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In Atlanta, an electrical problem in a "Buss Duct" has caused the Sam Nunn Atlanta Federal Center to be closed for at least a week. 5,000 federal employees work at the center.
While many might view this as another example of The Infrastructure Crisis in the USA, it may also be another example of mismanagement at the General Service Administration (GSA), landlord for the complex.
The GSA has had many scandals and has been the subject of several Congressional Hearings, including an August 1, 2012 hearing titled "GSA: A Review of Agency Mismanagement and Wasteful Spending - Part 2". That hearing followed an $823,000 GSA employee conference in Las Vegas and a one-day-long $250,000 GSA employee conference in Crystal City, Virginia.
The closed Atlanta complex is named for Samuel Augustus "Sam" Nunn, Jr., who served for 24 years as a United States Senator from Georgia and whose daughter is the current Democratic Party nominee for a Georgia Senate seat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28 2014, @10:33PM
This story is no surprise after having seen first hand how inefficient government facilities managers are. Nowadays the feds have a no in-house staff who can fix buildings on short notice (probably to please Republicans who want to shrink the gov). Instead they rely on contractors, with the associated red tape and delays. Contracts often go to minority- or female-owned companies, regardless of quality, because those contracts require less paperwork (that policy may please certain Democrats).
A post above mentioned that old buildings often have problems. That's true, but a for-profit business would not have let an electrical problem interrupt the work of 5,000 of their own people for a whole week.
Maybe some of the staff could have worked from home, but their IT department & VPN were probably not up to the task...