“When there are excellent tools, GSA’s work is to get them, not to make poor replacements,” added a colleague.
“Did you use this AI to organize the [reduction in force]? “Asked another federal worker.
“When will the Adobe Pro be returned to us?” said another. “This is a critical program that we use daily. Please make this question or at least one date on which it will be back. ”
The employees also pushed back to the office of the office. “How [return to office] Increase collaboration when none of our customers, entrepreneurs or people on our [integrated product teams] Will you be in the same office? A GSA worker asked.
An employee asked Ehkian who was the GSA DOGE team. “There is no DOGE team at GSA,” said Ehikian, according to two employees with direct knowledge of events. Employees, many of whom saw DOGE staff at GSA, did not buy it. “As if we had not noticed a bunch of young children working behind a secure area on the 6th floor,” said Wired, an employee. Luke Farritor, a young former SpaceX trainee who has been working at Doge since the first days of the organization, has been seen bearing sunglasses inside the GSA office in recent weeks, just like Ethan Shaotran, another young Doge worker who has recently been president of the Harvard Mountainering Club. An employee of the GSA described Shaotran as “smiling in a blazer and a t-shirt”.
GSA did not immediately respond to a request for comments sent by Wired.
During the meeting, Ehikian showed a slide detailing the objectives of GSA – dimensioning, rationalization operations, deregulation and IT innovation – current cost savings. “The overall costs avoided” were listed at $ 1.84 billion. The number of employees using generative AI tools built by GSA has been listed at 1,383. The number of hours of automation would have been 178,352. Ehikian also stressed that the agency had canceled or reduced 35,354 credit cards used by civil servants and terminated 683 leases. (Wired cannot confirm any of these statistics. DOGE is known to share Deceptive and inaccurate statistics Regarding its cost economy efforts.)
“Any efficiency calculation needs a denominator,” wrote an employee of the GSA in the cat. “Cups can reduce expenses, but they can also reduce the value delivered to the American public. How is it captured in the dashboard? ”
In a slide entitled “The road ahead”, Ehikian exposed his vision of the future. “Optmize Federal Real Estate Portfolio,” read a pillar. “Centralizing supply,” read another. The subcategories included “reducing compliance burden to increase competition”, “centralize our data to be accessible between teams” and “optimize cloud expenditure and GSA software”.
Online, employees seemed suspicious. “So, will Stephen prevent working on federal contracts after his mandate as a GSA administrator, in particular with regard to AI and computer software?” asked for an employee in the cat. There was no answer.
