Dive Brief:

• The U.S. General Services Administration is seeking congressional approval for $10 billion to make critical repairs to 103 buildings across fiscal years 2028 through 2034. 
• GSA needs the money to keep the buildings “safe, functional, and mission‑ready,” Administrator Edward Forst says in a letter to congressional leaders.
• GSA pays for repairs from money it collects from the lease and sale of U.S. government buildings, but it needs congressional approval to access the money for any repairs over $3.96 million, a cap that the agency is trying to raise to $75 million. “The average approval timeline is 426 days,” Forst says. Some requests have been pending for more than 10 years, “increasing [costs] by as much as 436 percent,” he says.

Dive Insight:

Forst has sought to get restrictions lifted on GSA repair funds since he was tapped to lead the agency in 2025. In testimony earlier this year, he described Congress repurposing money from the agency’s Federal Buildings Fund for other purposes as a hijacking. 

“It pains me to say this,” he testified. “Congress … has hijacked the Federal Buildings Fund for the last 15 years, taking approximately $1 billion annually for non-GSA programs.”

Congress created the fund in the 1970s so GSA could operate more like a private property owner by charging rent to agencies and retaining building sale proceeds, but since 2011, it’s been required to get lawmakers’ approval to use the money for repairs. 

The agency says it faces a $50 billion repair backlog that gets worse each year. 

“Deterioration is not an accident — it is an outcome of policy,” Forst said in the letter. “Routine maintenance becomes delinquent. Manageable repairs escalate into multimillion‑dollar failures. Temporary fixes multiply.”

Conditions have deteriorated so much that the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts in July threw its support behind a bill that would hand it authority from GSA to manage a portion of federal courthouses itself.

“The Judiciary can do a better job operating and maintaining its property,” said Judge Robert Conrad Jr., director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. 

GSA opposes the change. “The Judiciary’s core mission is to deliver justice — not to manage buildings,” Forst said in August. 

Forst has been asking Congress since March to change the repair cap from $3.96 million to $75 million. Raising the threshold, he said in his letter, would prevent small issues from becoming major capital failures. 

“A responsible homeowner would not wait years to fix a leaking roof while damage continued to mount,” he said. “The Federal Government should apply the same common‑sense standard.”

Congress would still retain oversight if the cap is raised, he said. GSA’s use of the funds without waiting for congressional approval would be limited to certain types of work, including immediate fire and life‑safety deficiencies, critical repairs, security countermeasures, repair or replacement of major building systems, structural and seismic work and hazardous materials abatement.  

Almost two dozen federal agency heads, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, signed a letter in May supporting the proposal to raise the cap. 

“GSA should be able to unlock its potential,” the agency heads said in the letter.

Paul Walden, executive director of the Public Buildings Control Board, which Congress created in 2016 to help GSA consolidate its portfolio of some 1,600 buildings, also agrees with lifting the cap. “It will … save U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars in day-to-day operations and maintenance costs,” he said in a letter to the Washington Times.

So far, the lobbying effort hasn’t had an impact because lawmakers have little interest in issues involving government administration, Dan Mathews, a former GSA official who sits on the Public Buildings Control Board, told the New York Times in June. 

“It doesn’t [rate] that high, and it never will,” said Mathews of lawmakers' interest in the issue. “Government is a terrible owner of real estate.”

The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which oversees GSA program authority, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.