The Transportation Department Built Headquarters for 6,894 People. Only 2,844 Show Up. GAO Says Fixing That Saves $370 Million a Year.
The Government Accountability Office spent months walking through 189 Department of Transportation office buildings. What it found, published July 15, 2026 as GAO-26-108089 at the request of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), is a department still paying for space sized for a workforce that mostly stopped showing up years ago. Eighty-nine percent of DOT’s buildings — 168 of 189 — fall below the government’s own 60% utilization benchmark. DOT’s own headquarters, the East and West towers in Washington, has room for 6,894 people. As of January 2026, 2,844 were actually assigned there — 34% full.
GAO puts a number on what that emptiness costs: $370 million a year in avoidable rent, operations, and maintenance across the underutilized buildings — the “hundreds of millions of dollars” in the report’s own title. The single biggest piece is a plan already underway: moving the Federal Aviation Administration’s headquarters staff into DOT’s building and vacating the FAA’s own complex, which GAO says would let DOT avoid $56 million a year in rent and operations, plus an estimated $131 million in deferred maintenance GSA could skip if it successfully unloads the vacated FAA towers.
None of that consolidation is free, and GAO is careful to separate the two ledgers: DOT has requested $60 million in its FY2027 budget for the move, estimates the total job at $91 million, and has already spent $12 million of it — all one-time costs, distinct from the $370 million-a-year figure. And as of June 2026, DOT still doesn’t know where roughly 950 FAA headquarters employees are going to sit.
- 34% — utilization at DOT headquarters as of January 2026 — 2,844 of 6,894 assigned seats filled, per GSA's March 2026 building data cited in GAO-26-108089
- 89% — of DOT's 189 office buildings (168 of them) fall below the federal government's 60% space-utilization benchmark — GAO-26-108089
- $370 million — in annual rent, operations, and maintenance GAO says DOT could save each year by further consolidating its underutilized office space
- $56 million — in annual rent and operations DOT could avoid by vacating FAA headquarters entirely and moving those staff into DOT's building — GAO estimate
- 950 — FAA headquarters employees for whom DOT has, as of June 2026, no finished relocation plan — including no resolution for classified space or the FAA's airspace-monitoring control room
GAO’s auditors examined 189 DOT-controlled office buildings — 147 leased, 42 owned, spread across nine component agencies and more than five million usable square feet in total. The department’s own headquarters, split between the East and West towers, is the largest single piece: 1,034,096 usable square feet with capacity for 6,894 people. GSA’s March 2026 building-level data shows the West tower at 40.08% utilization and the East tower at 15.69% — a blended 34% for a building that cost the government space to house nearly 7,000 workers.
The FAA’s own headquarters, the Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright buildings, tells nearly the identical story: 794,761 usable square feet, capacity for 5,298 people, only 3,309 assigned — including staff from four other FAA offices around the D.C. area — for 33% utilization. GSA’s data breaks it down further: the Orville Wright building at 28.98%, Wilbur Wright at just 16.23%. Two of the department’s most important buildings in the country are running at roughly a third full.
Headquarters isn’t the only place taxpayers are paying full rent for a fraction of the building. GAO’s worst example anywhere in the portfolio is One Aviation Plaza in Springfield Gardens, New York — $15.4 million a year in rent for a building running at just 13% utilization. The FAA’s northwest regional headquarters in Des Moines, Washington costs $12.3 million a year at 32% utilization; its southwest regional headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas costs $10.5 million at 36%; an FAA building in El Segundo, California costs $9.05 million at 27%. The John A. Volpe Transportation Systems Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts runs about $5.2 million a year at 34%, and a federal building in Anchorage, Alaska costs $4.2 million in rent at 32% utilization.
Add it up across all 168 underutilized buildings and GAO arrives at its headline number: $370 million a year in rent, operations, and maintenance the department could avoid. That figure is a recurring, annual estimate — not to be confused with the separate, one-time cost of actually executing any single consolidation, which for the FAA-into-DOT-headquarters move alone runs to the $91 million DOT has budgeted, financed in part by the $60 million it requested for FY2027 and the $12 million it has already spent getting the physical move started.
DOT isn’t waiting on GAO’s report to act — it announced in August 2025 that it would consolidate D.C.-area FAA staff into DOT headquarters and vacate the FAA headquarters complex entirely by summer 2027, in phases running from September 2025 through mid-2027. By June 2026, the department had reconfigured 70% of one DOT headquarters tower for incoming FAA personnel, largely by shrinking individual workstations from 8-by-10 feet down to 6-by-8 feet — about a 30% space reduction — rather than undertaking structural renovation. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy (R) has said the consolidation would “reduce costs” and improve “responsiveness, accountability and transparency,” while FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford has framed it as enabling “more in-person collaboration” that would “strengthen our safety culture.”
The union representing FAA employees raised the alarm early. Dan Ronneberg, president of AFSCME Local 1653, said in August 2025 that DOT headquarters was “mostly full already,” that as many as 5,000 employees could be affected, that the union had received no advance notice, and that the consolidation looked like it could mask a reduction in force. GAO’s own report gives that concern some backing: as of June 2026, DOT still has no definitive relocation plan for the roughly 950 FAA headquarters employees involved, hasn’t resolved where to rehouse specialized secure and classified space or the FAA’s Washington Operations Control Room — its airspace-monitoring center — and has no finished cost-benefit estimate for the move. GAO warns bluntly that DOT “may be forced to retain an FAA headquarters complex that is neither well-utilized nor vacant enough to dispose of.”
“DOT may be forced to retain an FAA headquarters complex that is neither well-utilized nor vacant enough to dispose of.”
GAO-26-108089 · July 15, 2026
GAO traces the root cause to its own earlier work, GAO-24-107006, which found pandemic-era telework left federal buildings sized for a workforce that stopped showing up. A January 22, 2025 presidential memorandum (90 Fed. Reg. 8,251) ordered agencies back to full-time in-person work, and DOT complied — yet headquarters still runs at 34%, because 2025 workforce reductions, including deferred resignations, reductions in force, and a hiring freeze, shrank DOT’s actual headcount even as the building’s footprint stayed put. Compounding it, DOT’s own space policy, DOT 4330.A (April 2024), guarantees a dedicated desk to anyone in-office six or more days per pay period — a threshold the return-to-office mandate now pushes nearly everyone past, blocking the desk-sharing “hoteling” model GSA and outside architects recommend. A prior consolidation study by the design firm Gensler, from October 2024, is now stale for the same reason: it excluded more than 2,000 remote workers back when telework was still standard policy.
DOT concurred with both GAO recommendations — finish a detailed FAA-headquarters relocation plan, and build a department-wide consolidation plan using space-maximizing strategies like desk-reservation systems. GSA, the agency that actually manages federal real property, did not comment on the draft report at all. That silence lands inside a broader climate of federal real-estate cutting: under Administrator Edward Forst, GSA has sold more than 125 properties totaling 6.5 million square feet for $614 million, and separately terminated 260 leases for roughly $112 million in savings, per Federal News Network. Neither total is directly tied to this report — they’re the backdrop DOT’s empty towers sit inside, not a consequence of GAO’s findings. Sen. Ernst, one of the report’s two requesters, runs a “Make ’Em Squeal with DOGE” oversight campaign and a Senate DOGE Caucus tip line — relevant context for why a DOGE-aligned senator co-requested this audit, though no DOGE statement on this specific report has surfaced. Beyond the FAA move, DOT told GAO as of March 2026 it has no plans to consolidate any other underutilized building.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) — Chairman, Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee; co-requested the GAO report.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) — co-requested the report; runs Senate oversight efforts branded around DOGE.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy (R) — says the consolidation will reduce costs and improve accountability.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford — says the move enables more in-person collaboration and a stronger safety culture.
GSA Administrator Edward Forst — oversees the broader federal property-disposal push; GSA did not comment on GAO's draft report.
Dan Ronneberg — President, AFSCME Local 1653, representing FAA employees; has raised concerns about the relocation plan and possible workforce cuts.
Nine of every ten DOT office buildings sit below the government’s own occupancy standard, and the department’s own headquarters is barely a third full. GAO says fixing that saves $370 million every year. DOT agrees with the recommendations and has already started shrinking desks to fit FAA staff into its towers — but a year into the plan, it still doesn’t know where roughly 950 FAA employees and their most sensitive workspaces will actually go, and GSA, the agency that runs federal real estate, wouldn’t even comment on the draft. The savings are real on paper. Whether Washington collects them depends on finishing a relocation plan it hasn’t written yet.
