The General Services Administration (GSA) is typically referred to as the landlord for the federal government. On behalf of federal agencies it leases 191 million square feet in roughly 8,700 office, storage, lab and other types of leased locations across the United States and its territories. The map below highlights those space concentrations. It’s no […]

The House of Representatives passed a bill yesterday designed to speed up the sale of large amounts of excess federal properties. The Civilian Property Alignment Act (H.R. 1734), commonly referred to as the “Civilian BRAC” bill),…

Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), has been on the hot seat lately, in congressional hearings over the troubled Healthcare.gov website. But overseeing much of the Affordable Care Act implementation is only one responsibility of the sprawling CMS, a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Other […]

Since its heyday in the Kennedy Administration more than half a century ago, nonmilitary foreign aid has had detractors and defenders in roughly equal measure. On the con side, critics urge that money spent building power plants in some tropical nation across the ocean would be better spent mending broken infrastructure here at home. On […]

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) leases private property at a cost of billions of dollars—$5.7 billion annually, to be precise, spread out over more than 8,000 leases. Every year, the agency claims, it saves taxpayers…

GSA’s effort toward execution of long-term leases has been a popular topic among investors. Going back to the earliest days of this blog, we observed that the remaining term of GSA leases was dwindling. When GSA began to embrace long-term leases as a means to achieve better rents, we chronicled the agency’s efforts to execute […]

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)—a semi-autonomous agency within the U. S. Department of Energy (DoE)—is responsible for the management and security of the nation’s nuclear weapons, nuclear nonproliferation and naval reactor programs—serious work, indeed.  Its mission is to: Manage the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile; Reduce the global danger from weapons of mass destruction and […]

Thanks to extensive media coverage, both positive and negative, and to countless spy novels and movies, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is the best-known intelligence unit within the U.S. government, virtually synonymous with intelligence generally. In fact, CIA (it’s “the Agency,” or “Central Intelligence,” or “the Central Intelligence Agency,” but never “the CIA”) is only […]

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,…

This chart, presented with the September 2014 meeting of the Federal Reserve Bank’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), provides each member’s forecast of the federal funds rate. Each shaded circle indicates the value (rounded to the nearest 1/8 percentage point) of an individual member’s judgment of the midpoint of the appropriate target range for the […]

DISA Headquarters With more than 56,000 employees—including about 5,700 new jobs that have resulted from BRAC-related movements—Fort George G. Meade is the largest employer in Maryland, the fifth-largest employment center in the state, and has the third-largest workforce of any U.S. Army installation. The BRAC-related construction completed at Fort Meade last summer (2011) includes new […]

The widely used abbreviation for military construction is MILCON (also written variously as MilCon, Milcon or milcon). This typically refers to any construction, alteration, development, conversion or extension of any kind carried out with respect to a military installation, including those for the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force; the Department of Defense; the […]

Rep. Jeff Denham (R-CA) When ordinary citizens find themselves with too much stuff, they have a garage or yard sale—even call in a clutter consultant, which explains why organizing maven Marie Kondo is in such high demand these days. But when the federal government sits on too much stuff, it usually stays sat upon, unused […]

If you find yourself working on a large lease transaction, you’ll eventually hear the term “Prospectus”.  The Prospectus refers to the document that GSA produces each time it seeks to execute a lease over a specified dollar threshold.  This document requires review by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and, most significantly, Congressional approval.  […]