GSA Organizational Structure and Leadership

The General Services Administration is, in the plainest possible description, the federal government's landlord, office-supply clerk, motor pool, and travel agent, rolled into a single agency with about a dozen acronyms inside it. Understanding how the place is wired — who reports to whom, where the money flows, which Senate-confirmed official signs which document — turns out to be more useful than it sounds, because almost every other federal agency is a customer of GSA in one form or another. The org chart is, on close inspection, a set of nested mailrooms that happen to control a great deal of real estate.

The Administrator and the Deputy

At the top of the structure sits the Administrator of General Services, appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The Administrator runs the agency, signs off on its strategic direction, and represents GSA before Congress, the White House, and the wider executive branch. The position was created by the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949, the same law that created the agency itself, and the authorities are scattered through Title 40 and Title 41 of the U.S. Code — public buildings and property in the former, public contracts in the latter.

Below the Administrator, the Deputy Administrator handles day-to-day operations. The Deputy is also a presidential appointee but is not Senate-confirmed, which is one of those small constitutional distinctions that matters enormously when an administration changes hands and a Deputy can step in as Acting Administrator without a confirmation vote. Both positions are political, in the technical sense — they turn over with administrations — though the career civil servants beneath them tend to stay put through several presidencies, which is generally how anything actually gets done.

The Administrator's office, per the GSA organizational materials, includes a Chief of Staff, a White House liaison, and a number of senior advisors whose titles change from administration to administration. A Chief Operating Officer role sits in this orbit as well, though the title has migrated around the org chart over the years.

The two big services: FAS and PBS

GSA's real mass is concentrated in two services, each run by a Commissioner who reports to the Administrator.

The Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) is the part of GSA that buys things — or, more precisely, that arranges for other agencies to buy things through pre-negotiated contracts. FAS runs the Multiple Award Schedule program, which is the long catalog of approved vendors and pre-vetted prices that federal buyers can purchase against without re-running a full procurement. It runs Government-wide Acquisition Contracts (GWACs) for IT, the GSA Advantage shopping portal, GSA eBuy for solicitations, the Reverse Auctions platform, the SmartPay charge card program, the City Pair Program for federal airfare, the Federal Fleet, and GSA Auctions for surplus. It also publishes per diem rates, which is why anyone who has ever filed a federal travel voucher has, knowingly or not, interacted with FAS.

Inside FAS sits Technology Transformation Services (TTS), which is something of an organizational oddity — a digital services shop tucked into an acquisition service. TTS includes 18F, the in-house digital consultancy; Login.gov, the federal sign-in system; Cloud.gov, the platform-as-a-service for federal applications; and USA.gov, the public-facing front door to government information. TTS exists because, sometime in the 2010s, it became clear that the federal government needed people who could write software in-house rather than only buy it, and GSA was the agency willing to host them.

The Public Buildings Service (PBS) is the other half of the empire. PBS owns or leases the office space that most civilian federal agencies occupy. Its portfolio runs into hundreds of millions of square feet across thousands of buildings, ranging from federal courthouses and border stations to fairly ordinary office leases in suburban office parks. PBS publishes the P100 Facilities Standards, the document that tells architects and engineers what a federal building is supposed to look like and do — everything from elevator capacity to seismic design — and it runs the Leasing program, which negotiates with private landlords, and the Federal Property Disposal operation, which handles real property the government no longer wants. The legal authorities are, again, in 40 U.S.C., and the operational rules are in 41 CFR.

PBS is, financially, the larger of the two services, because real estate moves serious money and because the Federal Buildings Fund, which is how PBS is financed, captures rent from tenant agencies and recycles it into operations and construction.

OGP: the rule-writing office

The Office of Government-wide Policy (OGP) is the part of GSA that most federal employees never see directly but whose work shapes their daily life. OGP writes and maintains policy in areas where GSA has government-wide authority — federal travel regulation, federal property management regulation, federal acquisition regulation (in concert with the FAR Council), identity management, mail, transportation, and committee management. The Federal Acquisition Regulation, hosted at acquisition.gov, is the working document that governs how every executive-branch agency buys things; GSA is one of three signatory agencies, alongside DoD and NASA.

OGP does not deliver services to the public. Its product is rules, guidance, and standards. The work is unglamorous and consequential in roughly equal measure.

OIG: the watchdog that doesn't report to anyone in the building

The Office of Inspector General is part of GSA on the org chart but, in operational terms, deliberately not part of the chain of command. The Inspector General is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, and reports to Congress as well as to the Administrator — which is to say, the IG can investigate the Administrator. This is by design. Inspectors General across the federal government are creations of the Inspector General Act of 1978, and the structural independence is the entire point.

The GSA OIG audits GSA programs, investigates fraud against the agency (a perpetual concern in a place that signs contracts for a living), and reviews schedule contractors for pricing compliance. Its reports are public. Anyone curious about how a given GSA program is actually performing, as opposed to how it is described in the strategic plan, will find the OIG's audit reports a more candid read.

The eleven regions

GSA divides the country into eleven regions, numbered in a way that confuses everyone who encounters them for the first time because the numbering is not geographically intuitive. The regions are:

Region 1 — New England (Boston)
Region 2 — Northeast and Caribbean (New York)
Region 3 — Mid-Atlantic (Philadelphia)
Region 4 — Southeast Sunbelt (Atlanta)
Region 5 — Great Lakes (Chicago)
Region 6 — Heartland (Kansas City)
Region 7 — Greater Southwest (Fort Worth)
Region 8 — Rocky Mountain (Denver)
Region 9 — Pacific Rim (San Francisco)
Region 10 — Northwest/Arctic (Auburn, Washington)
Region 11 — National Capital Region (Washington, D.C.)

Each region has a Regional Administrator and parallel regional structures for FAS and PBS. The National Capital Region is its own region because the federal real estate footprint in and around Washington is large enough to warrant separate management — roughly a quarter of the entire PBS portfolio sits inside Region 11, which is why a region that covers two cities rates the same status as one that covers nine western states and the Pacific territories.

The regional structure exists because real property is local. A lease negotiation in Sacramento is, despite the federal nameplate, a Sacramento real estate transaction, conducted with Sacramento brokers and Sacramento construction contractors. Centralizing that work in Washington would be, to put it mildly, inefficient.

How appointments actually work

The appointment pattern at GSA is fairly typical for a mid-sized federal agency:

Senate-confirmed: Administrator, Inspector General. Two positions.
Presidentially appointed (no confirmation): Deputy Administrator, and a small number of senior White House appointee slots.
Non-career Senior Executive Service: A larger pool, perhaps a few dozen, including some Commissioners and senior policy roles. These are political but selected through SES processes.
Career SES: The Commissioners of FAS and PBS are sometimes career, sometimes non-career, depending on the administration. Regional Administrators have historically been a mix.
Career civil service: Everyone else, which is most of the agency's roughly 12,000 employees.

When an administration changes, the political layer turns over, the career layer stays, and an Acting Administrator runs the place — usually the Deputy, sometimes a senior career official — until a new Administrator is confirmed. Confirmation gaps of several months are routine; gaps of more than a year are not unheard of.

How the money flows

GSA's budget is unusual among federal agencies because most of it is not actually appropriated to GSA in the conventional sense. The agency runs on two large revolving funds plus a small slice of direct appropriations.

The Federal Buildings Fund captures rent paid by tenant agencies — the FBI pays rent on its headquarters, the Social Security Administration pays rent on its field offices — and that rent is then available, subject to congressional approval of obligation limits, to fund PBS operations, repairs, and new construction. The fund is, in concept, self-sustaining. In practice, Congress regularly limits how much PBS can actually spend out of it, which produces the long-running federal buildings backlog of deferred maintenance.

The Acquisition Services Fund finances FAS. When an agency buys something through a GSA schedule, GSA charges a small fee — typically a fraction of a percent — and that fee revenue funds FAS operations. Like the Buildings Fund, it is a working capital arrangement rather than an annual appropriation.

Direct appropriations cover OGP, the OIG, government-wide policy initiatives, and a handful of other functions that do not have a natural fee base. These are the parts of GSA that show up as line items in the annual financial services and general government appropriations bill.

The practical effect of this structure is that GSA's budget is mostly determined by how much business other agencies do with it, not by how much Congress decides to give it. An agency that buys more laptops generates more FAS fee revenue, which funds more FAS staff to process more laptop orders. The system has a certain elegant circularity, and also a certain vulnerability: when federal procurement slows, FAS shrinks; when procurement booms, FAS scrambles to keep up.

Where to read further

Anyone trying to understand who does what at GSA will find the agency's own organizational page reasonable as a starting point, the Strategic Plan useful for stated priorities, and the OIG's semiannual reports useful for what is actually happening. The statutory authorities in 40 U.S.C. and 41 U.S.C. are dry but determinative. The Federal Acquisition Regulation explains how the buying actually works.