HC-001: The Parking Garage | Hard Calls

1

The Situation

You are a warranted CO at a federal agency headquartered in a commercial building it shares with several other tenants. The building has a parking garage. Leadership wants the agency to start paying for employee parking, and the requirement that reaches your desk is not modest: they want you to procure the entire garage.

Your office of general counsel has already weighed in, and not quietly. Employee parking is a personal expense of the commuter. Appropriated funds do not pay personal expenses without specific authority, so there is no justification for the agency to pay. You did your homework and offered scoped alternatives: spaces required under the ADA, mission critical positions, security detail vehicles. Real needs, defensible slices.

Not good enough. Leadership above your supervisor wants the whole garage, including capacity that would serve tenants who are not your agency. And they came armed: a GAO decision that says, in plain words, that an agency may use appropriated funds to provide parking to its employees. They are quoting that sentence at you and asking why you are the obstacle.

2

The Pressure

This is not a peer disagreement. The push is coming from above your supervisor, and it does not feel like a discussion. It feels like being told. The GAO language they keep quoting sounds like permission, and every time you raise the counsel opinion, the answer is some version of "GAO says we can, so find a way to yes."

You already tried to be the office of yes. You brought them the ADA spaces, the mission critical positions, the security vehicles. Offering the defensible version and getting told it is not good enough changes the character of the conversation. Now the only acceptable answer is the one thing counsel says the money cannot buy, and the signature they need to get it is yours. The warrant is personal. If this ripens into a purpose violation and an Antideficiency Act problem, "leadership directed me" does not transfer it off your name.

3

The Authorities

Read these before you vote. They are the terrain the decision sits on, and the two GAO decisions are the whole ballgame.

31 U.S.C. 1301(a), the Purpose Statute, and the necessary expense rule. Appropriated funds may be used only for their intended purposes. GAO has long treated commuting costs, including employee parking, as personal expenses of the employee rather than necessary expenses of the agency. That is counsel's default position, and it is the correct default. Read it →

GAO decision B-322337, U.S. International Trade Commission, Use of Appropriated Funds to Subsidize Employee Parking Permits (Aug. 3, 2012). The exception, and the decision leadership is quoting. When an agency determines that parking is necessary to avoid a significant impairment of its operating efficiency, appropriated funds may pay for it. But the same decision sets the gate: the test is who receives the primary benefit, the agency or the individual. The determination must be case specific and reflect current workplace realities, including telework and flexible schedules. GAO told ITC its own analysis did not go far enough. And the scale was 106 permits for unreserved spaces, sized to ITC's workforce, acquired as permits rather than a lease. Read the whole thing, not one sentence. Read it →

GAO decision B-248247, Subsidized Parking for Employees of U.S. Mint (Mar. 15, 1993), 72 Comp. Gen. 139. The precedent B-322337 stands on. The Mint documented a significant impairment to operations and got parking with appropriated funds. The scale that survived: three spaces. The finding drives the number, not the other way around. Read it →

FAR 1.602-1(b). No contract shall be entered into unless the contracting officer ensures that all requirements of law, executive orders, regulations, and all other applicable procedures have been met. The warrant is the last control in the chain, and it is personal. Read it →

4

What's Your Call

One anonymous vote. No login. You see the split after you commit.

Not voting? Skip the vote and show the call. But the vote is the point.

5

The Call

Locked. Make your call above first. This section opens after you vote.

B. Yes to the slice, no to the garage. And the key move is understanding that B-322337 is your best weapon, not theirs.

Leadership is reading that decision as a hall pass. It is a ceiling. Yes, it says an agency may use appropriated funds to provide parking to its employees. The same decision says the test is who primarily benefits, the agency or the individual. It says the determination has to be honest about telework and flexible schedules. It says the parking is for the agency's own employees, and it blessed 106 permits sized to ITC's workforce, not a structure. The Mint got three spaces. GAO even told ITC its analysis did not go far enough. Quote the whole decision back and the whole-garage ask dies on its own terms. Your agency is one tenant of several. No honest impairment analysis concludes that buying parking for other tenants primarily benefits the government. That is where the purpose violation lives, and purpose violations ripen into Antideficiency Act problems with your name on the obligation.

Option A is signing that problem into existence. Option C feels principled but hands back the one thing you actually have: a lawful path to the defensible version. You already scoped it once, ADA spaces, mission critical, security vehicles. Refusing outright turns a fiscal law question into a loyalty fight, and you will lose a loyalty fight with leadership.

So make the paperwork do the fighting. Tell them: I can procure defensible parking scaled to our workforce under a signed significant-impairment determination. Whoever wants more than that signs the finding that says a whole garage for other tenants primarily benefits the government. They will not sign it, because they cannot. The CO procures against a determination; you do not have to author the justification, and you do not have to be the villain. The signature requirement does the work for you. That is what find a way to yes actually looks like: not yes to the garage, yes to the version that survives an audit.

One caveat, and it applies to every Hard Call on this site. In contracting, the target always moves. This call does not mean you can never lease a garage, and B-322337 does not mean you always can. It depends on the specifics: the workforce, the facts, the finding, the funding. Nothing on this page translates to every requirement, ever. Make the call on the facts in front of you. Some of you will agree with mine and some will not, and that is exactly why this page exists. Take the floor below.

6

The Floor

Disagree with the call? Good. Make your case. Sign in with GitHub to post. Same rule as always: sanitized examples only. No CUI, no PII, no source selection information, no live acquisition details.