GSA Plans to Hire Hundreds After DOGE Staff Cuts
▼ Summary
– The General Services Administration’s Public Building Service is hiring approximately 400 people, focusing on facilities management, acquisition, and project management.
– This hiring follows major 2025 layoffs and building sales ordered by Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, which heavily impacted the PBS division.
– The agency has since scaled back its property sales and is instead assisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with a national office expansion.
– Hundreds of PBS employees were previously offered a return to work in late 2025 after accepting a deferred resignation, making their layoff a temporary separation.
– Stephen Ehikian, the former GSA head who oversaw the layoffs, now leads a private AI firm that recently announced significant workforce cuts.
Just over a year following major federal workforce reductions, the General Services Administration is moving to rebuild its ranks. The agency plans to fill approximately 400 positions within its Public Building Service division, a direct response to earlier staffing cuts. This hiring initiative, approved by the GSA Strategic Hiring Committee, aims to strengthen the agency’s core operational teams.
An internal email from PBS chief of staff Donna Dix announced the plan, expressing enthusiasm for addressing critical workforce needs. The recruitment effort will concentrate on facilities management, acquisition, and project management, areas identified as having the most significant demand. The GSA itself declined to comment on the new hiring wave.
This move represents a notable shift for the PBS, which manages the federal government’s real estate portfolio. In March 2025, the division lost hundreds of employees due to cuts orchestrated by the Department of Government Efficiency. That initiative, championed by Elon Musk, also initially mandated the sale of over 500 government buildings, including a sensitive Northern Virginia complex housing CIA facilities. The agency has since scaled back those property disposal plans, instead focusing resources on supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement expansion. Reporting from February confirmed GSA and PBS were actively assisting ICE in leasing office space nationwide for a major growth campaign.
The current hiring push is not the first attempt to restore PBS staffing levels. Last September, hundreds of former employees were offered the chance to return to work after accepting a deferred resignation package, turning a six-month separation into an extended leave period. These earlier cuts were implemented under former acting GSA head Stephen Ehikian, who left the agency in September 2025. He previously stated the layoffs presented an opportunity to restructure and slim down the organization, putting it in a phenomenal position to rebuild as desired. At the time, official figures indicated 2,100 workers took deferred resignation and another 1,000 were laid off.
Ehikian, whose wife previously worked for Musk’s company X, has since transitioned to the private sector as the head of enterprise AI firm C3 AI. That company announced its own substantial workforce reductions earlier this year, a move that triggered a 17 percent drop in its stock price.
(Source: Wired)
