GSA Blog

My Vision for GSA

Last week I had the pleasure of sharing my vision for GSA with more than 8,000 of our employees, and today I want to share it more broadly. We’ve been moving quickly over the past 60 days as we start to realize this vision, and I look forward to partnering with all of our stakeholders to make it a reality. 

My goal is that GSA returns to our founding mission of streamlining federal operations, consolidating resources and efficiently providing essential services that allow government agencies to focus on their core missions. GSA is the tip of the spear – we’re setting the example for other agencies and serving as a collaborative partner to help them cut wasteful contract spending, right size the federal real estate portfolio and deploy software to drive efficiency and productivity.

Path forward

GSA will focus on serving our customers, congressional partners and our communities to:

1. Optimize our Federal Buildings Portfolio.
2. Streamline and centralize procurement in support of the new Executive Order. 
3. Rationalize our IT infrastructure & Software as a Shared Service. 
4. Embrace GSA’s model (of efficiency) for ourselves.

Optimize our federal buildings portfolio

• Eliminate years of accumulated deferred maintenance liabilities: Liabilities now exceed $17 billion (compared to less than $5 billion ten years ago). In many cases, these liabilities exceed the value of the properties we own. For example, GSA recently sold the Webster School in Washington, D.C. This building sold for $4.1 million and reduced our deferred maintenance liabilities by more than $24 million. However, the bigger story is that this blighted vacant property was vacant for over 30 years within the historic Penn Quarter neighborhood. Now, with the support of a private developer, this property can be redeveloped, with the goal of revitalizing the neighborhood and contributing to the city’s growth.
• Increase office occupancy north of 80%: In addition to selling underutilized assets with large liabilities, we are taking advantage of leases in a cancellable state to save taxpayer money and further optimize our office space (our most recent survey data of a subset of buildings indicates average daily occupancy of 31%). We are actively working with our tenant agencies to assess their space needs to support the return to office while considering the impact of a downsized federal workforce across the country. 
• Support greater collaboration and sharing between agencies: Today, agencies across the federal government largely operate in silos. Within their real estate footprint, agencies typically lease/own their real estate and operate their facilities and infrastructure, both physical and IT, without any connection to other agencies, resulting in significant redundancy and inefficiency. There is a great opportunity to support greater interoperability between agencies.  

Streamline and centralize procurement

• Maximize the negotiating power of volume buying: In support of the Administration’s Executive Order, we’ll continue to centralize government procurement for common goods and services in order to negotiate the best prices for the taxpayer. We have already kicked off this effort with four agencies. We will ensure a strong partnership with each agency in order to meet each agency’s specialized procurement needs. 
• Streamline the procurement process and reduce the compliance burden to increase competition: Our goal is to restore merit-based opportunity and ensure contracts are awarded to those best positioned to fulfill government needs effectively and efficiently – we are working with our Federal Acquisition Regulation council partners and all stakeholders. We want to accelerate the adoption of best-in-class technologies by updating our compliance standards so that best-in-class enterprises and smaller businesses can compete for government business.
• Better technology tools for the contracting workforce: Improving the procurement technology infrastructure in order to create faster vendor onboarding, reduce paper based workflows, improve vendor management and improve data-driven decisions. 

Rationalize IT infrastructure and software as a shared service

• Consolidating the number of systems for each job: We will reimagine business processes and drive automation to deliver a superior experience for our employees and the American taxpayer. At the same time, we’ll standardize on one solution for each job in order to eliminate redundancy and wasteful spending. 
• Innovation: We’ll continue to pilot Generative AI to increase our team’s productivity with such initial use cases as an AI bot to search across all acquisition policies (saving time for our Contracting Officers) and internal directives/circulars (saving time for our policy team), as well as and code generation (driving productivity for our engineers).
• Centralizing our data to be accessible across teams: To increase collaboration and prepare for the future opportunities with AI, we need to break down the data silos and allow systems to better communicate with one another. 
• Increase Government’s access to best-in-class technologies: We are reimagining the FedRAMP authorization process to accelerate the adoption of secure, cloud technologies in order to modernize the government’s aging IT infrastructure.
• Optimize GSA’s cloud and software spending: We will save money and reduce redundancies conducting a line-by-line evaluation of every technology solution, ensuring we only pay for the licenses that we use and eliminate redundant systems. 

Embrace GSA’s model (of efficiency) for ourselves

• As we ask other agencies to consolidate and centralize their shared services, we’ll be reviewing our own GSA operations to ensure we are doing the same and realizing efficiencies where it makes sense. 

GSA has an important role to contribute towards the elimination of the federal deficit and enabling our customer agencies to move faster to accomplish their goals. We are the backbone of federal government operations and have an opportunity to innovate across federal procurement, real estate and technology shared services. The American people deserve a commonsense government that respects their tax dollars, prioritizes efficiency and delivers results. We at GSA are committed to making that a reality and driving government forward.