A report prepared by the Republican staff of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee identifies hundreds of billions of dollars in potential savings to the taxpayer through improved management of federal assets and the elimination of waste in agencies and programs under the Committee’s jurisdiction.
Click here for the full report, entitled “Sitting on Our Assets: The Federal Government’s Misuse of Taxpayer-Owned Assets.”
Click here for an October 6, 2010 press release on the release of the report.
Sitting on Our Assets: A slideshow |
The report proposes cost savings and better utilization of government-owned resources across the entire jurisdiction of the Committee and its six subcommittees.
The U.S. government is the nation’s largest asset holder. It manages 896,000 buildings and structures with a total area of 3.29 billion square feet and more than 41 million acres of land. The General Services Administration, which acts as the federal government’s landlord, owns or leases 9,600 assets and maintains an inventory of more than 362 million square feet of space.
The Department of Transportation owns or leases approximately 69,500 real property assets – including land, buildings, and structures. There are more than 4 million miles of public roads in the United States. Amtrak, heavily subsidized by taxpayers, maintains over $17 billion dollars worth of infrastructure assets throughout its national rail passenger system.
There are approximately 1,700 miles of levees, 650 dams and 383 major lakes and reservoirs, 12,000 miles of commercial inland channels, and 75 hydropower generating facilities all owned by the federal government. The U.S. government also owns waterways leading to 926 coastal, Great Lakes, and inland harbors and 241 individual lock chambers at 195 sites nationwide.
“Sitting on Our Assets” focuses on improving asset management and reducing government waste, including in the following areas:
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