The Public Buildings Service (PBS) is the largest public real estate organization in the United States, under whose aegis more than 1.2 million federal employees are provided with workspaces. The agency, a branch of the federal General Services Administration (GSA), is responsible for building and maintaining federal properties through contracts that have ranged from $65,000 […]
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, save for the radio antennas and microwave dishes studding the roof, and its interior tells the casual visitor at […]
The last round of Base Closure and Realignment (BRAC) was announced in 2005 and completed officially last year. In a press conference today, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced that DoD is planning for another BRAC round as part of the FY 2013 Defense budget. This round is meant to accommodate an expected $487 billion in […]
St. Elizabeths Campus Rendering (courtesy of GSA) The original $3.45 billion plan to consolidate the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) headquarters at a 4.5 million-square-foot campus on the site of the former St. Elizabeths Hospital—moving more than 14,000 workers from more than 180 separate offices and reducing the department’s leased spaces in the Washington […]
Portfolio investors of GSA-leased properties will be pleased to learn that GSA gross rents have, on the whole, performed reasonably well in the past ten years. GSA leases typically do not contain rent escalations–in fact, in…
When faced with thousands of pages of budget submissions and hundreds of megabytes of data, there is nothing so wonderful as a good infographic to make sense of it all. We’ve searched the web to find the best sites and included them here. Continue to check back because as we find others we’ll add them […]
If you think getting an immigration bill, say, or healthcare reform through a bitterly divided Congress is hard, try an annual budget. In mid-September, Congress, having been unable to agree on that budget, passed what is…
In 2010, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the fiscal watchdog within the federal government, issued an order requiring that federal agencies consolidate data centers in order to save money and reduce redundancies. Twenty-four agencies,…
Marble steps and columns crowned in the Corinthian order, yes. Great battleship-like masses of bare concrete, no. So demands an executive order issued from the White House on December 1, 2020, shorthanded as the “beautiful buildings act” and bearing the formal title “Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.” The 2,700-word order opens on […]
As we’ve reported in numerous postings throughout the past year (click on “BRAC” in the “Categories” to the right), the Base Closure and Realignment (BRAC) process has led to the closure of more than 350 military bases—and the shifting of many military operations from one base to another—since 1988. While the Department of Defense (DoD) […]
According to Moody’s Investors Service, last week’s election has not changed the “highly polarized and unpredictable” political landscape that still threatens the nation’s credit rating. In an analysis released today and outlined in a set of research notes yesterday, the ratings agency described how the presidential election and the prospect of a continuing standoff on […]
A century and a half ago, after the Civil War had ended, the federal government began an ambitious program of building national hospitals for wounded veterans—a few at first, and then, as those veterans became elderly,…
President Trump announcing his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement in the Rose Garden of the White House June 01, 2017. (Official Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian) For those of you who have recently awakened from a coma, here is a news alert: President Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris climate […]
Which federal agency represents almost a quarter of all federal outlays and administers more grant dollars than all other federal agencies combined? The mission of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is to protect the health of all Americans and provide essential human services, especially for those who are least able to […]