13. Environmental Protection Agency · Minor
Consolidate OCFO office space and security contracts
Printed page 444 13. Environmental Protection Agency
“Staffing assignments, especially at the senior level, should be reviewed and streamlined, and the office should consolidate space to save agency costs. For example, six offices need six security contracts to protect employees when one contract would suffice.”
What has happened
- Partially done
The reorganization centralized the function that buys the contracts. The FY2026 addendum merges the Office of the Chief Financial Officer and most of the Office of Mission Support into a single Office of Finance and Administration, and centralizes “all facility management functions for RTP and Cincinnati laboratories … in the Office of Finance and Administration with the Chief Facilities and Security Officer.” The Office of the Chief Facilities & Security Officer is now one of OFA's eight constituent offices. That is one office holding facilities and security for the agency, which is the structural precondition for the Quote's single security contract; no EPA document says the six contracts have become one.
- Partially done
The space half is being delivered. EPA's FY2026 budget justification describes “an ambitious space consolidation plan” under Executive Orders 14274 and 14210 that will cut occupied facilities and square footage for a cumulative annual rent avoidance of about $28 million: by the end of FY2025 EPA will have moved staff out of the Ronald Reagan Building into existing Federal Triangle space (−323,000 sq ft, −$18 million a year), vacated the Human Studies Facility at Chapel Hill (−155,000 sq ft, −$3.7 million) and closed the Houston regional laboratory into the Ada, Oklahoma facility (−41,126 sq ft, −$2.2 million). The document also puts a figure on the security side the Quote singles out — $11.1 million for security in the Science and Technology appropriation — without saying how many contracts that is.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- One search covered the grants and OCFO cluster on p. 444.
- Partial and not done: the Quote’s specific example is contract consolidation, and no source we accept as Evidence states that duplicative security contracts were combined. The space consolidation is documented and under way.
- The adjacent ask is #1045 (Develop a plan to relocate EPA regional offices), partial on the same program of work read through the buildings-and-facilities budget tab; this item records the OCFO space-and-security half.
- Action
- eliminate
- Object
- OCFO office space and duplicative security contracts
- ID
- 1200