GAO Urges GSA to Optimize Federal Real Estate via Shared Meeting Space Tracking
A new Government Accountability Office report highlights low awareness of GSA’s shared meeting space inventory among federal agencies. Enhancing visibility and inventory comprehensiveness could significantly cut leasing costs and maximize interagency footprint efficiency.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has called on the General Services Administration (GSA) to take aggressive steps to improve agency awareness and management of shared meeting spaces across federal facilities. Mandated under the Thomas R. Carper Water Resources Development Act of 2024, the report evaluated space utilization across GSA-owned and -leased multi-tenant buildings to pinpoint operational efficiencies. As federal real property utilization remains persistently low across the government, optimizing shared special-use facilities—such as conference centers, auditorium space, and specialized operational rooms—presents an immediate pathway to curtail redundant leasing and infrastructure spending.
GAO’s field assessments across multi-tenant federal properties revealed that while agency officials acknowledge the substantial benefits of space sharing—including lower baseline operating costs, optimized building footprints, and enhanced interagency coordination—significant operational barriers hamper widespread adoption. GSA maintains an online directory of volunteered meeting spaces, but the listing is neither comprehensive nor consistently maintained. Many tenant agencies fail to register available rooms, and key GSA-managed spaces remain unlisted. Compounding the issue, federal workforce turnover in 2025 severely eroded program continuity, leading to undelivered outreach emails and widespread ignorance of the reservation platform among tenant agency personnel.
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