GSA Services and Staff Offices: A Complete Breakdown

The General Services Administration is, depending on how you squint at it, either the federal government's landlord, its purchasing department, its travel agent, its fleet manager, or the people who run the website you used to renew your passport. It is, in fact, all of these. The agency has roughly twelve major components and eleven regional offices, and the easiest way to make sense of the whole arrangement is to walk through it slowly, because the names of the offices rarely give away what they actually do.

The two big services

GSA divides its operational work between two large services and a constellation of staff offices that support them. The two services are the parts that touch the outside world.

Federal Acquisition Service (FAS)

The Federal Acquisition Service is the buying half of GSA. If a federal agency needs laptops, cybersecurity consulting, office chairs, satellite imagery, or several thousand gallons of fuel, FAS is generally the route by which it acquires them. The mechanism is contracts — long, pre-negotiated contracts that other agencies can use without having to start from scratch.

The flagship of these is the GSA Multiple Award Schedule, sometimes still called the Schedules program by people who remember when there were many of them. According to GSA, the MAS consolidates what used to be a sprawl of separate schedules into a single contract vehicle covering everything from professional services to industrial products. Vendors who want on it follow what GSA calls the MAS Vendor Roadmap, which is roughly the bureaucratic equivalent of a hiking trail with very specific signage.

FAS also runs several adjacent purchasing tools: GSA Advantage, which is essentially an online catalog for federal buyers; GSA eBuy, for soliciting quotes; GSA Reverse Auctions, where vendors bid prices downward; and the Government-wide Acquisition Contracts, or GWACs, which are specialized vehicles for IT. There is, charmingly, no single name that covers all of this, because each was invented at a slightly different moment to solve a slightly different problem.

Tucked inside FAS is the Technology Transformation Services, or TTS, which is where GSA does its software work. TTS contains 18F, a consultancy of designers and engineers who help other agencies build digital products; cloud.gov, a platform for hosting government applications; login.gov, the federal identity service that lets a person use one account across many agencies; and USA.gov, which is the official public-facing front door to the federal government. The fact that these are all run by what is technically a sub-office of a sub-service of GSA is one of those small administrative facts that nobody minds until they have to explain it on a flowchart.

FAS also runs the travel and logistics programs that quietly hold the federal workforce together. These include the GSA Per Diem Rates that determine what a federal employee can spend on a hotel in Boise; the City Pair Program, which negotiates airfare on common government routes; the SmartPay charge card program, which is the largest commercial payment solution in the world by volume; and the Federal Fleet, which manages government vehicles. When surplus property leaves federal hands, it often does so through GSA Auctions or, for real estate, the Federal Property Disposal site.

Public Buildings Service (PBS)

The Public Buildings Service is the landlord half. PBS owns or leases the offices, courthouses, border stations, and warehouses where federal civilian agencies do their work. According to GSA's real estate documentation, PBS operates one of the largest property portfolios in the country, split between government-owned buildings and leased space.

Two documents matter here more than the rest. The first is the P100 Facilities Standards, GSA's design and construction handbook for federal buildings — a thick reference text that tells architects how loading docks should work, how elevators should be specified, and what ceiling heights are appropriate for which kinds of office. The second is the leasing program, which is how PBS handles the considerable share of its portfolio that the government does not own outright.

PBS sits on top of a body of statute, principally Title 40 of the U.S. Code (Public Buildings, Property, and Works) and the Federal Property Management Regulations at 41 CFR. These are the legal scaffolding that explains, among other things, why the federal government cannot simply buy a building the way an ordinary tenant might.

The staff offices

Around FAS and PBS sit the staff offices — the support functions that keep the agency running and accountable. They are smaller, less publicly visible, and in several cases legally required to exist.

Office of Government-wide Policy (OGP)

OGP is the office that writes the rules other agencies follow when they buy things, manage real estate, run fleets, handle travel, or dispose of property. It does not do procurement itself. Instead, per GSA's policy and regulations material, it produces the policy framework that makes federal acquisition and asset management roughly consistent across departments. A great deal of what appears in the Federal Acquisition Regulation, hosted at acquisition.gov, exists because OGP and its counterparts at other agencies negotiated it into being.

Office of Inspector General (OIG)

Every major federal agency has an Inspector General, and GSA is no exception. The OIG audits and investigates GSA's own programs — which is to say, it watches the watchers. It is structurally independent of the GSA Administrator, which is the point. When something goes wrong with a contract or a building lease, the OIG is generally the office that issues the report explaining what happened.

Office of Civil Rights

The Office of Civil Rights handles equal-employment-opportunity complaints inside GSA and oversees compliance with civil rights laws as they apply to GSA programs and the public who interacts with them. Its existence is a statutory matter, not a discretionary one.

Office of Communications and Marketing

This is the office that issues press releases, manages the gsa.gov web presence, and coordinates public-facing messages. It is also, in practice, the office that translates internal GSA jargon into something a journalist or a citizen might be able to parse on a first reading.

Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs

GSA, like every executive-branch agency, has to talk to Congress regularly — about budgets, about specific buildings, about whatever a constituent has written to a senator about. The Office of Congressional Affairs is the staff who handle that traffic. They also coordinate with state, local, and tribal governments, which is the "intergovernmental" half of the name.

Office of General Counsel (OGC)

OGC provides legal advice to the Administrator and the rest of the agency. Because GSA's work touches contracts, real estate, intellectual property, employment, and procurement law all at once, the General Counsel's portfolio is unusually broad for an agency of its size. Lawyers here are the people who decide whether a clause in a lease is enforceable or whether a vendor's protest has merit.

Office of Human Resources Management (OHRM)

OHRM runs the personnel side of GSA — hiring, classification, benefits, labor relations. The agency has employees scattered across all eleven regions, working in jobs that range from contracting officer to building engineer to user-experience designer, and OHRM is the office that keeps those employment relationships coherent.

Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO)

The CFO and the OCFO handle GSA's budget, accounting, and financial reporting. Because most of GSA's funding comes through revolving funds — the Acquisition Services Fund and the Federal Buildings Fund — rather than direct appropriations, the financial machinery is somewhat unusual. Other agencies effectively pay GSA for services rendered, and OCFO is the office that keeps track of all of it.

Office of the Chief Information Security Officer (OCISO)

OCISO is responsible for the security of GSA's own information systems. Given that GSA runs login.gov, cloud.gov, SAM.gov, and several other systems that other agencies depend on, OCISO's remit extends beyond merely protecting GSA's internal email. The office sets security policy, runs incident response, and oversees compliance with the federal information-security frameworks that apply to all of this.

A note on SAM.gov, which is the System for Award Management: it is the consolidated registry where any entity wanting to do business with the federal government registers itself, and it is operated by GSA on behalf of the entire executive branch. Anyone who has ever tried to register a small business as a federal vendor has met SAM.gov, usually with mixed feelings.

The eleven regions

GSA divides the country into eleven regions, numbered in a sequence that has historical reasons rather than geographic ones. Each region has its own regional administrator and its own staff, and each handles both PBS and FAS work within its territory.

Region 1 — New England, headquartered in Boston, covering Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Region 2 — Northeast and Caribbean, headquartered in New York, covering New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Region 3 — Mid-Atlantic, headquartered in Philadelphia, covering Delaware, Maryland (mostly), Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia.
Region 4 — Southeast Sunbelt, headquartered in Atlanta, covering Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
Region 5 — Great Lakes, headquartered in Chicago, covering Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
Region 6 — Heartland, headquartered in Kansas City, covering Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska.
Region 7 — Greater Southwest, headquartered in Fort Worth, covering Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Region 8 — Rocky Mountain, headquartered in Denver, covering Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.
Region 9 — Pacific Rim, headquartered in San Francisco, covering Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, and the Pacific territories.
Region 10 — Northwest/Arctic, headquartered in Auburn, Washington, covering Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.
Region 11 — National Capital Region, headquartered in Washington, D.C., covering D.C. itself and the surrounding parts of Maryland and Virginia.

The National Capital Region exists separately from Region 3 because the federal real-estate footprint in and around Washington is large enough to merit its own organization. Region 11 alone manages a portfolio that includes some of the most recognizable federal buildings in the country, which is the kind of fact that sounds obvious only after someone has pointed it out.

How to read the chart

Anyone holding the official GSA organizational chart for the first time tends to notice that it has a lot of boxes. The trick to reading it is to keep three categories straight. There are the services — FAS and PBS — which are the parts of GSA that actually deliver something to other agencies or to the public. There are the staff offices — OGP, OIG, OGC, OCFO, OCISO, and the rest — which exist to support, advise, oversee, or constrain the services. And there are the regions, which are how the services are physically distributed across the country.

GSA's published Strategic Plan, which lays out the agency's priorities over a multi-year horizon, treats these three categories as a system rather than a hierarchy, and that is probably the right way to think about it. A new federal courthouse in Cincinnati involves PBS for the building, FAS for the construction services contract, OGC for the lease and acquisition law, OCFO for the funds, OCISO for the IT, the regional office (Region 5, in this case) for the local execution, and OGP for the policies that govern all of the above. None of these can do the project alone, which is, when you stop to look at it, the whole point of having a General Services Administration in the first place.