Summary

  • GAO’s October audit found that March 2026 federal office-use reporting excluded vacant space controlled by the General Services Administration when no tenant agency had an active occupancy agreement. The omission was not clearly disclosed to Congress or the public.
  • GSA’s July records, supplied to GAO, counted 20,243,856 usable square feet in that vacant category. GAO identified 72 partially vacant properties reported at or above 60 percent utilization that could fall below the line if the missing space entered the denominator.

The missing part of the denominator

The federal government wanted a sharper measure of how much office space its agencies use. The first public report in March delivered a number with a hole in it: GSA-controlled rooms without a current tenant agreement were left outside the calculation. Excluding empty square feet shrinks the denominator and lifts the reported utilization rate. The Government Accountability Office’s full report says the omission was not made clear when the data went to Congress and the public.

The size of the missing category became visible in a later GSA file supplied to GAO. As of July 2026, it contained 20,243,856 usable square feet of vacant GSA-controlled owned and leased space. About 15.6 million square feet sat inside properties with another tenant; about 4.6 million was in fully vacant locations. July is the date of that inventory, not a retroactive measurement of March’s exact vacancy total. The governance problem is the reporting rule: an empty room can disappear from the measure precisely when the measure is meant to expose underused rooms.

The 60 percent benchmark gives this denominator choice teeth. GAO found 72 partly vacant GSA-controlled properties whose March figures met or exceeded 60 percent and whose ratings could fall below it after vacant space is added. In one California example, including 33,482 vacant square feet could take a building from 68 to 57 percent. A Michigan leased site could move from 78 to 58 percent after adding 5,737 vacant square feet. These are conditional recalculations, not completed reclassifications. They show why the building boundary matters more than a reassuring percentage on a tenant agreement.

The public release had a second blind spot: the full GSA dataset listed individual spaces below 60 percent, but omitted the individual spaces at or above that threshold. Congress received information on all spaces with active agreements, while vacant GSA space was still missing. GAO asked GSA to include vacant space and building-level figures in future reporting and make the public dataset’s scope clear. GSA said it would consider the recommendations. The next edition will show whether Washington can count the rooms it has no tenant for.