The federal government’s civilian real-property holdings include thousands of leased office buildings and warehouses across the country that cost billions of dollars annually to rent, operate, and maintain. As the federal government’s principal landlord, GSA acquires, manages, and disposes of real property on behalf of many civilian federal tenants. In this role, GSA is responsible for executing, renewing, and terminating contracts for leased properties. As of fiscal year 2014, GSA leased 6,444 office and 415 warehouse spaces (totaling 187.6-million rentable square feet) from the private sector. However, there are some federal entities that have independent statutory leasing authority, which refers to the authority to lease space independently of GSA. Congress provides this authority in law through a federal entity’s enabling legislation or through annual appropriations acts. Figure 1 illustrates examples of the types of spaces that federal entities lease directly from private owners. Within the executive branch, the OMB and GSA provide leadership for the management of federal real property. As the chief management office for the executive branch, OMB is responsible for oversight of how agencies devise, implement, manage, and evaluate programs and policies. For real property management, OMB develops and provides direction to executive branch agencies and is responsible for reviewing their progress. GSA has two key leadership responsibilities related to real property management for the federal government. First, GSA’s Public Buildings Service functions as the federal government’s landlord, as described above. Second, GSA’s Office of Government-wide Policy is tasked, among other things, to identify, evaluate, and promote best practices to improve the efficiency of management processes. To promote the efficient and economical use of federal government real property, in 2004 the President issued Executive Order 13327 establishing the Federal Real Property Council (FRPC) composed of senior management officials from specified executive branch departments and agencies covered by the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 (CFO Act), including GSA, and chaired by OMB. The executive order established FRPC with the goals of developing guidance, facilitating the implementation of agencies’ asset-management plans, and serving as a clearinghouse for leading practices. The executive order also directed GSA, in consultation with the FRPC, to establish and maintain a single, comprehensive database describing the nature, use, and extent of all real property under the custody and control of executive branch agencies. To meet this directive, GSA’s Office of Government-wide Policy established the Federal Real Property Profile (FRPP) to be a government-wide real property inventory database. It also provided guidance to the FRPC member agencies about how to annually report data on real property under their custody and control for inclusion in the FRPP. Since the formation of the FRPP, only the FRPC member agencies have been required to annually submit their real property information to the database. According to GSA officials and OMB staff, other unspecified federal entities may voluntarily submit data to the FRPP. In recent years, OMB has also undertaken several initiatives and issued guidance to federal entities to improve federal real-property management, specifically targeting offices and warehouses. In May 2012, OMB issued a memorandum directing FRPC member agencies not to increase the size of their civilian real-estate inventory, stating that any increases in an agency’s total square footage of civilian real property must be offset through consolidation, co-location, or disposal of space from the inventory of that agency. In March 2013, OMB issued another memorandum establishing implementation procedures for this policy, called Freeze the Footprint. This memorandum clarified that agencies were not to increase the total square footage of their domestic office and warehouse inventory compared to a fiscal year 2012 FRPP baseline. Most recently, in March 2015, OMB issued its National Strategy for the Efficient Use of Real Property (National Strategy). The National Strategy employs a three-step policy framework to improve the cost effectiveness and efficiency of the federal real property portfolio: (1) freeze growth in the portfolio; (2) measure the cost and utilization of real property assets to provide performance information and support more efficient use; and (3) reduce the size of the portfolio through asset consolidation, co-location, and disposal. To assist with the third step, OMB issued the Reduce the Footprint policy that requires agencies to develop a Real Property Efficiency Plan, which among other things, describes an agency’s overall approach to managing real property and establishes reduction targets for office and warehouse space, disposal of owned buildings, and the adoption of design standards to optimize owned and leased domestic office space usage. Only FRPC members are required to participate in these government-wide real property reform efforts. As a result of these efforts, we acknowledged in the February 2015 update to our High-Risk Series that the federal government has demonstrated a high level of leadership commitment to improving real- property data to support decision making, and has made some progress in increasing its capacity to improve data reliability. In our previous assessment of the FRPP, we found that FRPP’s data can be used in a general sense to track assets to provide an overall perspective on FRPC members’ real property portfolios. However, we raised concerns about the quality of the FRPP data specifically for some of the key variables, including utilization, condition, and annual operating costs. As such, we recommended that GSA develop and implement a plan to improve the FRPP, so that the data collected are sufficiently complete, accurate, and consistent. Most recently, we found that certain key FRPP data elements, such as utilization and status, continue to be inconsistently collected and reported by agencies. We recommended that GSA make transparent through its FRPP documents how its mission to provide space to federal agencies affects the reporting of the utilization and status data elements in the FRPP. GSA has taken steps to improve the reliability of FRPP data, but those efforts are ongoing. According to GSA officials and OMB staff, neither GSA nor OMB maintains a comprehensive list of federal government entities with independent leasing authority and neither is required to do so. GSA prepared a partial list of 33 federal entities with independent leasing authority for its own purposes in 2009, but this list, according to GSA, was not intended to be a complete list of all entities. FRPP offers a possible way for determining which federal entities have independent leasing authority as it has a data field that indicates if a federal entity uses its own authority to lease real property. However, this information is incomplete as only agencies covered by the CFO Act, which are FRPC members, are required to annually submit their real property information to the FRPP. Federal entities outside FRPC membership can voluntarily submit real property data annually to FRPP, according to GSA officials and OMB staff, but few do. We found that three non-FRPC member entities reported to the FRPP in fiscal year 2014 that they independently leased office and warehouse spaces. Other non- FRPC member entities have submitted data to the FRPP inconsistently. For example, the U.S. Postal Service had previously chosen to submit some data to FRPP, but no longer does. The population of federal entities with independent leasing authority can vary over time. As such, any list that is not regularly updated may not be comprehensive because it captures a snapshot in time. Some changes that may have taken place are, for example, federal entities that may have acquired leasing authority since the list was initially compiled. Also, individual leasing authority is specific to each federal entity and may change over time. For example, legislation may be enacted to create a new federal entity or change the nature of an existing entity’s leasing authority—laws may place conditions on the leasing authority, such as specifying the location, type of space, or terms under which the entities can exercise this authority. A federal entity’s leasing authority can range from an agency-wide, general authority to acquire real property (e.g., U.S. Postal Service, Tennessee Valley Authority), to authority given to specific components of a department or an agency (e.g., FAA within the Department of Transportation), or for types of property (e.g., Commodity Credit Corporation within the Department of Agriculture has leasing authority for office space and storage space), or for a specific time frame. To obtain more complete and reliable information on federal entities with leasing authority, we administered a survey to 103 civilian executive branch agencies and other federal entities that met our selection criteria. Sixty of the entities self-identified as having independent authority to lease real property of which 52 reported having the authority to lease domestic office or warehouse space. Of these, 37 federal entities reported that they are using their authority to lease 944 offices (approximately 16.6-million rentable square feet of space and an annual rent of $556 million) and 164 warehouses (approximately 3.3-million rentable square feet of space and an annual rent of $39.8 million) as of October 1, 2015. The FAA alone leases 341 offices and 70 warehouses, which accounts for 36 percent and 43 percent of the total number of independently leased offices and warehouses. The remaining 36 entities use their authority to lease up to 91 offices and 36 warehouses. See table 6 and table 7 in appendix II for a full listing of the 52 federal entities that reported having independent leasing authority to lease office and warehouse space, legal citations for their authority, and summary statistics about the offices and warehouses they leased. Of the 37 federal entities that reported using their leasing authority to lease office or warehouse space, 18 also reported using GSA to lease a portion of their space. There are a variety of reasons why federal entities use GSA to lease on their behalf in certain circumstances and use their independent leasing authority in other situations. For example, NASA officials told us NASA is legally required to use GSA to lease office and warehouse space inside the National Capital Region, but may choose to use its own authority elsewhere.