Robin Carnahan.
Robin Carnahan
Administrator at the GSA
As head of the General Services Administration, Robin Carnahan has made one thing perfectly clear this past year: It’s time to get federal workers back in the office full time both as a symbol and as a practical matter.
The move has been music to the ears of office owners in the Washington, D.C., area in particular, which counts on the federal workforce as the region’s animating tenant. (But this is something that no doubt is meaningful to office owners everywhere.)
To this end, then, in November, the agency piloted its first coworking spaces in Washington, Denver and San Francisco, allowing federal employees to test out the spaces for free. GSA is hoping to do more with coworking spaces in the year ahead as it encourages workers in its mission.
And it’s a big mission. The GSA owns or leases 371 million square feet of space on behalf of the federal government — and this doesn’t include post offices or federal laboratories and courthouses, which the GSA also run, or land border stations, for that matter.
GSA has also opened some space at its headquarters at 1800 F Street in Washington, D.C., for agencies to test new products and different space configurations and to learn what it would be like to have their teams work in different environments. Again, the hope is it will encourage workers to head back to the office. It’s part, too, of GSA’s Workplace 2030 initiative, a strategy to rethink federal office space in light of the widespread adoption of telework during the pandemic.
Just last month, speaking at a conference hosted by the Partnership for Public Service, Carnahan said that government departments now have the uncommon combo of both the funding and the political will to upgrade services, and that GSA is laser-focused on hiring the best talent to improve operations and reinforce its culture.
Additionally, Carnahan and the GSA spent the past year committed to ensuring that through GSA’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS) government agencies will make their technology and websites easier to use. For instance, GSA spent the past 12 months working to eliminate misrepresentations within Login.gov, a secure sign-on service provided by TTS, to boost customer trust and transparency.
