The first all-hands meeting hosted by President Donald Trump’s pick to head the General Services Administration set off a behind-the-scenes verbal onslaught by frustrated employees who turned to the meeting’s livestream chat to vent their anger.
That’s according to a new report in Wired, which obtained leaked chats detailing plans broadcast by GSA’s acting administrator Stephen Ehikian at an agency-wide meeting on Thursday – and the outraged employees’ response.
“‘My door is always open’ but we’ve been told we can’t go to the floor you work on?” one employee chided in the Google Meet chat logs for the event obtained by Wired.
Another employee, whose real name Wired chose not to include to protect their privacy, told others in the chat: “We don’t want an AI demo, we want answers to what is going on with [reductions in force]. That post stoked over 100 GSA staffers to add a “thumbs up” emoji in favor of it.
But despite their hidden protests, an AI demo is exactly what they received, according to the report.
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“During the meeting, Ehikian and other high-ranking members of the GSA team showed off GSAi, a chatbot tool built by employees at the Technology Transformation Services,” according to the report. “In its current form, the bot is meant to help employees with mundane tasks like writing emails. But Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been pushing for a more complex version that could eventually tap into government databases.”
The bot is expected to be deployed Friday to more than 13,000 employees within the GSA, a massive increase of the roughly 1,500 people who currently have access to it, Wired said.
But that didn’t seem to illicit exactment from employees, who the publication noted are “anxious to hear about whether more people will lose their jobs and why they’ve lost access to critical software tools.”
"We are very busy after losing people and this is not [an] efficient use of time,” one employee wrote. Another chimed in: “Literally who cares about this?”
“When there are great tools out there, GSA’s job is to procure them, not make mediocre replacements,” one more GSA employee added, according to Wired’s reporting.
“Did you use this AI to organize the [reduction in force]?” another federal worker posed to the chat.