Good management starts with good data

Terry Gerton We’re gonna talk about a new GAO report focused on federal real property and specifically the judiciary. I think it’s kind of interesting because the executive branch agencies are increasingly being required to measure their office space occupancy and utilization, but the judiciary isn’t really subject to those requirements. Where do they fit in the broader federal effort to get a handle on government real estate?

David Marroni They’re right there with the other parts of the federal government. They have a large real property footprint. They pay about a billion dollars a year in rent, though they are, you’re right, not currently measuring utilization, but they’re part of the problem too.

Terry Gerton A billion dollars in rent sounds like a lot of money. How does that get distributed?

David Marroni So that goes to GSA, the General Services Administration, which essentially functions as a landlord for the judiciary. The judiciary doesn’t actually own its courthouses, its buildings. It’s federally owned space that GSA manages.

Terry Gerton And they spend about half of that billion dollars on courthouses, where does the rest of the money go?

David Marroni So all that money goes to rent. About half of it goes to GSA directly for federally owned space. About half goes to a GSA to pay commercial leases. Well, this is lease space. But beyond courthouses themselves, within the courthouse is there what we call an administrative space, which is essentially like office space, conference rooms, meeting rooms, places where clerks work, which was the focus of this report.

Terry Gerton The judiciary, as the report says, has a number of tools intended to control space and costs, including its no net new policy. What are all of those efforts intended to accomplish? How do they work?

David Marroni There are efforts by judiciary that have been going on since 2013 to try and optimize its space, to try to have the space it needs to carry out its mission. And so, for instance, the new policy you mentioned means that judiciary, the courts are not supposed to add any new space without reducing an equivalent amount of space a year. They have reduced their space since the 2010s by about 3% or so, which was their target. And has remained largely flat when you’re talking about administrative space since 2021.

Terry Gerton If they’re not tracking space utilization, how do they know how much they need or which ones to get rid of?

David Marroni So that’s a good question. They do have some sense of that from their caseload, from the number of employees they have, but they don’t have as detailed of a sense as you’d want to really maximize your use of space. That’s why we’re recommending that they develop way as your utilization.

Terry Gerton As you did your assessment here, what were the big issues that elevated your concern?

David Marroni The biggest issue is it’s a federal government wide issue where we have found consistently over a decade, rural agencies tend to have more space than they need, which costs billions of dollars, doesn’t go to mission, it’s just a cost. And judiciary is in that same boat where they have space and some of it may not be needed. And the way you identify more precisely what you may or may not need is the kind of data we’re talking about, utilization data that says how much of the capacity of these various buildings are we using and could we be more efficient and reduce the amount of space we have so ultimately we can reduce the number of rent?

Terry Gerton David Marroni is a director on the physical infrastructure team at GAO. David, in the report, the judiciary seemed to say that, well, courts aren’t typical office environments and people move around, sometimes they’re in one place, sometimes in another, sometimes they are out in the field. We can’t really measure utilization. What do you think about their argument?

David Marroni Well, there’s some truth in that argument, but it’s not unique to judiciary. There’s many federal agencies where that also applies, where workers have office space for when they need to do in-building work, but they also go out in the field. This is not unique to them. And there are ways you deal with that. There are ways that you can share desks. There are way you can track the data so that you account for that. And then also it comes down to the benchmark you set for how utilized you want your space to be. For example, under the law, federal agencies have to utilize 60% of their space, but not 100%. It accounts for folks not being in the office every day or moving between spaces.

Terry Gerton Does the judiciary as a branch have the capacity to do the kind of utilization measurement that you’re suggesting?

David Marroni Well, we’ve recommended that they take steps to do so. And they should. There are many different ways you can measure utilization. You can go from the platinum version, which could be very expensive to do, to something that’s more like a daily check-in survey, where you send an email to employees and just say, are you in the office today? That’s the range of options that GSA has provided to executive branch agencies. Those same options are things that judiciary could have been put in place so they can get the data. Which is not going to be perfect. The goal is not perfect data. And it’s not data that’s going to make your decision for you, but useful indicators of how much space you need. And there are different ways to get at that. It doesn’t have to be the platinum.

Terry Gerton So did you come away from this report thinking that judiciary was open to this and willing to explore these, or did they have other objections?

David Marroni They are open to exploring. They said in their response to our report that they will take under consideration what we’ve recommended. They haven’t said whether they will [act] on the recommendations yet or not. I’m hopeful they will because at the end of the day it’s really important for all federal components, the judiciary executive branch agencies or legislative branch agencies understand how are we using our office space? And does it indicate we could be doing it better? Because ultimately that’s more money that can go to mission unless spending on rent or maintenance.

Terry Gerton Did you find that there might have been some geographic areas that were doing this kind of collection or had this kind of data or was it a problem across the country?

David Marroni It was across the country. We went to all 12 circuits, asked their executives or surveyed them for whether they were measuring occupancy or utilization in any way. Occupancy is the number of people who are going into the office every day and utilization is the amount of your building space that you’re actually using. And they were not. So it is not just one geographic area, it’s just across the board. They’re not measuring this data. There are other, like I mentioned earlier, they are measuring other kinds of data that are useful for making these type of space decisions, but the utilization data would really push them forward in making better choices.

Terry Gerton Any indication as to why they’re not already collecting the utilization data?

David Marroni So, some of the concerns we’ve discussed. So. Concerns about, can we measure this in an efficient way? I think they can. Would we be able to translate this into judiciary’s unique work? Again, I think that they can. And some of it is just they haven’t done it before. And we found that with executive branch agencies too. When we first looked at this in terms of trying to generate some estimates in 2023, we heard similar things from the executive branch agency. This is difficult. We don’t know if we can do this. A lot of inertia from the way things had always been done. And now executive branch agencies are doing it. Again, there’s still gonna be room for improvement over time in collecting the data and in using the data, but executive branch agency have made progress. There’s no reason that you didn’t share, cannot do the same.

Terry Gerton So if they adopt your recommendation and they start collecting this utilization data, what do you think is the first thing they might learn about their space portfolio that they just can’t know today?

David Marroni I think they’ll have a better sense of, for this administrative space, this office space, how much of it are we actually using and where are we using it? And most importantly, if you find spaces that are not being well used, are there enough contiguous blocks of that space that you could give it back to GSA and say, we don’t need to pay rent for that anymore? We can consolidate down because that’s ultimately, you’re going to save money. This did not focus on courtrooms so that’s an entirely different thing. But when you’re talking about basic office space, there is room for gains here.