GSA Staff Raise Concerns as AI Takes Center Stage at All-Hands Meeting
On Thursday, Stephen Ehikian, the acting administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA), held his first all-hands meeting with agency staff since his appointment by President Donald Trump. The auditorium was filled, with hundreds of employees attending in person and thousands more tuning in online. While the live event maintained a polite tone, the accompanying online chat revealed a different story.
“‘My door is always open’ but we’ve been told we can’t go to the floor you work on?” one employee wrote, according to Google Meet chat logs from the event obtained by WIRED. The staffers used their real names to ask questions, but WIRED has chosen not to include those names to protect their privacy. “We don’t want an AI demo, we want answers to what is going on with [reductions in force],” wrote another, as over 100 GSA staffers added a “thumbs up” emoji to the post.
Instead of addressing those concerns, the meeting focused on an AI demonstration. Ehikian and other high-ranking members of the GSA team showcased GSAi, a chatbot tool developed by employees at the Technology Transformation Services. Currently, the bot is designed to assist employees with routine tasks like email composition, but Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been pushing for a more complex version that could eventually tap into government databases. According to WIRED, roughly 1,500 people have access to GSAi today, and by tomorrow, the bot will be deployed to more than 13,000 GSA employees.
Musk associates—including Ehikian and Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who now runs the Technology Transformation Services within GSA—have made AI a central part of their agenda. Recently, GSA hosted a media roundtable to display its new AI tool to reporters. “All information shared during this event is on deep background—attributable to a ‘GSA official familiar with the development of the AI tool,’” read an invitation. (Reporters from Bloomberg, The Atlantic, and Fox were invited. WIRED was not.)
WIRED reported that GSA was one of the first federal agencies taken over by Musk’s allies in late January. Ehikian, who is married to a former employee of Elon Musk’s X, works alongside Shedd and Nicole Hollander, who slept in Twitter HQ as an unofficial member of Musk’s transition team at the company. Hollander is partners with Steve Davis, who has taken a leading role at DOGE. Since the leadership change, more than 1,835 GSA employees have accepted a deferred resignation offer as DOGE continues its push to reportedly “right-size” the federal workforce. Employees still employed at the agency have been told to return to the office five days a week. Their government credit cards—used for everything from paying for software tools to buying equipment—have a spending limit of $1.
At the all-hands meeting, employees expressed frustration and concern. One employee wrote, “We are very busy after losing people and this is not [an] efficient use of time.” Another asked, “Literally who cares about this.”
“When there are great tools out there, GSA’s job is to procure them, not make mediocre replacements,” a colleague added. One federal worker asked, “Did you use this AI to organize the [reduction in force]?” Another questioned, “When will the Adobe Pro be given back to us? This is a critical program that we use daily. Please give this back or at least a date it will be back.”
Employees also raised concerns about the return-to-office mandate, one GSA worker asking, “How does [return to office] increase collaboration when none of our clients, contractors, or people on our [integrated product teams] are going to be in the same office? We’ll still be conducting all work over email or Google meetings.”
One employee asked Ehikian who the DOGE team at GSA actually is. “There is no DOGE team at GSA,” Ehikian responded, according to two employees with direct knowledge of the events. However, several employees, having seen DOGE staff at the GSA, weren’t convinced. “Like we didn’t notice a bunch of young kids working behind a secure area on the 6th floor,” one employee told WIRED.
Luke Farritor, a young former SpaceX intern who has worked at DOGE since the organization’s earliest days, was seen wearing sunglasses inside the GSA office in recent weeks, as was Ethan Shaotran, another young DOGE worker who recently served as president of the Harvard mountaineering club. A GSA employee described Shaotran as “grinning in a blazer and T-shirt.”
During the meeting, Ehikian presented a slide detailing GSA’s objectives—right-sizing, streamlining operations, deregulation, and IT innovation—alongside current cost-savings. “Overall costs avoided” were listed at $1.84 billion. The number of employees using generative AI tools built by GSA was listed at 1,383. The number of hours saved from automations was said to be 178,352. Ehikian also pointed out that the agency has canceled or reduced 35,354 credit cards used by government workers and terminated 683 leases. (WIRED cannot confirm any of these statistics. DOGE has been known to share misleading and inaccurate statistics regarding its cost saving efforts.)
“Any efficiency calculation needs a denominator,” a GSA employee wrote in the chat. “Cuts can reduce expenses, but they can also reduce the value delivered to the American public. How is that captured in the scorecard?”
In a slide titled “The Road Ahead,” Ehikian outlined his vision for the future. “Optmize federal real estate portfolio,” read one pillar. “Centralize procurement,” read another. Sub categories included “reduce compliance burden to increase competition,” “centralize our data to be accessible across teams,” and “Optimize GSA’s cloud and software spending.”
Online, employees expressed skepticism. “So, is Stephen going to restrict himself from working on any federal contracts after his term as GSA administrator, especially with regard to AI and IT software?” asked one employee in the chat. There was no response.
