“When you have great tools, the job of GSA is to source them, not to make mediocre alternatives,” the colleague added.
“Did you use this AI to sort out (power reduction)?” asked another federal worker.
“When will Adobe Pro be returned to us?” another said. “This is an important program we use every day. Please return this, or at least give it a date it will return.”
Employees also opposed their mission to the office. “How would you increase collaborations (back to office) if you’re not in the (integrated product team) clients, contractors, or in the same office?” asked the GSA worker. “We still do all our work via email or Google Meetings.”
One employee asked Ehikian who the GSA Doge team actually was. “The GSA does not have a Doge team,” Ehikian responded, according to two employees who know first-hand about the event. Employees who have seen the Doge staff at GSA did not buy it. “Like we didn’t realize there were a lot of young children working behind the safe area on the sixth floor,” an employee told Wired. Luke Farritor, a young former SpaceX intern who worked at Doge since the organization’s earliest days, has recently been wearing sunglasses inside his GSA office. A GSA employee described Shaotran as “smiling with a blazer and a t-shirt.”
The GSA did not immediately respond to requests for comments submitted by Wired.
During the meeting, Ehikian showed us detailed current cost reductions on the GSA goals (right size, streamlined operations, deregulation, IT innovation). “Overall expenses avoided” is listed as $1.84 billion. The number of employees using the GSA-built Generated AI tools was listed at 1,383. It was said that the number of hours saved from automation was 178,352. Ehikian also noted that the agency has cancelled or cut 35,354 credit cards used by government workers and ended 683 leases. (WIRED cannot review these statistics. Doge is known to share misleading and inaccurate statistics about its cost-cutting efforts.)
“The calculation of efficiency requires a denominator,” a GSA employee wrote in the chat. “Reductions can reduce costs, but they can also reduce the value delivered to the American people. How is that seen in the scorecard?”
In a slide entitled “The Road After,” Ehikian laid out his vision for the future. Read one pillar of the Optmize Federal Real Estate Portfolio. Read another person, “Nutrifying procurement.” Subcategories include “Reduce compliance burden and increase competition,” “Concentrate data for access across teams,” and “Optimize GSA’s cloud and software spending.”
Online, employees looked crazy. “So, are you planning on restricting your federal contracts from working on after your term as a GSA administrator, especially with regard to AI and IT software?” asked one employee in the chat. There was no answer.
