GSA Paid $133M for Building Studies. It Lost Most of Them.
Summary
The General Services Administration commissions studies -- on asbestos, fire risk, blast vulnerability, deferred maintenance -- to decide how to manage the more than 8,500 federal buildings it owns or leases. Its own inspector general checked whether GSA can even find the studies it paid for. Sampling 158 of them, auditors located just 31 in the agency's own tracking system. GSA obligated more than $133 million on these studies over five years and, by its watchdog's own account, does not have complete, accurate, reliable data on what most of that money bought.
A file PBS itself can't produce
Over its five-year audit period ending September 2024, PBS's Office of Portfolio Management alone obligated more than $133 million⧉ on building studies -- more than 1,200 separate requests, by the office's own count. When the asked for a reliable list of what had been bought, PBS could not produce one. Portfolio Management had to reconstruct a list from a spreadsheet the Chief Financial Officer's office periodically assembles and a round of phone calls to regional offices; PBS's other major requester of studies, the Facilities Management office, could not even attempt that -- its Risk Management Division director told the the office does not track its studies because there is "no business need to do so." That is a stated policy for an office spending part of a $133 million-plus budget line on documents the Federal Records Act of 1950⧉ and 's own records-management order⧉ require it to preserve.
View data as table
| Studies in Portfolio Management's sample list | 158 | Drawn from the 10 highest-cost buildings in each of five GSA regions |
|---|---|---|
| Studies GSA could find in its own tracking system (BAT) | 31 | 20% of the sample -- the other 127 could not be located there |
The failure isn't confined to one office, or one region
The 's test was concrete: pull the 10 highest-cost buildings in each of five regions, gather every study on Portfolio Management's list for those 158 studies across 48 buildings, and check whether each one had actually been uploaded into 's Building Assessment Tool (BAT) -- the system PBS's own 2022 policy says is where completed studies belong. Just 31 turned up. Every region undershot: the best-performing region⧉, Northwest & Arctic, still lost 60% of its sample; the worst, Heartland, lost nearly 89%. Where records did exist, they weren't always trustworthy ones -- the study list carried four separate line items for a pipe study at the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building⧉ in Portland, Oregon, each with a different cost and fiscal year, and a PBS program specialist could not tell the auditors whether that was four studies or one study counted four times.
View data as table
| Northwest & Arctic Region | 40% | 8 of 20 sampled studies found in BAT -- the best rate of any region |
|---|---|---|
| National Capital Region | 25% | 7 of 28 sampled studies found in BAT |
| Northeast & Caribbean Region | 18.8% | 6 of 32 sampled studies found in BAT |
| Pacific Rim Region | 14.7% | 5 of 34 sampled studies found in BAT |
| Heartland Region | 11.4% | 5 of 44 sampled studies found in BAT -- the worst rate of any region |
GSA has been here before
PBS is not encountering this problem for the first time. A 2019 GSA OIG audit⧉ found that PBS spent 14 years and more than $1.9 million on at least 33 environmental studies at the Goodfellow Federal Complex in St. Louis, Missouri -- many of them duplicative -- without comprehensively acting on what the studies found or telling the building's occupants what was in the air. Seven years later, the same watchdog's answer to "has PBS fixed its relationship with its own paperwork" is: not systemically.
The 's recommendations this time are narrow -- build a working tracking method, write policies that keep the data honest -- and the PBS Acting Commissioner agreed to both. The stakes for actually doing it are rising: PBS is mid-reorganization⧉ toward a leaner, centralized structure that the itself says will need more reliable operational data, not less, to manage a portfolio funds out of roughly $3.3 billion a year⧉ in building-operations spending.
- PBS obligated more than $133 million over five years on building studies through one office alone, and its own watchdog found the agency does not have complete, accurate, reliable data on what that money bought or what happened after. A sample of the highest-cost buildings turned up 127 of 158 studies -- 80% -- missing from 's own tracking system; the says this sample doesn't project statistically to the full $133 million, but nothing in the audit suggests the untracked share is smaller elsewhere.
- No region cleared even half of its sampled studies logged into the tracking system PBS's own policy requires -- the best region, Northwest & Arctic, still lost 60% of its sample; the worst, Heartland, lost nearly 89%.
- This is not the first time 's watchdog has flagged how PBS manages building studies. A 2019 audit found duplicative environmental studies at a single complex in St. Louis whose hazards went unaddressed; the 2026 finding is broader -- an agency-wide inability to even confirm which studies exist or where they went.
- PBS is heading into a leaner, centralized reorganization with the recordkeeping problem still unresolved. The 's own conclusion: the new structure will need reliable data about PBS's operations more than the old one did, not less -- and the agency does not yet have it.
Figures are drawn from the U.S. General Services Administration Office of Inspector General's audit, Report No. A240084/P/6/R26002, PBS Is Not Effectively Tracking and Monitoring Building Studies (issued March 6, 2026), read in full via direct PDF fetch from gsaig.gov. The report's own landing page on gsaig.gov independently corroborates the report number, issue date, and headline $133 million figure on a separate page. A blind adversarial verifier, working from the primary documents alone with no access to this draft, independently checked every itemized fact; see verification.json.
The five per-region upload-rate percentages, the 127-study/80% gap, and the roughly-30%-of-spending sample-cost share are this outlet's own arithmetic on the source document's own itemized figures (methods and caveats in analysis.json); the 20% national upload figure and the dollar totals are the 's own stated numbers. None of the per-region percentages appear pre-computed in the source document itself.
Sources(2) ▾
- U.S. General Services Administration, Office of Inspector General, PBS Is Not Effectively Tracking and Monitoring Building Studies (Report A240084/P/6/R26002) (2026-03-06) — The 's own performance audit is the sole source for every finding: the $133 million obligated over the 5-year audit period, the 1,200-plus study requests Portfolio Management could not produce a reliable list of, the 158-study/48-building sample and its 20% BAT-upload rate (overall and by region), the $40.4 million sample cost total, the Portland duplicate-study example, the 2019 Goodfellow Federal Complex precedent, the Federal Records Act/ Order 1820.2A recordkeeping requirement, the PBS reorganization context, and the two recommendations with 's concurrence. gsaig.gov · original document
- U.S. General Services Administration, Office of Inspector General, PBS Is Not Effectively Tracking and Monitoring Building Studies (report landing page) (2026-03-06) — The 's own report-landing page independently corroborates the report number, March 6, 2026 issue date, title, and the $133 million headline figure and finding summary stated in the PDF -- confirming the PDF is the same report the itself publishes. gsaig.gov · original document
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The General Services Administration -- the federal government's landlord, owner or lessor of more than 8,500 buildings nationwide -- pays outside consultants to study those buildings before it spends money on them: whether a roof needs replacing, whether a facade could survive a blast, whether the air is safe to breathe. Those studies are supposed to be the evidence base for how 's Public Buildings Service (PBS) decides where taxpayer dollars go. 's own Office of Inspector General⧉ -- the agency's statutory internal watchdog -- set out to check whether that evidence base actually holds together. It picked a sample of studies PBS itself said it had commissioned and tried to find them. Four out of five were not where they were supposed to be.