Hundreds of federal employees in the United States have been lost to Elon Musk’s cost-cutting blitz.
According to an internal memo obtained by the Associated Press, the General Services Agency (GSA) has either accepted or refused employees who managed government workspaces until the weekend to return to work.
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Those who accept it must report their mission on October 6th, after what constitutes seven months of paid leave. Meanwhile, the GSA acquired the high costs given to taxpayers.
“In the end, the outcome was that the agency was broken and left understaffed,” said Chad Becker, a former GSA real estate agent.
“They didn’t have the people they needed to perform basic functions.”
Becker, who represents the owners with government leases for Arco Real Estate Solutions, said the GSA has been in “triage mode” for several months.
He said the sudden reversal of the negative size reflects how government efficiency (DOGE) went too far and too fast under Musk’s previous leadership.
The GSA was founded in the 1940s and centralized the acquisition and management of thousands of federal workplaces.
That return request reflects rehiring of efforts at several agencies that Doge has targeted.
Last month, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said it would allow employees who have been offered to resign to stay at work.
The Labor Bureau also revives employees who shopped, while the National Park Bureau revives many previously purged employees.
Important to the work of such an institution is the GSA, which manages many buildings.
Since March, thousands of GSA employees have left the agency as part of a program that encourages resignation or early retirement.
Those subject to the recall notification were rejected as part of a proactive push to reduce the size of the federal workforce. Those employees did not show up for work, but some continue to pay.
GSA representatives did not answer detailed questions issued by the agency on Friday regarding the notification of return to work.
They also refused to discuss potential cost overruns, or staffing decisions, or potential cost overruns, generated by reversed plans to close the lease.
“The GSA leadership team is reviewing workforce behavior and adjusting the best interests of the client institutions we serve and the American taxpayers,” an agency spokesman said in an email.
Democrats attacked President Donald Trump’s indiscriminate approaches to significantly reduce costs and jobs.
Arizona leader Greg Stanton, a top Democrat on the subcommittee overseeing the GSA, told the Associated Press there was no evidence that the agency cuts “provided savings.”
“It has created costly disruptions while undermining the very services that taxpayers rely on,” he said.
Doge has identified an agency that had around 12,000 employees at the start of the Trump administration as the main target of a campaign to reduce federal fraud, waste and abuse.
A small cohort of Musk’s trusted aides embedded at GSA’s headquarters, sometimes slept in the sixth floor bed of the agency, pursuing a plan to suddenly cancel almost half of the federal portfolio’s 7,500 leases.
Doge also wanted the GSA to sell hundreds of federal-owned buildings with the goal of generating billions of savings.
The GSA began by sending over 800 lease cancellation notices to landlords, often without notifying government tenants. The agency has also published a list of hundreds of government buildings intended for sale.
The Government Accountability Office, an independent parliamentary oversight body, is investigating the management of GSA’s labor force, lease termination and planned building disposals, and is hoping to issue the findings in the coming months, said David Marroni, a senior GAO official.
