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Part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s plan to slash spending and personnel is to boost attrition by depressing morale, sources told the Washington Post.
To do that, up to half of the government’s nonmilitary real estate will be liquidated, the report said, resulting in office closures and forcing workers to make longer commutes to comply with President Donald Trump’s return-to-office mandate.
“We’ve heard from them that they want to make the buildings so crappy that people will leave,” a senior official at the General Services Administration, which manages federal property, told the Post. “I think that’s the larger goal here, which is bring everybody back, the buildings are going to suck, their commutes are going to suck.”
Once those workers leave, the plan is to use artificial intelligence, according to the report, with DOGE staffers applying AI tools to government records to figure out how to replace humans. At the GSA, managers have been told that DOGE plans to automate a majority of jobs.
“The end goal is replacing the human workforce with machines,” another source told the Post. “Everything that can be machine-automated will be. And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”
The U.S. DOGE Service, which was reorganized from the U.S. Digital Service to enact DOGE’s agenda, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Wired magazine reported this week that DOGE is developing a chatbot for GSA called “GSAi” to boost employee productivity by analyzing contracts and drafting documents.
The GSA owned and leased 8,397 buildings as recently as this past fall in more than 2,200 communities nationwide, according to the agency data cited by the Associated Press.
On Jan. 29, GSA headquarters told regional managers to begin terminating leases on roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide, according to an email seen by the AP. A source also told the AP that the GSA’s goal is to terminate up to 300 leases per day.
That added to the GSA’s confusion as it was scrambling to find workspaces and fulfill IT needs for the civil servants who were expected to return to offices.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration offered buyouts to 2 million employees to reduce the federal headcount, though a judge temporarily blocked that on Thursday as the deadline to accept the offer neared.
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