federal govt owns 65% of American land and $1.2 Trillion in unused buildings

From Robby Soave in Reason about the results of a Reason Foundation study...

Most people are not aware that the federal government owns 65 percent of the land in the contiguous United States. It turns out that the government isn't totally aware of this either...

According to Peter Orszag, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, in addition to about 14,000 buildings that federal agencies have already conceded they don't need any more, there are at least 55,000 more that are either underutilized or not used at all. Since the indexing of property is often left to individual agencies, there is no accurate, comprehensive federal database of government-owned property. The Reason study, written by Anthony Randazzo and John Palatiello (or a shorter/summary) revealed that the amount of unused holdings owned by the government is much greater than previously estimated: Selling them could raise more than $1.2 trillion and put a sizable dent in the federal debt.

On June 10, President Barack Obama issued a memorandum calling for federal agencies to save money by selling excess property, earning the president praise from one of the study's authors...