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Government Executive March 7, 2025
New Process for Staffing US Government, Determining Operations:
federal employees are required to make a presentation to Trump’s political appointees who then decide if the department goes or stays
Gov't Exec: GSA Nearly Wiping Out Entire Offices
with slow drip of RIFs
The General Services Administration is slowly moving through its organization to lay employees off en masse, leaving some of its offices with few if any staff still standing.
On Thursday, the agency — which plays a key role in managing the government’s real estate, procurement and technology, among other things — slashed virtually all of its Office of the Chief Financial Officer based in the national capital region, issuing more than 100 reduction-in-force notices.
That followed the agency on Wednesday eliminating nearly the entire northwest region of its Public Buildings Service, issuing RIFs to more than 90% of its roughly 200 employees there.
PBS had earlier this week laid off around 600 employees, with much of its regional staff throughout the country bearing the brunt of the cuts. Nearly 40% of GSA’s region nine, based in San Francisco and covering California, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii, were let go, employees said. GSA is in the process of terminating thousands of leases across the country and has said it will soon list hundreds of federal properties to sell.
Last weekend, GSA also eliminated 18F, a government consultancy that helps other agencies with their technology, laying off around 90 people. Among the work affected by the shuttering of the group were projects to help military service members and overseas Americans vote more securely and to stand up a new website at the National Weather Service, according to a group of former 18F employees.
More cuts are coming. In a Thursday meeting, Thomas Shedd — the head of the agency’s cross-government tech group, the Technology Transformation Services, which housed 18F — told staff that TTS will be cut down to half its size, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Government Executive. TTS will stop work that isn’t required by statute, is not deemed “critical” or falls outside the priorities of GSA and the administration. The agency will eliminate contracts and job functions outside of those areas, he said.
Shedd, a Tesla alum, previously called TTS’ technical expertise “essential” to GSA and the administration. On Thursday, he asked employees “to remain focused on the reason you came to the government and the team to begin with, which is to deliver value and ship,” tech lingo for releasing a product or feature.
At a separate town hall meeting for another one of GSA’s divisions on Thursday, employees were told RIFs were focusing on the Federal Acquisition Service—of which TTS is a part—and PBS first. About three-quarters of GSA’s 13,000 employees work in those two divisions. The remaining GSA offices will subsequently endure their own RIFs to align with the restructured FAS and PBS, employees were told.
One current GSA employee said the morale has, expectedly, tanked at the agency and “no one knows” when the slow but steady stream of layoffs will end.
“We’re constantly checking emails for RIF notices and debating whether it would be better to be RIF’d now, because the daily threat is mentally draining, or be one of the few left to pick up the pieces of whatever is left of a formerly great place to work,” the employee said.
GSA’s acting administrator, Salesforce alum Stephen Ehikian, warned employees last week that RIFs would be coming at the agency. The layoffs followed a directive from President Trump to conduct widespread workforce reductions and all agencies are required to submit initial RIF plans by March 13. Like many agencies, GSA also offered voluntary early retirement to eligible staff.
GSA’s RIFs are currently focused on eliminating entire functions and offices, according to employees briefed on that matter, with more nuanced cuts expected in the next round.
Within GSA, various offices have presented their roles and responsibilities to what senior executives are calling a “murder board,” on which Ehikian and other political appointees sat, to justify their positions. The focus of those meetings was on staffing cuts, according to an employee briefed on the discussions.
Ehikian has been particularly focused on utilizing AI to reduce headcount and at least some GSA employees have been tasked with reporting to their supervisors on ways the technology could assume their work responsibilities.
Within TTS, Shedd listed the government’s identity proofing and single sign-on service, Login.gov, as a priority. The division head also pointed to FedRAMP — a security standards program for cloud products and services — and cloud.gov — a shared service for government agencies to move to the cloud — as priorities. He noted that the cloud.gov team has been “working super hard” to help GSA’s leadership with AI.
“There’s still loads of work to do,” Shedd told staff in the online meeting, where the chat function was disabled and no questions were taken, according to a current TTS employee. But even the TTS teams doing work that is continuing under the current administration could see cuts as GSA tries to get to a “target reduction number,” he said.
