Senior leaders at the General Services Administration are planning to relocate employees from their current headquarters to the nearby Interior Department, in order to prepare for the eventual sale of the 1800 F Street property.
Some, however, fear the Trump administration is cutting office space faster than it’s able to cut the size of the federal workforce.
“There are currently far more personnel assigned to GSA headquarters than can actually fit in either building,” a source familiar with the situation at GSA told Federal News Network.
A timeline for the move remains unclear, but Public Building Service Commissioner Michael Peters said last week that GSA plans are underway to move out of its current headquarters building — the first step to downsize the federal government’s non-defense building space by 50%.
Federal News Network has reached out to GSA and the Interior Department for comment.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is contemplating bigger changes for GSA. A specific plan has yet to come into focus, but GSA senior leaders are saying the Trump administration’s long-term goal is to merge GSA, the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget into a single agency.
President Donald Trump, during his first term in office, sought to merge GSA and OPM together but ultimately scrapped those plans.
A federal judge has paused the deadline for federal employees to accept OPM’s “deferred resignation” offer, but at least five Senior Executive Service personnel from GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service have accepted the deal.
A GSA official said the agency’s headquarters has increased security and that access to the seventh floor — which includes office space for the GSA administrator, senior leadership, and most recently, a team from the Department of Government Efficiency — is now “sealed off from normal foot traffic.”
“This is highly unusual. The building is normally entirely open and accessible to all personnel,” except for a few secure areas, the official said.
TTS director: ‘We are going into a time of a smaller workforce’
Thomas Shedd, the director of GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, told employees in a meeting Thursday that their expertise is key to the Trump administration’s goal of automating more of the federal government’s functions.
“We are going into a time of a smaller workforce. What that means for us is it’s a time to build. We anticipate super-strong demand for technical services, which means a group like this one is really important,” Shedd said. “There’s still a ton of programs that have to exist, even with this smaller workforce in the federal government, which just means there’s an opportunity for technology, automation, et cetera, to play a part.”
Shedd told employees he believes “technology in government should exist to enable efficiency and enable programs to continue with less headcount.”
“As the size of the federal government is reduced, there’s going to be a larger need for software, both big pieces of software that go across multiple agencies, and then many small implementations of software. Again, this is what TTS has been living and breathing, even before this administration came in,” Shedd told employees.
In addition to cutting federal employees, Shedd said the administration’s goal is to also reduce the number of contractors GSA has on staff — as well as across the federal government.
Shedd conceded this was a “somber meeting” with TTS staff, as employees contemplated whether to take OPM’s deferred resignation offer.
“It’s been a weird three weeks, because you all are delivering such great work, and you’re all incredible at what you do. And there’s this push to move fast and make changes,” he said.
Shedd applauded TTS for a “great win,” with the Transportation Security Administration’s PreCheck program moving to Login.gov. TSA PreCheck has more than 20 million users, and Shedd said “a lot of them are likely to start using Login.”
“It’s super clear that the federal government should have teams like TTS that can be deployed to solve hard technical problems. You’ve all been doing this for a while, so I don’t have to tell you that it should,” he said. “I just want to reiterate that the administration sees TTS, as well as U.S. Digital Service as two pillars of technical talent.”
Trump, in an executive order on his first day in office, rebranded the U.S. Digital Service as the “U.S. DOGE Service.”
DOGE head Elon Musk 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 GSA official told Federal News Network that 18F engineers “have deleted large swaths of internal code” at the Shedd’s direction.
Beyond TTS, Shedd said GSA’s current leaders have “moved quickly to cut regulation, reduce contract spend, and reduce leased square footage faster than any past administration that I’m personally aware of.”
Peters 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%.”
“The vision here really is to modernize the office spaces, not by doing a bunch of construction, but by moving into modern leased buildings,” Shedd said.
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