The identification by the federal public service that a significant portion of their office buildings was being underutilized was prepandemic. That would have been in 2017. In 2019, they designed plans to try to get to the reduction of 50%. There was very little movement between 2019 and 2024, mostly because there was no funding allocated toward this. The budget in 2024 gave money, so now there's funding. If you want to do something, I think you need resources and funding in order to make sure it's accomplished. Now there's the ability to move forward.
Here's where you need the co-operation of all the federal tenants. We saw that some of the larger tenants were very hesitant to agree to space reductions, motivated by a few reasons. One, they needed perhaps specialized space to deliver their mandates, so they couldn't really reduce their space to a certain square foot per employee. Two, there was concern about whether or not increased presence in the workplace would be a requirement. The increase that happened during the audit period actually removed a lot of the flexibility that was in the existing plan to get to 50%. We also highlighted the fact that we think there isn't an incentive for many departments to free up that space. For most departments, rent is not paid. It's sort of a global bucket that rents and/or owns the buildings. Individually, it doesn't hit your budget, so you might not be as incentivized to move forward.
We hope we've highlighted some of the weaknesses and made some recommendations to see bigger progress going forward. It's not one thing that's slowing this down; it's a lot of things. Missing data is another critical element.