IBM Center for The Business of Government

As the largest public real estate organization in the United States, the General Services Administration's Public Buildings Service owns or leases 8,700 assets and maintains an inventory of 371 million square feet of rentable workspace. Within this inventory, PBS has more than 500 owned and leased historic properties.

Around that time, I published the first in a series of blogs that sought to break down government response efforts into logical and digestible phases to help leaders organize their approach. The Phase I immediate response was all about emergency management and business continuity. This phase started with providing advanced analytics to track the virus and predict where it was going next.

One is how different states reacted differently to the virus. The other is how the nation’s reliance on the states has affected the nation’s response.

[Note: This column also appears in Washington Technology. It is the seventh in a series on how the COVID-19 crisis has changed how government works. Michaela Drust, IBM, co-authored this column.]

Early in the pandemic, Congress appropriated $46 billion to agencies to support technology upgrades for cloud and telework capabilities. However, the challenges facing federal agency transitions to a distance work environment may not be technology driven.