Perhaps you should sit down for this.
A new report found federal agencies spent $4.63 billion on furniture in the Covid years to furnish the mostly empty offices of overpriced federal government buildings.
The new expenditure check by government tracker Open the Books (OTB) shows a host of absolutely insane purchases on the taxpayer’s dime — from $182,000 on plexiglass panels for IRS offices as part of a scientifically stupid Covid mitigation plan, to $237,000 for solar-powered picnic tables with charging stations at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Remember, the CDC was the same government agency whose absurd social-distancing guidance urged Americans to stay at least six feet apart at all times. Gee, Yogi, it’s hard to social distance around a picnic table.
All of this wasteful spending was going on, as the OTB report notes, during the height of Covid and the prolonged remote-working policies for federal workers when occupancy rates at government buildings in Washington, D.C. were between approximately 2 percent and 26 percent capacity, according to a 2024 report to Congress by the Public Buildings Reform Board. The study noted the properties’ average occupancy rate in 2023 — when U.S. health agencies declared the end of Covid — was an obscene 12 percent.
Federal workers are now having to do what has been the unthinkable under President Joe Biden: show up to work. One of Trump’s first orders of business was to tell bureaucrats to stop clocking in remotely and head back to their “respective duty stations on a full-time basis.”
OTB’s findings are part of a growing body of work exposing inexcusable waste in the federal government, including billions of dollars every year to maintain and operate tens of thousands of federally-owned properties, too many of them underused or mostly empty.
“Today’s expansive, excessive and sometimes opulent federal real estate portfolio is both a monument to the administrative state and a mausoleum of lost dreams, opportunity and freedom for American taxpayers,” said Open the Books CEO John Hart during his opening statements Tuesday before a Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) subcommittee hearing titled, “Federal Foreclosure: Reducing the Federal Real Estate Portfolio.” The subcommittee is an arm of the House’s Government Oversight Committee.
The Trump administration has made a good start in reducing the federal footprint, but government fat cutters say there’s much more work to do.
You Paid for This
As the radical left holds made-for-accomplice-media protests demanding the Trump administration keep its “Hands Off!” bloated federal agencies, the latest records reckoning shows the same agencies getting quite handsy with taxpayer money. And it appears they’ve had expensive tastes in furniture and decor as part of their spending bender.
Between fiscal year 2021 and 2025, executive agencies spent more than $4.6 billion on furniture alone, Hart told the committee. To put the number in perspective, the massive expenditures could buy 9.2 million American families a modest $500 kitchen table, he said.
“It’s true that beautiful spaces can make us more productive. But beauty at what cost and on whose dime?” Hart asked. “Do federal employees need seven figures-worth of abstract modern art to make government run?”
Good questions. Apparently, unelected bureaucrats — and many members of congress who have approved a smorgasbord of debt-busting spending bills since the start of Covid — think so.
The OTB report notes some eye-popping numbers over the previous four years:
› $700,000 for one regional conference room at the Securities and Exchange Commission building in New York.
› $284,000 for high-end, modern Herman Miller furniture in a Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters conference room. Yes, the same FEMA that has misspent billions of dollars in response to natural disasters has surrounded itself in stylish — and expensive — comfort.
› $39,000 for conference tables in the old Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in San Francisco, despite the fact that employees were directed to work remotely in 2023 amid rising high crime rates around the government property.
Some federal agencies spent lavishly on decor for their high-priced office spaces, according to OTB.
› The State Department purchased $1.4 million of artwork and drawings for its embassies, including $200,000 for two oil paintings by modern abstract artist Alfred Jansen.
› $120,000 for Ethan Allen leather recliners for the State Department embassy in Islamabad.
› And $4 million for furniture and cubicles for serial tax dollar abuser USAID’s operations in West Africa, Mozambique, and Ukraine.
“The Embassy in Islamabad is a place where you can put your feet up thanks to 40 Ethan Allen chairs, which cost taxpayers $120,000,” Hart told the subcommittee.
‘Expensive by Most Taxpayers’ Standards’
The Department of Defense was by far the biggest spender on furniture and decorating, handing the taxpayer a $1.63 billion bill over the period, followed by the Department of Veterans Affairs ($590 million). While Biden’s Department of Justice made going after the left’s political enemies a top priority, it made time to scratch its interior decorating itch, shelling out $555 million, while the State Department dropped more than $508 million for fresh furniture and accessories.
Krueger International, a Green Bay, Wisconsin-based institutional furniture supplier, was the top federal government contractor over the period, raking in $364 million, according to OTB.
“Expensive by most taxpayers’ standards, Ethan Allen was second with $251.6M [million]” the report states. “Herman Miller’s corporate parent was sixth with $119.8M; similar high-end modern furniture purveyor Price Modern booked $110.8M in federal government business,” the report notes.
Federal agencies made the brunt of the furniture and decor purchases — about $3.3 billion — during the peak years of Covid, from 2020 to 2022, even as work migrated to Zoom, according to the review. A 2023 Government Accountability Office study found that 39 federal buildings, housing 17 of 24 agencies, used an average of 25 percent or less of their building’s capacity.
Property Problem
Everybody seems to agree, at least at some level, that the federal government has a property problem. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who chairs the DOGE subcommittee, said taxpayers spend about $10 billion annually just to operate and maintain the portfolio of real estate under the federal government’s control. More so, between 2022 and 2024, maintenance on the aging buildings the government owns grew by more than $150 billion, to $370 billion, the Georgia Republican said.
“What’s worse, aside from paying for useless leases and allowing federal buildings to decay, the Biden administration spent billions on high-end furniture for empty buildings during the pandemic,” Greene said Tuesday during her opening statements.
The subcommittee’s ranking member, Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., boasted of $2 billion in “savings” that the Biden administration captured through the disposition of federal properties, even as it was spending billions of dollars more in furniture for mostly empty federal buildings. Stansbury said she’d like to see Congress work on the property problem in a bipartisan fashion, and then referred to the Democratic Party’s talking points in ripping President Trump for acting to take hefty leases and operation costs off the taxpayers’ hands.
“The Trump administration is taking a fire sale approach of looting the federal government and stripping it for parts to pay for tax cuts that we know will come up in their reconciliation bill,” she said.
The General Services Administration, the federal government’s property manager, has been moving to sell off several federal properties and to eliminate unnecessary office leases, according to the Trump administration. At Tuesday’s hearing, Greene said to date, GSA has canceled nearly 700 leases, saving taxpayers some $400 million.
“One of the canceled leases was a nearly $250 million, 15-year lease at a luxury office building on Pennsylvania Avenue to house Voice of America and the United States Agency for Global Media,” the chairwoman said. “The Biden administration signed the lease late last year, sticking taxpayers with the tab. It’s one of the fanciest office buildings in the city. It had zero broadcasting capabilities.”
‘Pandemic Shined a Light’
David Marroni, director with the Government Accountability Office’s Physical Infrastructure Team, told subcommittee members that the federal government has held on to too much space and has been slow in shedding underused property, federal buildings often in poor condition and not configured for the modern workplace.
“The pandemic shined a light on these long-standing problems and created a unique opportunity to right-size the government’s property holdings,” Marroni said. He added that “there is a risk of moving too fast.” The trick is to “balance the goal of speedy reductions with deliberate plannings.”
D.C.-area landlords, builders, and financiers would like to see a more deliberative process. They have a lot to lose in the right-size movement.
“Disposal is not the enemy, it is how it is done. It must be done carefully with deliberate study,” Ron Kendall, executive chairman emeritus of the National Federal Development Association, told the subcommittee.
Like all things in D.C., there’s been a lot of talk for decades and relatively little action on the property portfolio problem. Trump is changing that, Greene said.
“This administration is taking historic action on reducing the size of government and with it, a significant reduction in the useless office space that is claimed to be ‘essential’ for the government to operate,” the subcommittee chairwoman said.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
