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…
Capitol Markets
Issues and analysis relating to government leased and owned property
The Specter of Deflation and What it Means for GSA Lessors
One well-known quirk of GSA leases is that operating cost reimbursements are not based on increases in actual costs. Rather, they are calculated on the increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and…
Can We Expect the Government Sector to Outperform? Lessons from the Last Fiscal Crisis
Kevin Warsh, a Federal Reserve governor during the Great Recession, noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this year, “If you’ve seen one financial crisis, you’ve seen one financial crisis.” That is to say, all…
A New GAO Report Questions GSA Savings Claims
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…
Child Care Centers and Security Vulnerabilities
The title of a new report by the US General Services Administration (GSA), issued on January 30, 2020, speaks volumes: “Child Care Centers in GSA-Controlled Buildings Have Significant Security Vulnerabilities.” The 30-page report that follows, drawing…
The Public Buildings Reform Board Eyes Federal Properties to Sell
On December 27, 2019, the five-person Public Buildings Reform Board (PBRB) presented a report to the Office of Management and Budget that identifies a dozen federal properties that, it urges, should be sold. Guided by the…
BLM’s Proposed Reorganization Stirs Controversy
In January 2018, then–Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke announced a sweeping program to reorganize the department, the largest such reorganization since its founding in 1849. Zinke’s plan involved dividing the United States into thirteen regions,…