The General Services Administration has told Congress that the rule meant to control its spending is what’s making its buildings expensive. GSA Administrator Edward Forst asked congressional leaders for $10 billion to make critical repairs to 103 buildings across fiscal years 2028 through 2034, and for the repair approval threshold to rise from $3.96 million to $75 million.
The number is the wait
GSA funds repairs out of lease and sale proceeds through the Federal Buildings Fund, which Congress created in the 1970s so the agency could behave like a private property owner. Since 2011 it has needed congressional sign-off for any repair above $3.96 million. Forst says approvals now average 426 days, some requests have been pending more than ten years, and the delay increases costs by as much as 436 percent.
Anyone who has priced deferred repair work knows the mechanism without needing the percentage. A roof that needed replacing becomes a roof plus water damage plus mold abatement plus a tenant relocation. A failed chiller becomes an emergency procurement at whatever the market will charge. GSA puts the resulting backlog at $50 billion, growing annually.
What the agency would and wouldn’t be allowed to do
If the cap moved to $75 million, GSA says unilateral spending would be limited to 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. That’s a narrower list than the cap increase implies, and it’s the part of the ask that makes it defensible.
Forst has been making this request since March 2026. Nearly two dozen federal agency heads signed a letter supporting it in May. Paul Walden, executive director of the Public Buildings Control Board that Congress created in 2016 to help consolidate GSA’s roughly 1,600-building portfolio, supports lifting the cap. Forst has separately testified that Congress “has hijacked the Federal Buildings Fund for the last 15 years,” taking about $1 billion a year for non-GSA programs.
Read all of it as agency self-reporting
The 436 percent, the 426-day average, the $50 billion backlog, the 103-building count and the $1 billion annual diversion are GSA’s own numbers from Forst’s letter and prior testimony. None have been verified by GAO or an inspector general. The 436 percent is framed as “as much as,” which is a maximum case and not an average. And the $75 million cap and the $10 billion are requests. Nothing has passed.
The competitive pressure is real, though. In July the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts backed a bill to take over management of a portion of federal courthouses, with Judge Robert Conrad Jr. saying the judiciary can do a better job operating and maintaining its property. GSA opposes it. Dan Mathews, a former GSA official now on the Public Buildings Control Board, told the New York Times in June that the lobbying hasn’t moved because lawmakers have little appetite for government administration.
What a decade of that produces is visible in the federal portfolio: buildings like the Tomochichi Federal Building in Savannah that need work priced years before the work is authorized. Paris is running the same problem at the Musee d’Orsay, forty years on from opening, with a leaking forecourt and a listed canopy. Institutional owners everywhere defer the same way. The difference is whether anybody has to ask permission first.