GSA preps for layoffs at TTS

The General Services Administration intends to send reduction in force letters to some staff in its technology branch soon, following a warning in early March that the agency planned to eventually cut half of the staff in that office.

The head of the Technology Transformation Services, Thomas Shedd, wrote in a Thursday email to staff that some employees would be getting an “intention letter” for a reduction in force, or layoff. 

The agency’s cross-government tech group has already seen its workforce slashed during the first couple months of the Trump administration, and Shedd previously told staff that the TTS workforce would be halved as GSA writ large is shrunk. Trump’s leadership at the agency is looking to halve the agency’s total budget overall, per reporting by Federal News Network and NPR.

At TTS, probationary employees have already been fired, and the administration has cut the tech consultancy under its purview, 18F, completely. Agency employees have been given until April 18 to accept the second deferred resignation offer GSA issued in late March.

The latest round of layoffs will affect employees in the TTS Office of the Integrated Award Environment and Office of Regulatory and Oversight Systems, as well as parts of the Office of Solutions, including its public experience branch, its platforms and services work, and its front office and accelerators, according to Shedd’s email, which was obtained by Nextgov/FCW. GSA did not respond to a request for comment.

“These teams deliver mission-critical capabilities to every federal agency. We (and our agency partners) are still in the dark on specifics, but TTS is the government’s force multiplier,” one current GSA employee told Nextgov/FCW. They, like others Nextgov/FCW spoke to, were granted anonymity, as they weren’t authorized to speak on the record. “If you cut 100 TTSers, it delays or deletes service delivery for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of citizens.”

It’s not immediately clear how many employees are affected, although an estimate of at least 200 affected employees is circulating within the agency, per two current GSA employees. Another current employee told Nextgov/FCW that each of the affected components will be cut by 50%.

Shedd had previously called TTS’s technical savvy “essential” to GSA and the Trump administration. 

Moving forward, TTS is prioritizing and getting rid of functions and work that are not required by statute, that are deemed not “critical” or outside the priorities of GSA and the Trump administration, as Nextgov/FCW has previously reported. 

“TTS is moving to smaller and flexible teams to provide support to government-wide shared services and partner agencies,” Shedd wrote in the email. “To the maximum extent possible TTS programs and products will remain operational through this change.”

GSA leadership has previously listed the following as remaining TTS priorities: Login.gov, the government’s single sign-on service; FedRAMP, a security standards program for cloud products and services; and Cloud.gov, a shared service for government agencies to move to the cloud.

“It’s not about efficiency,” said another GSA employee, referencing billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which has played a key role in government downsizing. “In three months, they haven’t actually built anything. Just destroyed.”