A gymnasium, funded with taxes, is almost unused

Topline: The Consumer Product Safety Commission wasted $3.9 million by “actively rejecting” recommendations to improve cost efficiency at its office buildings, according to an audit from the agency’s inspector general.

Key facts: The CPSC is a small agency that makes sure that store products meet safety standards. It owns three buildings in Maryland: its headquarters, storage facility and testing center. That’s too much space for the agency’s 477 employees, according to the inspector general.

The headquarters has three meeting rooms that can be reserved in advance. From May 2022 to June 2023, the meeting rooms were reserved for a total of 51 hours and were vacant for 4,809 hours. Three other meeting rooms were left “largely untouched” for over three years starting in March 2020.

Those are separate from the headquarters’ 12 conference rooms, which were reserved less than 7% of the time.

The headquarters also has a fitness center that costs $137,344 to lease, but only 44 employees use it at least once a month. Some of them might be using it for the restroom instead of exercising, the inspector general said. The CPSC is allowed to fund its fitness center by charging its own employees, but taxpayers covered the entire bill instead.

The inspector general claims that 28,122 square feet of space in the headquarters is not needed, and recommended the CPSC stop paying its $2.8 million of rent for the space. Each CPSC employee takes up 219 usable square feet, which “greatly exceeds” the standard of 150 square feet per person.

The General Services Administration told the CPSC in 2019 that it should reduce its office space by 25,380 square feet to save $3.9 million on its next lease. The advice was ignored because of “poor internal controls.” Contracting officers are supposed to sign leases for federal buildings, but in 2021 three Directors of Facility Services at the CPSC signed leases totaling $99 million, even though they had no authority to do so, the audit claims.

Background: The CPSC is the latest of several federal agencies that spend too much on their office space.

The government has spent $4.6 billion on furniture since 2021, including Ethan Allen leather recliners and solar-powered picnic tables. Much of that spending was during the pandemic when employees were working remotely. Even after the pandemic, only 6% of employees were working in person every day in 2024.

Search all federal, state and local government salaries and vendor spending with the AI search bot, Benjamin, at OpenTheBooks.com. 

Summary: Government audits are useless if agencies ignore the findings. The CPSC should have reduced its office space in 2019 and saved taxpayers millions of dollars.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com