WASHINGTON — The federal government has forked over $4.6 billion for new furniture since October 2020, a taxpayer watchdog group’s president told a House panel Tuesday, despite just around half of all agency employees showing up for work as of last year.
OpenTheBooks CEO John Hart shared the “high cost” for every agency sprucing up during the bulk of the COVID-19 pandemic and former President Joe Biden’s term during a House Oversight Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee hearing.
“That amount can buy 9.2 million American families a modest $500 kitchen table,” Hart said of the billions of dollars splurged on the “federal real estate portfolio” that was effectively “decorating and redecorating the administrative state.”
“And of course, workplaces need desks, chairs and meeting tables, and it’s true that beautiful spaces can make us more productive, but beauty at what cost and on whose dime?” he added.
The Office of Management and Budget found in May 2024 that “more than half of federal employees were either teleworking regularly or fully remote,” according to figures provided to the Oversight panel earlier this year.
The year before, the Government Accountability Office audited the use of federal workspaces and discovered 17 of the 24 federal agencies surveyed used only 25% or less of their headquarters’ buildings.
President Trump later issued a return-to-work order for all federal employees after returning to the White House — that was struck down by the US Supreme Court on Tuesday.
According to OpenTheBooks figures shared with The Post, the US government doled out $4 million for furniture and cubicles in US Agency for International Development (USAID) offices in Ukraine, West Africa and Mozambique — the last of which filled spaces with $250,000 worth of Herman Miller chairs.
The State Department also spent $1.4 million on art and drawings to fill the walls of its embassies worldwide — including $200,000 for just two paintings by the modern abstract painter Alfred Jensen, Hart also noted in his opening remarks.
“Our embassy in Islamabad is a place where you can put your feet up thanks to 40 Ethan Allen chairs, which cost taxpayers $120,000,” he said of the US office space in Pakistan.
The Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in San Francisco also got $39,000 for new conference tables — despite workers having been instructed to work from home in August 2023, OpenTheBooks auditors noted.
“All in all, we have an incomprehensible amount of physical space and furnishings — too much of it inefficiently procured, leased and maintained,” Hart concluded.
OpenTheBooks had issued a report in October 2023 giving a first look at many of the other spending items, including:
- $14.4 million for the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to get new furniture, averaging $14,400 per employee, with 1,000 working for the agency
- $6.5 million for the Environmental Protection Agency to buy trendy furniture, while it downsized to move into a 300,000-square-foot office space at Four Penn Central in Philadelphia
- $284,000 at the Federal Emergency Management Agency for conference rooms
- $237,960 for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to purchase roughly 30 solar-powered picnic tables
- $213,828 at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for conference rooms
- Roughly $182,000 on plexiglass panels at the IRS offices, a COVID mitigation method that the NIH couldn’t find evidence for being highly effective
The highest-spending departments included Defense ($1.63 billion), Veterans Affairs ($590.4 million), Justice ($555.5 million), State ($508.5 million) and the General Services Administration ($552.8 million), where the hearing was held.
The top contractors for the agency’s renovations were Kreuger International ($346 million), Ethan Allen ($251.6 million), Herman Miller ($119.8 million) and the high-end furniture maker Price Modern ($110.8 million).
The House subcommittee, led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), is coordinating with the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which announced in partnership with the GSA last month it would be terminating nearly 800 federal leases to save $500 million in taxpayer money.
“Federal agencies shouldn’t be maintaining empires at taxpayers’ expense,” Greene said.
Rep. Melanie Stansbury, the top Democrat on the subcommittee, characterized the misuse of federal office space as “a long-standing issue” and said she hoped to “make this a bipartisan hearing about how we may best address the needs of this country.”
But she lashed out at Musk and congressional Republicans as well for prioritizing the cost-cutting measures in executive agencies to make way for a deficit-busting $4 trillion tax cut package in the coming months.
“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,” Stansbury (D-NM) also said, noting billions of dollars in federal contracts secured by Musk for his various companies.
GAO acting director of physical infrastructure David Marroni and National Federal Development Association executive chairman emeritus Ron Kendall also appeared as witnesses for the Republican majority and Democratic minority, respectively.
“Today’s expansive, excessive and sometimes opulent federal real estate portfolio is both a monument to the federal administrative state and a mausoleum of lost dreams, opportunity and freedom for American taxpayers,” Hart said.
“Every dollar saved in Washington is a dream realized somewhere else in America.”
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