The Trump administration’s leadership at the General Services Administration is looking to cut the agency’s total budget in half, and looking to reduce staffing to reach that goal.
GSA leaders have notified staff they are expected to reduce total spending across all programs and personnel by 50%. Plans to meet that goal are due to GSA’s acting administrator no later than Friday.
GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service told staff in a town hall meeting on Jan. 31 that senior leadership is developing a plan to cut GSA’s spending by 50%. Potential areas for cuts include personnel, payroll and contracts.
GSA leadership didn’t offer a timeline for implementing the cuts, but employees were told that a nonvoluntary Reduction in Force (RIF) is expected “shortly” after Feb. 6. That’s the deadline for federal employees to accept the Office of Personnel Management’s “deferred resignation offer.”
FAS Commissioner Josh Gruenbaum told staff in an email this week that FAS will be “looking at operations in every portfolio to strengthen our business and comply with the directive from the President to reduce the federal workforce.”
“We can and must make tough decisions to create a leaner and more agile organization,” Gruenbaum wrote.
Among those decisions, Gruenbaum told employees that “we won’t need staff in certain parts of the country,” and will be “cutting redundant business functions and associated staffing.”
“In addition to optimizing our workforce, we’re also considering how we can use AI in our portfolios and ways to reduce prices for our client agencies,” Gruenbaum wrote.
Acting GSA Administrator Stephen Ehikian told employees in an email last week that the “OPM email is real and should be taken seriously,” and added that there are “NO excluded positions” at GSA.
“Per President Trump’s directives concerning the federal workforce, there will be a multi-step approach to reducing the size of the federal workforce and consolidating redundant operations,” Ehikian wrote in an email sent Jan. 30.
“If you do not accept, you should expect more changes to come. We will be implementing a performance culture that will evaluate everyone based on key performance metrics,” he wrote. “There will be further consolidation of office and centralization of functions. This plan is actively being worked on, but will not be finalized before Feb. 6.”
GSA’s return to office mandate, he added, will go into effect on March 3, with the requirement of working five days per week at a federal facility.
Elon Musk, the head of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency, wrote on X Monday that GSA’s 18F — a team of designers, software engineers and product designers that helps other federal agencies build, buy and share technology products — has been “deleted.”
A source familiar with the situation at GSA said 18F engineers “have deleted large swaths of internal code” at the direction of Thomas Shedd, the director of GSA’s Technology Transformation Services.
Federal News Network has reached out to GSA for comment about 18F’s status and spending cuts proposed by GSA’s leadership.
‘GSA is going to be a substantially smaller organization’
Michael Peters, commissioner of GSA’s Public Buildings Service, told staff in an email obtained by Federal News Network that non-Defense Department federal building space — both owned and leased — “should be reduced by at least 50%.”
“This reduction will come from more efficient space utilization, as well as an overall downsizing of the federal workforce,” Peters wrote.
The lower operating and maintenance costs, he added “will enable us to deliver higher-quality work environments over a smaller, more appropriately-sized footprint.”
Peters wrote that his initial assessment of GSA’s real-estate holdings shows a “gross excess of space in the portfolio,” as well as “substantial levels of deferred maintenance.”
Peters said GSA will also transition away from an “agency-centric model of space utilization” to a “whole of government” approach “that assesses requirements and availability across agencies.”
He added that he expects this new approach will allow PBS to “further consolidate and reduce space, as well as downsize the associated support staff and other PBS resources.”
Peters previewed his plans last week at a meeting of the Public Buildings Reform Board. During that meeting, he said a “disproportionate amount” of eliminated building space would come from the Washington, D.C. metro area — and will include GSA moving out of its own 1800 F St. NW headquarters.
Peters said the PBS is also restructuring away from an “outdated and inefficient model” of 11 regional offices across the country.
“In the immediate future, we will effectuate a restructuring along functional reporting lines rather than the current matrix of regions and functions,” he wrote. This more streamlined organization will allow the majority of our remaining personnel the flexibility to provide service across the entire geographic footprint in response to surges in demand and provide improved resource utilization and efficiency.”
Peters said these plans are still not “fully formed,” but notified PBS staff ahead of OPM’s deferred resignation offer deadline.
“GSA is going to be a substantially smaller organization in the future. I am excited to work with a highly motivated team to affect transformational change. If you want to join me on this mission to transform how PBS functions and to set an example for other federal agencies, be prepared for the hard work and difficult decisions that will be required to right size PBS,” he wrote.
‘If there is a place in government that is run like a company, it is GSA’
The proposed cuts at GSA raise questions about its ability to keep meeting its mission without impacting customer agencies.
A former GSA official told Federal News Network that the agency and its many missions — the federal government’s landlord, tech hub and contracting nerve center — have always been a “force-multiplier for really good cross-governmental efficiencies.”
“It is a prerogative of the president to set the budgets, to make sure that the government is functioning in a reflection of the way they want. I’m not trying to take that away from the administration. But to come in and just do mass layoffs and without really understanding the potential consequences — there’s mission-critical infrastructure run out of GSA,” the official said.
While Trump administration officials have touted agency cuts as a way to cut federal spending, much of GSA’s funding doesn’t come from congressional appropriations.
“It’s mostly not an appropriated agency. Even the IT shop at GSA runs off a working capital fund, which is responsive to the buyers of tech within the agency,” the former GSA official said. “If there is a place in government that is run like a company, it is GSA. So to dismiss it, and say it’s ‘deleted,’ you’re either missing the point or there’s something else at play here.”
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