Roughly 13% of workers in the General Services Administration’s Public Buildings Service have resigned in recent weeks, a drastic reduction in personnel for the agency tasked with aggressively shrinking and reorganizing the federal government's real estate portfolio.
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Around 725 employees accepted the Office of Personnel Management’s deferred resignation program, which offered employees full pay through September and minimal work obligations if employees agreed to resign by Feb. 12, Federal News Network reported.
GSA acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian announced Monday that the first wave of employees who took the offer are now on administrative leave.
“When Acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian notified the agency that GSA was beginning a Reduction in Force, he made a commitment to ensuring a fair and respectful process,” a GSA spokesperson told Bisnow in a statement, declining to comment further.
The PBS manages an inventory of more than 359M SF of owned and leased space for 1.1 million federal employees, according to its website, and is operated by 5,600 employees, approximately 40% of the GSA workforce.
Across the entire federal workforce, 75,000 federal employees took the offer to resign by mid-February.
Ehikian warned GSA staff this week in a memo that more terminations were imminent and several of the agency's regional offices are expected to close amid the consolidation.
The GSA is looking to eliminate 3,557 positions through a nonvoluntary reduction in force, which would be about a 63% reduction, FNN reported earlier this week.
The aggressive reduction in personnel could pose challenges to the Department of Government Efficiency's ambition to cut the federal real estate portfolio by 50%. The Trump administration instructed agencies on Wednesday to submit any plans for relocating offices out of the National Capitol Region by April 14
The PBS is in charge of construction, management and maintenance of federally owned and leased properties. DOGE has already announced that it terminated more than 100 leases spanning over 2.3M SF.
“You’re talking about getting rid of the people, but you haven’t yet accomplished getting rid of the work that those people are doing,” a former GSA official told FNN.
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