Solar Picnic Tables? How The Federal Government Has Treated Your Tax Dollars With Utter Disdain

The House Oversight Committee’s subpanel on government efficiency held a hearing Tuesday exposing billions of taxpayer dollars wasted annually on outdated federal buildings.

Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who leads the Subcommittee on Delivering Government Efficiency (DOGE), opened the hearing by slamming federal agencies for maintaining a bloated real estate footprint. She pledged to continue pushing to “right-size” the federal government’s real estate portfolio.

“Here in D.C., found in 2023 that the vast majority of federal agency headquarters buildings were less than 25% occupied — some much less,” Greene said. “Meanwhile, from 2022 to 2024, the backlog of deferred maintenance on the aging buildings the government owns grew from $216 billion to $370 billion. That’s more than one-third of a trillion dollars it will cost to restore them — if we don’t sell them.”

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has flagged federal property management as a “high-risk” area since 2003. Yet despite two decades of warnings, the Biden administration allowed billions to be spent not only to maintain vacant offices but also on lavish furniture purchases, according to the subcommittee’s review.

Greene highlighted early Trump administration moves, including canceling nearly 700 federal leases totaling 7.9 million square feet of space — moves she said saved taxpayers around $400 million. One such canceled lease was a 15-year, quarter-billion-dollar agreement for luxury office space on Pennsylvania Avenue, signed by the Biden administration to house Voice of America and the U.S. Agency for Global Media. The building, Greene said, had zero broadcasting capabilities, and taxpayers would have been on the hook for another $130 million in renovations.