WASHINGTON — On the rooftop patio of the General Services Administration headquarters, an agency staffer recently discovered something strange: a rectangular device attached to a wire that snaked across the roof, over the ledge and into the administrator’s window one floor below.
It didn’t take long for the employee — an IT specialist — to figure out the device was a transceiver that communicates with Elon Musk’s vast and private Starlink satellite network. Concerned that the equipment violated federal laws designed to protect public data, staffers reported the discovery to superiors and the agency’s internal watchdog.
The Starlink equipment raises a host of questions about what Musk and his efficiency czars are doing at GSA, an obscure agency that is playing an outsized role in the Trump administration’s quest to slash costs and bring the federal government to heel.
Among other clues that GSA is a critical cog in Musk’s stated efforts to slash billions of dollars in federal spending: people with ties to the entrepreneur or his companies hold key jobs at the agency. Its acting administrator is a Silicon Valley tech executive with expertise in rolling out artificial intelligence tools and a wife who once worked for Musk at his social media company, X.
An engineer at Tesla, the billionaire’s electric car company, runs the GSA’s technology division. And one of Musk’s trusted lieutenants is helping to spearhead the work of downsizing the government’s real estate footprint.
GSA oversees many of Uncle Sam’s real estate transactions, collecting and paying rent on behalf of almost every federal agency. It helps manage billions in federal contracts. And it assists other agencies in building better websites and digital tools for citizens.
It is so important because it is “a choke point for all agencies,” said Steven Schooner, a George Washington University law school professor who specializes in government contracting. “They can, in effect, stop all civilian agencies from purchasing, period. That’s everything.”
In a statement in early March, GSA said it planned to get rid of “non-core assets” and welcomed “creative solutions, including sale-lease backs, ground leases and other forms of public/private partnerships.”
The search for those cuts has engulfed the entire 12,000-person agency. At the helm of that push is the GSA’s acting administrator, Stephen Ehikian, the tech executive whose wife worked for X.
“GSA was built for this moment,” Ehikian told employees last month in a meeting, a video of which was viewed by The Associated Press.
“This agency is the backbone of federal government operations,” said Ehikian, who is seeking to expand automation — through the use of artificial intelligence — of many GSA functions. “We literally have an impact on the administration’s mandate right now, which is around efficiency.”
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Unloading real estate
Another close Musk adviser — Nicole Hollander — is driving the initiative to unload the government’s real estate. Her husband, Steve Davis, is acting as the de facto leader of the Musk-inspired Department of Government Efficiency.
Hollander, who studied business and real estate at George Washington University, is a licensed property manager in Washington, according to LinkedIn. Her profile also lists her as an employee of X since 2023.
In early March, the GSA real estate division released a list of hundreds of government-owned or leased properties it sought to sell in a frenzied rush.
The list drew sharp criticism from Democrats and civil society groups because it proposed the sale of the Justice Department headquarters and included at least one undisclosed Central Intelligence Agency facility. GSA quickly withdrew the list.
That did not stall DOGE’s fire sale. In the presentation viewed by the AP, Ehikian said the agency has canceled more than 680 leases, listed or sold at least 32 properties worth $185 million and cut more than $50 billion in contracts.
Hollander has mostly operated behind the scenes. She rarely appears in Zoom meetings, according to employees. Documents obtained by the AP show spreadsheets she creates are stripped of her name and replaced with a more generic “GSA leadership.”
The AP also obtained copies of some event invitations on Hollander’s calendar. They showed Hollander had several meetings with commercial real estate and services firms, including a brokerage firm and a real estate consulting company that helps companies economize their space. She also took meetings with a consortium of Washington technology companies.
Hollander did not respond to a request for comment sent over LinkedIn or through a GSA spokesperson.
It’s not the first time that Hollander has led a cost-cutting campaign for Musk. A lawsuit brought by fired Twitter employees in 2023 alleged that Hollander and Davis were part of a “cadre of sycophants” who were particularly zealous in implementing Musk’s mandate overhaul of the social media company.
