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One of the next moves in President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s sweeping effort to fire government employees and curtail operations is using the agency that manages thousands of federal employee worksites around the country to cut down on office space.
Last week, regional managers for the General Services Administration, or GSA, received a message from the agency’s Washington headquarters to begin terminating leases on all of the roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide, according to an email shared with The Associated Press by a GSA employee.
The order seems to contradict Trump’s own return-to-office mandate for federal employees, adding confusion to what was already a scramble by the GSA to find workspace, internet connections and office building security credentials for employees who had been working remotely for years.
But it may reflect the Trump administration’s belief that it won’t need as many offices due to its efforts to fire employees or encourage them to resign.
An independent agency, the GSA in essence acts like the federal government’s real estate broker, managing federal property for various agencies. President Harry S. Truman established the GSA in 1949, streamlining administrative duties of procuring workplaces for federal employees that had to that point been handled by a variety of entities.
As of last fall, the GSA owned and leased more than 363 million square feet of space in 8,397 buildings in more than 2,200 communities nationwide, according to the agency’s website. Those properties include courthouses, post offices and data processing centers.
Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency group have homed in on the GSA.
An email sent last week from GSA headquarters in Washington instructed regional managers to begin terminating leases on roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide.
“Lease terminations are the clear priority at this time,” according to a Jan. 29 email from a senior GSA manager, a copy of which was provided to the AP by a GSA employee.
In a follow-up meeting, GSA regional managers were told the goal is to terminate as many as 300 leases per day, according to the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
According to the employee who spoke to the AP, the initiative is being led by Nicole Hollander, who has been embedded in the GSA’s headquarters in recent days.
On her LinkedIn profile, Hollander describes herself as an X employee with a background in real estate, in the Washington area. Hollander’s X account — which shows that she joined in March 2015 but where posts date only to September 2023 — is full of posts related to X’s real estate acquisitions, as well as information about auctions of items from Twitter’s former offices after Musk purchased the platform.
