The federal government’s landlord is trying to find office space for the new hires needed to implement President Obama’s health-care law.
“Health and Human Services [HHS] is going to need more space in Baltimore and in the D.C. area, as they’ll be hiring more people to carry out the health-care law over the next year or two,” said Robert Peck, commissioner of public buildings for the General Service Administration (GSA), when asked by the Washington Post to name “big deals” he’s working on.
“Baltimore is where they carry out Medicare and Medicaid, and those programs will expand in some form,” said Peck, who oversees 362 million square feet of Federal office space.
GSA spokesman Sahar Wali said she could not give specifics on the HHS expansion because Peck was just “projecting” what he sees as future demands for space, and was not speaking about a specific request from the HHS.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not return requests for comment by phone and e-mail. But in an interview earlier this month with Politico, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius estimated the number of new hires at the agency in the hundreds.
“Some of what is anticipated is new responsibilities potentially, not necessarily new people or new bureaucracies,” Sebelius said. “I’m a big believer that you start with assuming that you do more with less. You know we have new responsibilities, but we’ve got to figure out what within our resources we have the capacity to take on immediately.”
In addition to the Hubert H. Humphrey Building — the HHS headquarters on Capitol Hill — the agency conducts business at several other locations, including an 18-story building that houses 6,000 employees in Rockville, Md.
Other HHS properties: The campus of the National Institutes of Health employees 17,000 people in Bethesda, Md., who work in 40 buildings. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry are located in Atlanta. Other offices are scattered in leased buildings across the Washington area.
Republican lawmakers have estimated that the health-care law will also require the Internal Revenue Service to hire thousands more employees. A March 18 report from House Ways & Means Committee Republicans estimated between 11,800 and 16,500 new officials could be hired.
Critics of that report have been dubious of the GOP estimate, saying it is merely speculative and doesn’t reflect hard data. IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman said during a House hearing earlier this month that the IRS is still trying to determine its own estimate.
“The bottom line is it’s very new legislation and we’re accessing all new provisions we have responsibility for,” an IRS spokesman told The Daily Caller on Wednesday.
