The facts
The Government Accountability Office's October 2026 report on federal office space says Congress passed the USE IT Act in January 2025, ordering 24 CFO Act agencies to count how many employees actually show up and report the numbers. Buildings are supposed to hit 60 percent utilization, the ratio of a building's capacity to its daily attendance. Agencies reported for the first time in March 2026. Not one agency hit 60 percent across its entire portfolio.
Counting cost money: $16 million across 23 agencies in 2025, mostly on badge systems and check-in surveys.
The numbers were also bent. As of April 2026, the Interior Department had not collected or reported any occupancy data at all. Instead it reported the number of employees assigned to each location, without measuring whether they were actually present. It blamed a lack of badge readers and an inability to match timecard data to specific spaces. As of July 2026, Homeland Security was not collecting or reporting data for nearly 700 of its spaces. USAID refused to answer GAO's survey at all, citing a need to focus on operations related to reducing the agency's footprint and terminating awards.
The landlord fudged too. The March 2026 data given to Congress did not include GSA-controlled vacant space, nor was it made clear to Congress or the public that this vacant space was excluded. Leaving it out shrinks the denominator, producing higher utilization rates than the buildings deserve. As of July 2026, GSA controlled more than 20 million usable square feet of vacant space, and 155 fully vacant buildings and leased spaces totaling 4.6 million square feet never made the March report. Count the empties and the grades collapse: a California federal building drops from 68 percent to 57 percent, a Michigan leased space from 78 percent to 58 percent. GSA also left the spaces that did clear 60 percent out of its public data. GAO made four recommendations. GSA did not agree or disagree.
Our take
Congress spent $16 million of your money to find out if anyone’s actually in their fucking office. The answer is a colossal, taxpayer-funded ‘no.’ Not a single goddamn agency could clear the laughably low bar of a 60% ass-in-chair rate. What a stunning, shocking twist that nobody could have predicted after the last twenty fucking years of remote work. What a profound fucking waste of time and money to quantify the obvious: the federal office is a ghost town run by cowards and liars who can’t even count right when ordered to by law. Let’s hand out the participation trophies for this shitshow. The Department of the Interior wins the gold medal in bureaucratic bullshit. Their job was to count how many people showed up. Their solution? Count how many people are *supposed* to show up. That’s like a teacher marking everyone present because they have a class roster, you useless fucking idiots. Their excuse - no badge readers, can’t match timecards - is the sound of a multi-billion dollar agency admitting its own infrastructure is held together with duct tape and wishful thinking. Homeland Security, tasked with securing the homeland, couldn’t secure data from nearly seven hundred of its own locations. They just fucking skipped them. USAID looked at the whole project, said ‘we’re busy dismantling our own agency,’ and told the watchdogs to get fucked. An honest moment in a sea of cowardly, self-serving horseshit. But the real dickhead in this clown car is the General Services Administration, the government’s fucking landlord. These pricks didn’t just fail the test; they burned the answer sheet and lied about there ever being a fire. They handed Congress a report that conveniently excluded over 20 million square feet of vacant space they control. That’s not a report; it’s a fucking forgery. They shrunk the denominator to fake better grades, turning failing buildings into passing ones. A California building’s ‘passing’ 68% instantly becomes a failing 57% when you remember to count the empty fucking floors. Then they hid the buildings that *did* pass, because why the fuck would the public get the full picture? The GAO, doing its job, made four recommendations to stop this fraud. GSA’s response? They didn’t agree or disagree. They gave the bureaucratic equivalent of a limp-dick shrug. So here’s the summary: we spent $16 million to learn that offices are empty, that the people in charge are either incompetent or lying cunts, and that the system for fixing it is itself a broken joke. The federal government’s real estate portfolio has been ‘high risk’ for two decades. This $16 million exercise proved the only thing at risk is the last shred of faith anyone had in these grifters to do a single fucking thing right.
