be reduced to nothing. The BLM and EPA need to be completely disbanded and the Forrest Service needs to go back to the service portion of their name. They’ve abused the service part just like the IRS has.
All that takes is a President willing to reign in his agencies and a Congress willing to pass specific legislation rather than amorphous and ambiguous laws that leave it up to the agencies to set their own missions.