The General Services Administration is asking Congress to give it as much budget authority as it brings in through rents and building sales so it can close the maintenance and repair gap that’s threatening the safety of people occupying federal buildings.
“GSA’s federally owned buildings are now, on average, over 50 years old, and many of the buildings have not undergone any significant modernizations since they were constructed,” the agency says in its fiscal year 2027 budget request, released earlier this month.
The agency says it’s facing some $26 billion in cumulative backlogged building repairs, creating life-safety risks to building occupants.
“Backlogged repairs and alterations in federally owned facilities [are exacerbating] the risk of critical system failures [and] the safety and well-being of occupant agencies,” the agency says.
The agency operates a federal buildings fund that generates billions of dollars each year in income from the rents that federal agencies pay to occupy federally owned buildings and from the proceeds it generates in building sales. The fund was established in the early 1970s to enable GSA to operate more like a private business by using its own income to maintain and upgrade buildings, but since 2011 Congress hasn’t authorized it to use the full amount to meet building needs.
“Without access to the full rental income and proceeds from property sales, GSA cannot adequately maintain its facilities to standards comparable to private sector landlords, address critical deferred maintenance backlogs, or strategically modernize federal workspaces,” the agency says.
The fund generated almost $15 billion in fiscal 2025 but Congress has been diverting billions of dollars to offset funding gaps in other agencies. “This represents a trend in which GSA is collecting commercially equivalent rent from its occupant agencies but is precluded from reinvesting all of these funds in providing quality space and services to those rent-paying agencies,” the agency says in its budget request from last year. “Instead [the funds] were used to offset increases for other agencies.”
For fiscal 2027, the agency is asking for $1.2 billion in appropriations over and above what it can use from the buildings fund to undertake maintenance and repairs, up from roughly $620 million that it’s been receiving in recent years.
“To prevent the deferred maintenance backlog from growing, GSA conservatively needs annual appropriations to exceed $1.2 billion, significantly more than the current average of $620 million,” it says.
The work it needs to do includes “major repairs to malfunctioning elevators, replacement of obsolete electrical systems, updates to outdated fire alarm systems, seismic retrofits, and environmental abatement,” the agency says.
It’s also asking for authority to tap into all of the revenue it collects in the fund.
“The FY 2027 Budget includes a proposal to facilitate GSA’s full access to annual revenues and collections” from the federal buildings fund, it says.
GSA’s budget proposal starts its fiscal 2027 funding process by letting Congress know what its priorities are. Lawmakers will hammer out actual appropriations in bills for passage in the House and Senate. The current fiscal year ends Sept. 30.
