If you had a meeting room but nobody knew about it, is it really a meeting room?
For the federal government, that’s more than an existential riddle.
Agencies are sitting on dozens of meeting spaces across the country that they are willing to share with other agencies — but the others don’t know about it, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s chief watchdog.
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GAO said the General Services Administration, which acts as the chief landlord for the federal bureaucracy, maintains a list of more than 130 meeting spaces — everything from conference centers to training facilities to meeting rooms — that are available across the country.
But GAO investigators deployed to four cities, interviewed 18 agencies, and only one even knew about the list.
“Officials from most of the tenant agencies within selected buildings were not aware of GSA’s federal meeting spaces list, according to our interviews,” the GAO said.
The space crunch isn’t as much of an issue in Washington, where agencies tend to have their own buildings to themselves.
But in other cities, multiple agencies usually share space in a single federal building and shared meeting rooms could help keep down costs and lead to higher occupancy and use rates.
The Trump administration has been on a push to right-size the government’s footprint, bringing telework employees back to fill ghost-town buildings and urging consolidations and sales to dump properties that aren’t useful anymore.
GAO said there could be value to sharing fitness centers or cafeterias, too, but those sorts of spaces were largely victims of the pandemic.
Cafeterias have been replaced with grab-and-go markets or outside food trucks, while fitness centers have been shuttered or taken over by a single agency.
GSA has strategies for converting those facilities to office space, but told investigators it’s costly and there doesn’t appear to be much demand right now.
GSA has maintained its shared spaces list for more than a decade, and makes it publicly available on its website. Regular emails prod other agencies to update information on sharable spaces to keep the list current.
But the landlord agency said there’s been so much upheaval in the federal workforce since the start of 2025 that many of their email contacts are out of date.
And agencies themselves told GAO that personnel cuts have pushed out some of the support staff that would have been responsible for identifying and sharing space. So they don’t end up offering space as much as they used to.
Plus, the push to consolidate space has actually meant some previous shared meeting rooms are no longer available.
GAO investigators also found other hurdles to sharing space.
Some agencies reported worrying about security and how to let people from another agency into their space.
Even just getting onto a sister agency’s Wi-Fi setup can be difficult.
Firewalls and different technology profiles were also listed as hurdles. And some agencies told GAO that meeting rooms tend to have outdated technology.
GSA said they are reluctant to upgrade the rooms unless they know they are getting more use.
Ironically, some of the agencies who didn’t know about the list suggested to investigators that something like it would be helpful.
“Officials we interviewed from most agencies in selected buildings said a list of available federal meeting spaces could help them reduce costs or identify shareable meeting space. They told us they were not aware of GSA’s federal meeting spaces list,” the GAO said.
The audit recommended that GSA make an effort to add more spaces to its list, and do more to make agencies aware that the list exists.
GSA Administrator Edward Forst agreed with those recommendations.
The agency told GAO it already had some success over the last year in reconnecting with agencies, several of which offered up shared spaces for the master list.
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