A check-in with the office in charge of running the Capitol building

Thomas Austin The Capitol campus is a big and varied group of a collection of historical resources. Overall, we manage, of course, the Capitol building, as well as the House and Senate office buildings. There’s eight buildings total there. The Supreme Court building, including the Federal Judiciary Building, Thurgood Marshall Building, the Library of Congress — it’s those three buildings — U.S. Botanic Garden, the Capitol Visitor Center, and the Capitol Power Plant. Overall, it’s 18 and a half million square feet of space. And we’ve got 30,000 daily occupants. We’ve got 10 to 12,000 visitors every day. So there’s a lot of things going on. So it’s a very complicated question as far as my top priorities. But we’ve got a couple of really exciting things that we’re doing in 2026. I guess I should talk first off about things that are finishing in 2026, which is the Cannon House Office Building Renewal. That’s a 10-year program that we are finishing for the Cannon House Office Building, which was originally constructed in 1908. This was a full refurbishment, modernization, rehabilitation of its mechanical and physical structures. So that’s finishing. We’re also finishing some work at the Supreme Court building. You may have seen some things with a lot of scaffolding up in front of it. We were doing the facade restoration, replacing some of the marble that had been detached over the years, some modernizing the front of it, doing some security enhancements there as well. So those are the things that are kind of finishing in 2026. Stuff that’s starting, we’re going to do sort of the similar work that we did on the Supreme Court building, we’re doing that on the east side of the Capitol building. So you’ll see some scaffolding going up this summer on the East front of the Capitol building, we are doing some facade restoration, cleaning the marble, repointing it, fixing broken areas, doing things called Dutchman repairs. So that’s going to be some work that’s going to be going on from about 2026 until 2028. In addition, we’ll be doing a new pedestrian screening facility on the south side of Capitol building, so that will be a new structure. It’ll mostly be low-profile, built into the ground. But that construction just got awarded, and that’s going to take about two years to construct as well. So we see a lot of changes on the east side of the Capitol building. And I was telling my relatives, if you’re going to get a picture in front of the Capitol building on the East side, make sure you do it early in the spring. Don’t wait til summer, because you’ll have to wait two years until we have all that finished. So that’s some exciting work going on there. But when we look at the Capitol as it is, it’s almost a self-contained small city. So we have to look at kind of different buckets of work that we do. We’ve got the immediate stuff that we do every day, everything from changing filters and fixing leaks and moving furniture and things like that, these work orders. And we do about half a million of those every year. So over 1,300 a day that we do that kind of work. And then we have other construction projects we do that take a couple of months to a couple years. And that we do with funding from Congress that we get in our annual appropriations. But we have work that goes on that all the time. And then we have long-term work that we do, like the Capitol building, getting ready for some other work on both the Senate and the House sides that I can speak to if you like.

Terry Gerton That is a huge scope of responsibilities and projects. How do you balance the construction with the sustainment? Deferred building maintenance is always such a challenge. How do keep all of those trains running on?

Thomas Austin It is, and one of the issues we have with working on the Capitol campus is, of course, Congress needs it. That’s the reason it exists. We have Congress and the Supreme Court. They have a mission that they have to do all the time, every year, and so we have occupants there around the clock, and we have our teams there around-the-clock, so we have 24/7, 365 days a year, we have people. We say the AOC never closes. Even in the midst of winter storms, we never close, because we have to be there for Congress and the Supreme Court, so when you say balancing those challenges, we have the mission that we don’t want to impede on the Court or the Congress’s work. So we have to be careful that we’re allowing them to do their job uninterrupted without distraction. So that’s kind of our overall imperative. But then we also have our other imperatives that we have to balance, historical preservation, visitorship, making sure the Capitol campus is accessible to our tourists and our visitors that come to see the members of Congress. And so that creates some unique challenges as well. But as far as the deferred maintenance that you asked about, it is an issue. We do the best with the money that Congress gives us, and they have a lot of priorities, but we try to balance that in an objective way. It’s very difficult to interject all the objective criteria into a very subjective process, and so we do a scoring of projects. Our 10 jurisdictions nominate different, or nine jurisdictions, excuse me, nominate different projects, and then we score those in an object way. We compare them against other projects. We do this in a time phase way as far as what’s ready for construction now, what’s in design, what’s at study, and then we make our proposals to Congress for appropriations. And fortunately they give us some multi-year appropriations, which helps, which takes some of the time pressure off of us, and then we get some no-year appropriate, which certainly helps us for trying to phase longer-term things like the Cannon Project. What we do, we do a very deliberate scoring and evaluation process with all of our construction projects. We work closely with our oversight to make them aware of where our priorities are, why we think these are more important versus something else. And then we work with appropriations so that we can keep a handle on that maintenance backlog, because it is a challenge. The more maintenance backlog you have, the more risk that you are taking that something may happen to this facility that would impede that mission of Congress and the Supreme Court I talked about earlier.

Terry Gerton I think the last number I saw was that your maintenance backlog is $2.6 billion. You’re probably not getting $2.6 billion in appropriations to tackle that. So how do you prioritize and how do you keep the backlog from growing?

Thomas Austin Some of it, as I said, the backlog is, again, kind of a subjective number. So I think $2.6 billion is in some ways underselling it, as far as our challenge. But it is certainly an objective measure that we look at, that we work towards. So part of it is to make the case about what risks we are taking with our facility if we defer this another year. We’ve got air handler units at a 30-year design life that just celebrated their 60th birthday. And we have a great team that does the maintenance, the everyday work, to keep these older components functional. And if it wasn’t for their work all the time, we would have a lot more challenges. This is definitely something that we have extended the service life of a lot of our components well beyond what they were originally designed for. Now that being said, there’s some things you just can’t get around. Pipes are going to corrode, electrical systems are going to degrade over time. We run risks of failure in that regard. But we do, we work with our oversight and Congress to make sure that we identify those challenges and those risks, and we propose our budget every year. You probably may have seen some of my testimony in Congress as far as what the individual challenges are. What we do, we have to prioritize. And sometimes when you get into this realm, when you have such a large amount of backlog and you’re trying to insert those objective criteria into the subjective process, you sort of bridge that gap between what’s a science and into what’s an art? What have you seen in your experience? What can we risk here by fixing something there? And so it is a bit of a trade-off, and it’s a very dynamic situation that we deal with, certainly, that we’re trying to balance that risk versus their budget priorities.

Terry Gerton We talked there about historical components. Your job before coming to the Architect of the Capitol was managing the historical buildings at Arlington National Cemetery. So you obviously come with great experience. What is it about the Capitol complex? I mean, you just look at these buildings and they’re amazing. How do you keep the historical nature of the buildings while you’re trying to modernize them?

Thomas Austin Yes, that is a challenge we certainly are always cognizant of. So first off, we do want to keep that wow experience of coming and seeing the Capitol. The Capitol Dome is such an icon. It’s the symbol of my agency. It’s, in a lot of ways, the symbol of our government. And we want to have the future generations get that same experience that we have when we see it from the outside, when we go in inside and we look up at the apotheosis of George Washington, the Capitol Rotunda, seeing the statues, seeing the floors and the paintings on the walls and all those things, but they do require care. They require a lot of upkeep to make sure that they are gonna be preserved for the future. So we have curators and we have preservationists that work as part of the AOC team. I’m very blessed that they brought their skill set to the agency. And so we evaluate all of our work against those priorities as far as preserving it into the future, some of the exciting things that we’ve done, one of the connecting corridors to the Senate, we just finished the restoration of that, and this was a corridor that was originally painted by Constantino Bernini back in the 1860s, and it had been painted over and repainted over the years. We stripped back the paint, our curator, our preservationist found 50 to 60 layers of paint that had just kind of one on top of the other. And so we stripped all that back and we found out how it was originally put together. And our in-house painters kind of schooled themselves up on how to do that. And they recreated that using their own skill set and modern paints. But it was that process of discovering how it was originally intended to be presented, and what we could do to restore that. But those challenges are, every day we look for these things because the Capitol building, of course, is the oldest, 233 years now almost, that’s been there. But I mean, even our office buildings are somewhere between 100 years old to 65 years old, and everything in between. And they all have their unique challenges. But we do want to make sure we keep that wow factor when people come in. Because that’s something special that I feel about this job, is being able to care for those things, and I want future generations to have that same experience.

Terry Gerton It really is breathtaking when you go up. And we talked about all kinds of different projects here, new construction, reconstruction, rehabilitation. And then we touched a little bit earlier on your budget and some budget uncertainties. Of all of the different kinds of projects that you have, which of them are most vulnerable to challenges with cost management?

Thomas Austin Well, I think whenever you do — I’m going to try to make a complex answer a little bit simpler, but anytime you do restoration work, when you’re working with existing spaces, especially historic spaces that didn’t keep great records and so when you kind of open up the walls, it’s always a little bit of discovery learning, and so we have those challenges all the time when we’re doing this kind of work because we don’t, our limited amount of destructive testing we can do and so some of the work we don’t discover until we have started that first layer of demolition, we have peeled back those layers of paint, we have pulled up this floor. We did a project over in the library, we’re doing a project of a library with the Kislak Center, and as they pulled back the floor, we found out it wasn’t just the tile on top. There was also terra cotta and parquet wood and planks and brick and everything underneath. And it was like I’ve never seen it before. It was like every generation, they put on a different type of flooring. Impossible to know until you started to pull that back. But that created challenges because that was a different scope of work than we originally had. So just the nature of doing this historic renovation work is challenging because you’re never 100% sure of the conditions you’re dealing with. But on top of that, making sure that we have the proper scope of what we want to achieve at the end of this project. Some of these projects like the Cannon, it takes 10 years, and what may have been a high priority eight years ago is not as high priority now. Or we discovered an opportunity to maybe add an amenity space like we did because we pulled back the floors and we said, wow, this is great marble. This is not a typical office. What could we do with that? And so some of it can be scope creep. Some can be change orders. Some of it is just different. We call it different site conditions. So maintaining a strict control of change management is a continual challenge for any construction project, especially so on the Capitol campus. We have a lot of people that have feelings and opinions on the work we do. We have all the members of Congress, obviously. We have 30,000 daily visitors. We have outside agencies that see our work and want to weigh in on it. But making sure that we have that fiscal discipline, that we that discipline of ourselves, that we can envision what we started with, the design, and carry that through to completion is something that requires constant care and constant tending as we go through the project.

Terry Gerton And I would imagine quite a bit of on-the-spot adjustment.

Thomas Austin Absolutely, absolutely, yes. And one of the things we always say with construction management, and probably a lot more than just construction management is most of our problems come down to communication or lack thereof. And so we try to maintain that constant flow of communication, whether it be with the librarian, whether it with the members of the court, whether it would be with our oversight, appropriations, even in some cases, the members of the public who weigh in on this. We want to make sure we have that constant flow of communications. So we are level setting, we all know what the challenges are, what’s within the realm of possible? If we want to do this, if we want to do A, it’s going to cost B, both in time and in money. So making sure that flow of communication stays constant and in both directions really helps to forestall some problems that could crop up along the way.