National Labor Relations Board Plans To Cut D.C. Office Footprint By 40%
The National Labor Relations Board is planning to decrease the footprint of its D.C. office by at least 40% when its lease expires in June 2025, according to a government solicitation notice.
The NLRB occupies 153K SF at 1015 Half St. SE in the Navy Yard neighborhood. The solicitation posted last week requests a space between 79,701 SF and 92,199 SF. It notes the General Services Administration intends to renew in place, but that it would consider alternative locations if "economically advantageous."
The notice doesn't state that the lease is for the NLRB, but the prospectus number in the notice is the same as one the GSA submitted to Congress in October for the agency. The prospectus had envisioned a smaller reduction for the agency to 125K SF, but it now appears to have decided it needs even less space with the new request.
The GSA didn't respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
The 1015 Half St. SE building is owned by Hines, which purchased the 396K SF property from PGIM Real Estate in May 2021 for $216M.
The NLRB moved to the building in 2015, relocating from Franklin Court downtown, where it had been since the early 1990s, the Washington Business Journal reported. The move constituted a more than 100K SF consolidation. The agency has 32 other regional offices nationwide.
Over the past decade, the GSA has undertaken multiple initiatives to cut federal office space, including “Freeze the Footprint” in 2013 and “Reduce the Footprint” in 2015, which required federal executive branch departments and agencies to set yearly targets to reduce office and warehouse space.
The years since the start of the pandemic only exacerbated the need for the federal government to shed space with the shift to remote work. In June 2021, the Biden administration directed federal agencies to draft long-term policies for their remote work strategies, and instructed them to provide maximum flexibility.
And as over half of federal leases are set to expire in the next five years, lawmakers and government accountability officials say there is a near-term chance to reassess and reduce space. A study released by the Government Accountability Office last week found that on average, just a quarter of the space in federal office buildings is used on a daily basis.
A GAO report in September found that 17 out of 24 agencies it surveyed reported that the pandemic resulted in “limited” reductions to office space. Federal agencies at that time had reduced their number of leases by 5% and their square footage by 4%, according to the report.
From July 2011 to March 2022, federal inventory was reduced by 1,165 leases and nearly 14M SF, according to the September report.
The Department of Justice is set to reduce its footprint in a NoMa office building by about 150K SF with a new lease in 2025. The agency reduced its Penn Quarter footprint by 30% in 2022 after it relocated in the area. Last year, the Patent and Trademark Office reduced its footprint by 800K SF at its Alexandria headquarters.
