The decay in America's federal buildings is no longer a line item in an inspector's report. Lately it has a way of crawling across the floor.
A crisis hiding in plain sight
At an IRS campus in Chamblee, outside Atlanta, employees reported rodents, mold and pest infestations severe enough that workers staged a protest in June; the agency responded by offering telework, CBS News reported. The scene is less an aberration than a symptom of a long-deferred reckoning with the upkeep of the government's enormous real-estate portfolio.
The numbers behind the neglect
The Government Accountability Office told Congress in 2025 that the government's total building-repair backlog — covering both military and civilian facilities — had more than doubled in seven years, from about $171 billion in fiscal 2017 to roughly $370 billion in fiscal 2024, and it added federal building conditions to its "High Risk List."
For the General Services Administration, the civilian government's landlord, the gap is stark. GSA's own estimate put its deferred-maintenance backlog above $17 billion in early 2025; the independent Public Buildings Reform Board assessed the true figure at around $50 billion in a March 2026 report, after examining the full scope of needed work. The board traced the shortfall to chronic underfunding — GSA spends a fraction of the share of building value that industry standards recommend on maintenance — and noted that money has for years been diverted from the dedicated buildings fund to other priorities.
Buildings with names and addresses
The backlog is concrete. At the Dirksen federal courthouse in Chicago, a pipe failure in late 2024 damaged multiple floors and left a courtroom closed many months later. The federal judiciary, in an unusually direct appeal, reported a roughly $8.3 billion backlog of critical repairs across hundreds of government-owned courthouses, documenting elevator entrapments, a ceiling collapse during proceedings, Legionella in water systems and mold sickening staff. "Federal courthouses are in crisis," the courts' administrative director warned, as the judiciary asked to manage its own buildings rather than rely on GSA. A GSA inspector-general review, separately, found tens of thousands of unresolved safety, fire and health hazards across nearly 2,000 properties.
Cuts that compounded the problem
The agency responsible for fixing all this went into 2025 understaffed — and then shrank dramatically. Beginning early in the year, the administration moved to slash GSA's Public Buildings Service, and a December 2025 GAO report found the service had cut its staff by roughly half during a still-unfinished reorganization. After warnings about the operational fallout, GSA reversed some of the terminations, rehiring a portion of the employees it had let go. The reversals did not undo the disruption, and the conditions managers are now scrambling to address had been building for years.
A problem without an easy exit
Watchdogs argue the government cannot simply spend its way out, and have urged it to shed unneeded buildings to concentrate scarce repair dollars. But disposing of property takes staff and time, both in short supply, and a recent law pushing agencies to offload chronically underused buildings has added complexity rather than relief. For the federal workers who show up each day to leaking roofs, dark elevators and worse, the abstractions of backlog accounting have a way of becoming very immediate.
