GSA to ‘quadruple' in size to centralize procurement across the government

A new executive order moves some agencies’ contracting work to the General Services Administration, which already plays a key role in government procurement, agency leadership told employees in an all-hands meeting. 

Trump reportedly signed the contracting-focused executive order on Thursday. The text of the order wasn’t immediately available, and the White House didn’t immediately respond to request for comment.

“Over the coming months, we are going to ingest all domestic, commercial goods and services inside the GSA. We’re not going to do all $900 billion, but we will do about $400 billion, so we’re going to quadruple our size,” Josh Gruenbaum, the head of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, told employees Thursday, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Nextgov/FCW.

Already, GSA has piloted onboarding two to three agencies “to see what procurement would look like being onboarded at GSA,” Gruenbaum said. Federal News Network first reported this pilot. 

The Office of Management and Budget is being onboarded now, a source familiar told Nextgov/FCW, as is the Office of Personnel Management, which laid off its entire procurement team last month. 

“We now feel as though we have a very mobilized operational process to onboard and ingest procurement from around the government,” Gruenbaum continued, saying that GSA will be automating procurement processes and bringing in some talent from the agencies it will be buying on behalf of.

Currently, GSA runs the schedules program — which agencies can use to buy different services or goods — and several major governmentwide contract vehicles. It is the government's landlord and develops governmentwide procurement practices, such as category management and best-in-class contracts.

GSA’s acting leader, Stephen Ehikian, emphasized the potential savings of purchasing as “one buyer on behalf of the government."

The change comes as the agency continues to dramatically downsize its workforce, eliminating entire offices in the process. 

Just yesterday, the agency cut the talent division and the market development and partnerships division at its Technology Transformation Services. Employees also received offers for Voluntary Early Retirement Authority and Voluntary Separation Incentive Payments on Wednesday. Contracting officers thus far have been largely spared, however.

GSA employees who do still have their jobs will now have access to a new artificial intelligence bot, which was demoed during the Thursday meeting as well. GSA said in an announcement that it plans to offer the tool to other federal agencies, too. 

Ehikian has been focused on using AI to reduce headcount as the agency lays off employees en masse. Some feds at GSA have been tasked with coming up with ways AI could take over their work.

The AI tool features a chat function and application programming interface, or API. GSA says that it plans to continuously iterate on the tool as it gets staff feedback. Wired first reported its development earlier this month. 

In the meeting, Ehikian said that the bot was an example of the “build back phase” of modernization after the “slimming down phase” focused on efficiency. 

“This is how we bring new tools in to allow us to do more with less,” he said, naming “rationalizing IT” as another priority. An internal meeting slide deck viewed by Nextgov/FCW pointed to consolidating the number of systems per job, centralizing data, optimizing GSA’s cloud and software spending, and investing in shared services as goals for this effort.

GSA plans to announce a major overhaul of its FedRAMP program next week, Nextgov/FCW reported Thursday. 

Finally, the agency is also charging ahead with its efforts to shrink the government’s real estate portfolio. Ehikian told staff that the agency had canceled almost 700 leases, noting that “we do make mistakes” and that the agency has course-corrected in some cases after hearing from senators and others that a lease shouldn’t be cancelled. 

Nick Wakeman contributed to this story.