'We Don’t Want an AI Demo, We Want Answers’: Federal Workers Grill Trump Appointee During All-Hands

On Thursday, Stephen Ehikian, the acting administrator of the General Services Administration, hosted his first all-hands meeting with GSA staff since his appointment to the position by President Donald Trump. The auditorium was packed, with hundreds of employees attending the meeting in person and thousands more tuning in online. While the tone of the live event remained polite, the chat that accompanied the live stream was a different story.

“‘My door is always open’ but we’ve been told we can’t go to the floor you work on?” wrote one employee, according to Google Meet chat logs for the event obtained by WIRED. Employees used their real names to ask questions, but WIRED has chosen not to include those names to protect the privacy of the staffers. “We don’t want an AI demo, we want answers to what is going on with [reductions in force],” wrote another, as over 100 GSA staffers added a “thumbs up” emoji to the post.

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But an AI demo is what they got. During the meeting, Ehikian and other high-ranking members of the GSA team showed off GSAi, a chatbot tool built by employees at the Technology Transformation Services. In its current form, the bot is meant to help employees with mundane tasks like writing emails. But Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been pushing for a more complex version that could eventually tap into government databases. Roughly 1,500 people have access to GSAi today, and by tomorrow, the bot will be deployed to more than 13,000 GSA employees, WIRED has learned.

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Musk associates—including Ehikian and Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who now runs the Technology Transformation Services within GSA—have put AI at the heart of their agenda. Yesterday, GSA hosted a media roundtable to show its AI tool to reporters. “All information shared during this event is on deep background—attributable to a ‘GSA official familiar with the development of the AI tool,’” an invite read. (Reporters from Bloomberg, The Atlantic, and Fox were invited. WIRED was not.)

GSA was one of the first federal agencies Musk’s allies took over in late January, WIRED reported. Ehikian, who is married to a former employee of Elon Musk’s X, works alongside Shedd and Nicole Hollander, who slept in Twitter HQ as an unofficial member of Musk’s transition team at the company. Hollander is partners with Steve Davis, who has taken a leading role at DOGE. More than 1,835 GSA employees have taken a deferred resignation offer since the leadership change, as DOGE continues its push to reportedly “right-size” the federal workforce. Employees who remain have been told to return to the office five days a week. Their credit cards—used for everything from paying for software tools to buying equipment for work—have a spending limit of $1.

Employees at the all-hands meeting—anxious to hear about whether more people will lose their jobs and why they’ve lost access to critical software tools—were not pleased. "We are very busy after losing people and this is not [an] efficient use of time,” one employee wrote. “Literally who cares about this,” wrote another.

“When there are great tools out there, GSA’s job is to procure them, not make mediocre replacements,” a colleague added.

“Did you use this AI to organize the [reduction in force]?” asked another federal worker.

“When will the Adobe Pro be given back to us?” said another. “This is a critical program that we use daily. Please give this back or at least a date it will be back.”

Employees also pushed back against the return-to-office mandate. “How does [return to office] increase collaboration when none of our clients, contractors, or people on our [integrated product teams] are going to be in the same office?” a GSA worker asked. “We’ll still be conducting all work over email or Google meetings.”

One employee asked Ehikian who the DOGE team at GSA actually is. “There is no DOGE team at GSA,” Ehikian responded, according to two employees with direct knowledge of the events. Employees, many of whom have seen DOGE staff at GSA, didn’t buy it. “Like we didn’t notice a bunch of young kids working behind a secure area on the 6th floor,” one employee told WIRED. Luke Farritor, a young former SpaceX intern who has worked at DOGE since the organization’s earliest days, was seen wearing sunglasses inside the GSA office in recent weeks, as was Ethan Shaotran, another young DOGE worker who recently served as president of the Harvard mountaineering club. A GSA employee described Shaotran as “grinning in a blazer and T-shirt.”

GSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by WIRED.

During the meeting, Ehikian showed off a slide detailing GSA’s goals—right-sizing, streamline operations, deregulation, and IT innovation—alongside current cost-savings. “Overall costs avoided” were listed at $1.84 billion. The number of employees using generative AI tools built by GSA was listed at 1,383. The number of hours saved from automations was said to be 178,352. Ehikian also pointed out that the agency has canceled or reduced 35,354 credit cards used by government workers and terminated 683 leases. (WIRED cannot confirm any of these statistics. DOGE has been known to share misleading and inaccurate statistics regarding its cost saving efforts.)

“Any efficiency calculation needs a denominator,” a GSA employee wrote in the chat. “Cuts can reduce expenses, but they can also reduce the value delivered to the American public. How is that captured in the scorecard?”

In a slide titled “The Road Ahead,” Ehikian laid out his vision for the future. “Optmize federal real estate portfolio,” read one pillar. “Centralize procurement,” read another. Sub categories included “reduce compliance burden to increase competition,” “centralize our data to be accessible across teams,” and “Optimize GSA’s cloud and software spending.”

Online, employees seemed leery. “So, is Stephen going to restrict himself from working on any federal contracts after his term as GSA administrator, especially with regard to AI and IT software?” asked one employee in the chat. There was no answer.

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Zoë Schiffer oversees coverage of business and Silicon Valley at WIRED. She was previously managing editor of Platformer and a senior reporter at The Verge. ... Read more

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