Marjorie Taylor Greene took her DOGE agenda on the road Tuesday, but the tour didn’t go far. The Delivering on Government Efficiency Oversight Subcommittee held a field hearing on federal real estate holdings from the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, the home of the U.S. Agency for Global Media located just three blocks west of the Capitol.
The office building sits mostly empty. Last month, President Donald Trump moved to gut the agency and Voice for America, and while a federal judge recently blocked the firing of around 1,200 workers, many remain out on administrative leave.
The federal government has a massive property portfolio, owning and leasing office space across the nation to house millions of employees. Operations that large come with inefficiencies, and for decades Democratic and Republican administrations alike have worked on incremental changes. Now Trump is taking a different approach: In February, the administration moved to begin terminating the roughly 7,500 leases managed by the General Services Administration nationwide and sell upward of another 500 properties.
The subcommittee heard from John Hart, CEO of Open the Books; David Marroni, an acting director of physical infrastructure at the Government Accountability Office; and Ron Kendall of the National Federal Development Association, but the agency at the heart of the hearing, the GSA, was not represented.
Greene opted to hold the hearing in the largely empty Cohen building in an apparent attempt to highlight government waste. She noted that the U.S. Agency for Global Media and Voice of America had signed a lease to relocate to new offices that would have cost $250 million over 15 years, but Trump blocked the move. The Biden administration had planned to sell the Cohen building and estimated it would have saved taxpayers $150 million over the lease’s term.
Greene argued that selling off the GSA’s portfolio would help reduce the federal debt, which currently tops $36 trillion.
“The federal government owns a massive real estate portfolio of more than a quarter-million buildings,” Greene said. “Taxpayers spend about $10 billion dollars annually just to operate and maintain it all.”
Last week, the Senate adopted a GOP budget resolution that could open the door to a reconciliation bill adding substantially to annual deficits, depending on how the final package is structured.
The hearing calling for the culling of federal offices came amid reports that many federal employees, ordered back to the office five days a week after the Trump administration ended flexible working arrangements, are sharing desks for lack of space.
In its third hearing, the DOGE subcommittee has fallen into a familiar pattern. Republicans point to individual outrages — like $120,000 spent on high-end chairs at an embassy — to defend the White House’s bone-saw cuts to the federal bureaucracy. Democrats say they’re all for thoughtful spending reductions but decry the administration’s arbitrary approach while arguing that no amount of discretionary decreases would cover the cost of Republicans’ proposed tax cuts and other priorities. Aides on both sides hold up posters aimed at going viral with their bases on social media.
In her opening remarks, ranking member Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico noted that the federal government has steadily worked over the years to reduce its real estate footprint.
“The last administration disposed of property, saving nearly $2 billion for American taxpayers, and recently, Congress worked together to pass bills for additional tools to reform and consolidate the federal property inventory,” Stansbury said. “Instead of building on these successes and continuing to do what could be characterized as the tedious analytical work on behalf of Americans, the Trump administration is currently taking a fire sale approach of looting the federal government and stripping it for parts to pay for tax cuts that we know will come up in their reconciliation deal.”
Democrats also countered with their own examples of wasteful spending under the current administration. Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas noted that security and travel expenses for Trump’s golfing trips so far this year, including one this past weekend as markets crashed and the bodies of four soldiers who died in Lithuania were returned to U.S. soil, cost taxpayers an estimated $26 million.
Republicans maintained that the White House’s actions were long overdue. Rep. Michael Cloud of Texas applauded the speed the Trump White House was bringing to the portfolio.
“Our friends on the left are complaining about how this is being done, but one would have to ask them — they had the House, the Senate and the White House just a few [years] ago — why didn’t they do anything about it then?”
As in past DOGE hearings, Democrats complained that the subcommittee refused to examine its namesake, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, and its leader, billionaire government contractor Elon Musk.“We have been deeply concerned that the entire DOGE effort has been a front to help support billionaires who are trying to privatize public services, and just this week, we have seen as Elon Musk is on his exit out of the federal government, he has secured billions of dollars in new contracts across the federal government,” Stansbury said, alluding to reports that Musk might leave DOGE in a few weeks’ time.
This report was corrected to accurately reflect the Senate adoption of a Republican budget resolution.
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