The Department of Transportation’s headquarters campus in Washington spans two complexes covering 1.8 million square feet across 11-acre of prime DC real estate.
In the private sector, such a trophy office property would fetch north of $1 billion per year in rental income.
Yet for the federal government, two-thirds of the space sits empty according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the federal government’s own internal watchdog.
This is based on real data; the GAO toured the department’s buildings last fall and counted the empty desks.
And this is far from an isolated case. Of the 189 government buildings around the country that were analyzed by the GAO, 168 were underutilized– with occupancy averaging just 37%.
One of the worst offenders is One Aviation Plaza in Queens, which sits at 13% occupancy.
Ironically, Congress actually set a MINIMUM standard for all government buildings to be at least 60% occupied. This is the law of the land in the United States, set by the 2023 USE IT Act.
So, Congress was surprisingly trying to make things more efficient and save taxpayer money– potentially billions each year. They passed a law. But the government doesn’t follow it.
The big consequence for the government violating its own law so far has been this GAO report. Nobody was fined, nobody was fired, and nothing was sold. Basically we got a PDF.
And all of that is just one category of waste at just one department. The bigger losses are to outright fraud.
In June, the Justice Department announced a record-setting healthcare fraud takedown: 455 defendants, the most ever charged in a single healthcare fraud operation, including 90 doctors and licensed medical professionals, all accused in schemes involving $6.5 billion in fraudulent claims.
Yet federal agents only managed to seize $182 million in cash and assets. No word on what happened to the other $6.3 billion.
By the government’s own accounting, federal agencies made close to $200 billion in improper payments in fiscal year 2025 alone… $24 billion more than the year before.
That’s money which should never have gone out the door, went out in the wrong amount, or can’t be documented. And that was only across 64 programs at 15 agencies… a small fraction of the government’s total footprint.
This keeps happening for a simple reason: the federal government’s ~$7 trillion annual budget is too vast for anyone to keep track of… and no one is ever held accountable.
Bureaucrats who waste the money never get fired; in fact it is damn near impossible to fire a federal employee. And voters continue electing the same incompetent, crooked politicians to public office.
Even when there’s public outcry over obvious fraud, the legacy media closes ranks around their party and insists that voters are racist for criticizing “Learning Centers”.
None of this is free. The empty buildings, the stolen billions, the money nobody can track: it all gets paid for with borrowed money. And that deficit spending is what fuels inflation.
June’s Consumer Price Index came in at 3.5%. By the Fed’s own admission, inflation has now missed its 2% target for five years running.
And after all that failure, few in Washington will name the cause.
A lot of people blame oil, especially after the war with Iran sent crude above $126 a barrel. But oil has been all over the board for the last five years; it was under $60 a barrel just last fall. So why wasn’t inflation falling when oil was cheap?