Federal Agency Hit by DOGE Layoffs Prepares to Hire Hundreds of New Staff

One year after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) implemented mass layoffs that cut thousands of roles from the U.S. federal workforce, one agency heavily impacted by those cuts is now moving to add hundreds of new employees.

The General Services Administration (GSA), the federal body that oversees the U.S. government’s IT infrastructure and national real estate holdings, is looking to fill roughly 400 open positions across its Public Building Service (PBS) division, according to an internal email obtained by WIRED.

“We’re thrilled to announce that the GSA Strategic Hiring Committee has approved the PBS staffing plan designed to address our workforce needs and strengthen our teams,” read the email sent to PBS employees Monday by division chief of staff Donna Dix.

The email added that the new hiring push will prioritize roles in “the most significant areas of need: facilities management, acquisition, and project management.” GSA has not responded to a request for comment on the initiative.

PBS, which manages all federally owned public buildings under GSA’s oversight, lost hundreds of employees in March 2025 to DOGE’s cost-cutting layoffs. At the time of the cuts, WIRED reported that the division was also ordered to sell off more than 500 federal properties. The list of properties for sale included buildings housing federal agencies and U.S. Senate offices, plus a sensitive secured complex that hosts a CIA facility in Northern Virginia. The agency has since walked back the scope of its sale plans, and instead refocused its resources on supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as ICE carries out a massive expansion across the U.S. As WIRED reported in February, GSA and PBS have been assisting ICE with leasing new office locations nationwide as part of that expansion campaign.

This is not the first time PBS has moved to rehire or restore roles eliminated by DOGE cuts. In September 2025, hundreds of former PBS employees were offered the chance to return to their jobs months after they accepted a deferred resignation offer, turning their six-month separation from the agency into an extended paid break.

Stephen Ehikian, the former acting head of GSA who led the agency’s mass layoffs, left GSA in September 2025. By May that year, 2,100 GSA workers had accepted deferred resignation deals, and another 1,000 were laid off permanently. “The opportunity we had was to restructure [GSA], slim it down, and now the team's in a phenomenal position to build it back the way they want,” Ehikian told Nextgov at the time of the layoffs. Ehikian has close ties to Musk: his wife previously worked at X, Musk’s social media company.

Since leaving federal service, Ehikian has moved to the private sector, where he now leads enterprise artificial intelligence firm C3 AI. Earlier this year, C3 AI announced its own large round of workforce cuts, and the company’s stock dropped 17 percent in the immediate aftermath of the announcement.