GSA looks to ‘meaningfully increase’ hiring to replenish its workforce 

The General Services Administration, the federal government’s landlord, is looking to increase its hiring after going through significant staffing cuts last year. 

GSA’s Public Buildings Service told staff in an internal notice last week that a total of 142 new vacancies have been posted to USAJobs, “reflecting our continued growth and need for talented individuals.” According to the notice obtained by Government Executive, PBS is hiring a mix of construction managers, lease contracting officers and building managers. 

GSA Administrator Ed Forst told office heads in a separate email that “we need to meaningfully increase our hiring in certain disciplines and decisively attract the best talent that will support GSA as we continue to grow as an agency.” 

“Recruiting the right people is one of the most important things we will do to strengthen our agency. The people we bring in will shape our capacity, our performance, and our ability to power the federal government for today and our future,” Forst wrote. 

An agency official familiar with the matter told Government Executive that 142 vacancies “constitutes just one week's worth of hiring news,” and that "GSA has a few hundred approved hiring opportunities, which will include external hires and internal merit promotions.” 

“Many positions have already been filled, and many more opportunities are in the offer or awaiting onboarding stage as GSA strategically invests to meet its evolving mission needs,” the official said. 

Current and former agency officials said significant hiring is needed at PBS to help it recover from last year’s deep staffing cuts. Since the start of the second Trump administration, PBS has cut its total workforce by more than 2,500 employees through a combination of layoffs, attrition and voluntary separation incentives. 

PBS cut its workforce by 45% between September 2024 and November 2025, according to a report in April from the Government Accountability Office. Agency officials told GAO that PBS didn’t conduct workforce planning before the staffing cuts.

In the early days of the Trump administration, Department of Government Efficiency officials embedded at GSA pushed for dramatic reductions in government office space, posting lease terminations on its online “Wall of Receipts.”  The DOGE website shows that 264 leases were eliminated, roughly a third of its earlier goal.

PBS employees said the agency’s staffing cuts have hampered its goal of offloading underutilized office space. A PBS employee said the agency lost nearly half of its workforce “but retained 100% of the work.” 

“Everything was being slow-rolled while they tried to terminate all soft-term leases,” the employee said. “Fast-forward to today, where we aren’t just sprinting, we are racing. Workloads have doubled for just about everyone. The workforce remaining is feeling the strain.” 

GSA officials told GAO that about a third of the staff responsible for processing disposals of GSA-owned properties left the agency, “creating uncertainty on whether properties were properly vetted and approved to begin the process.”

The agency, which manages 40% of the federal government’s office space, is accelerating plans to offload underutilized buildings and those falling into disrepair as part of a $50 billion maintenance backlog. Forst told members of the Senate Appropriations Committee in May that half of GSA’s buildings portfolio is in “fair” or “poor” condition. 

Forst and the heads of more than 20 federal departments and agencies asked Congress to give GSA full access to the Federal Buildings Fund, a pot of money that includes all rent payments GSA receives from its tenant agencies.

Over the past 15 years, Congress has skimmed about $1 billion annually from the Federal Buildings Fund to cover other expenses. Adjusted for inflation, Forst said that Congress has “looted” about $22 billion from the fund that would have otherwise gone to repairing and maintaining federal buildings.

The Public Buildings Reform Board, created by Congress under the 2016 Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act (FASTA) to help GSA identify properties it should offload from its portfolio, said congressional appropriations won’t address GSA’s maintenance backlog without a “radical reduction” of its real estate portfolio. 

The Trump administration, with GSA's assistance, is in the process of selling or consolidating headquarters buildings used by several agencies in the Washington, D.C. area. So far, it has announced plans to sell headquarters buildings for the Agriculture Department and Department of Housing and Urban Development. 

The Education Department plans to vacate its headquarters and hand it over to the Energy Department. The PBRB recommends selling the current Energy Department headquarters. 

Education employees under this plan would relocate to leased space that previously held staff for the now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development. 

The FBI is moving out of its headquarters building and relocating to the Ronald Reagan Building, just a few blocks away, which already provides office space for several other agencies. This week, a federal judge granted a permanent injunction blocking those plans. 

GSA is also embarking on plans to renovate its own headquarters. Once those renovations are completed in December 2028, the building will also serve as OPM’s headquarters. 

In the early days of the Trump administration, GSA officials pushed for deeper cuts to the PBS workforce, at one point seeking a 63% reduction in its workforce, which would have eliminated more than 3,500 total positions. But more recently, under new leadership, GSA has been taking steps to reverse those workforce cuts. 

PBS told staff in April that it’s looking to hire 400 employees over the next six months. Last fall, the agency offered another 400 laid-off employees the opportunity to come back to their jobs. 

Another PBS employee told Government Executive that “we don’t have enough people.” 

“They realize they let go of too many people and were inundated, because the kids at DOGE didn’t know what they were doing,” the employee said. 

A third PBS employee said “the cuts really had a brain drain effect that will take a decade to recover from.” A fourth employee said the agency’s hiring efforts were “replacements for all the firings.” 

“It does appear that GSA is doing some serious hiring to rebuild after last year,” a fifth PBS employee said. 

Tenant agency officials interviewed by GAO “voiced ongoing concern” about PBS’s capacity. One of its tenants, the Judicial Conference of the U.S., the national policymaking body for federal courts, is asking for control of courthouse property management. 

While the Judicial Conference of the U.S. has held this perspective for decades, the organization told Congress that the issue has worsened since the Trump administration cut the staff at the federal government’s real estate agency. 

Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sens. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. and John Boozman, R-Ark, introduced a bill last month that would give the federal judiciary authority to manage courthouse facilities in 10 judicial districts. 

“Managing the federal government’s real estate portfolio is an enormous undertaking, and too often our courthouses are at the bottom of the priority list for maintenance, repairs, and upgrades,” Cramer said in a statement. 

GSA’s Forst told the Washington Reporter that the Judicial Space and Facilities Management Effectiveness Act was “misguided,” and cited several GAO reports as evidence that the federal courts system is not prepared to manage its own facilities. 

“The Judiciary’s core mission is to deliver justice — not to manage buildings,” he said. 

A former PBS employee who received a RIF notice last year said the agency’s hiring push was “bittersweet” news. He said he considers himself “lucky for having landed a great new job” after the RIF, but his "former colleagues that are left need help with a relentless workload and there is so much to be done.”

“It was all just so random and terribly senseless, obviously,” he said about last year’s sweeping RIFs. “Honestly, I would never go back to [federal] employment under this administration and don’t envy anyone that is still there now. It’s just a real mixed bag of feelings.”