Stephen Ehikian, the acting head of the General Services Administration for the first six months of Trump 2.0 until his recent departure, says he’s left the agency in a better position than when he started.
He exited GSA a week ago to join the private sector and lead C3 AI, after being replaced by a State Department official, Michael Rigas, in late July. Shortly after Ehikian was sidelined, President Donald Trump nominated financial executive Ed Forst to officially lead the agency, pending Senate confirmation.
Some have interpreted the changes as a reining in of Department of Government Efficiency-affiliates, including Ehikian and GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service commissioner, Josh Gruenbaum.
A backend nerve center for the government with procurement, technology and real estate duties that cross agencies, GSA was an early stronghold for the controversial DOGE effort.
Tech billionaire and then-DOGE head Elon Musk himself visited the agency in January. DOGE associates were even spending nights in a GSA building in D.C., although during Ehikian’s first town hall at the agency, he told employees that there was no DOGE team at GSA when asked about the efficiency group.
“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/FCW when asked if he would’ve done anything different with DOGE.
He wasn’t “formally” part of DOGE, he said, but “believe[s] in the DOGE mission.”
Ehikian previously helped build two AI companies that were later bought by Salesforce, where he’s also worked. At GSA, he oversaw an effort to massively downsize the the agency’s workforce through both voluntary departures and layoffs. The agency has shed thousands of employees.
Ehikian also aimed to centralize procurement within GSA, streamline acquisition regulations, get rid of government real estate and push for the adoption of AI — including as a way to reduce headcount, and also have the technology assume the responsibilities of employees.
“I think we executed our strategy pretty well,” he said when asked about DOGE. “We came in with a vision of making the government more streamlined. I think we articulated it very well to the employees. I think it’s always hard slimming down, like that’s just never easy.”
“But I do believe the GSA is in a much better position coming … to now being phase two, which is the build back. Maybe that’s one thing I would say that wasn’t obvious to people,” he continued. “Like any restructuring, you have to get down to the studs, and that’s from a headcount reduction, program reduction, contract renegotiations.”
Ehikian, who himself met with Musk in late January, had reportedly told staff early on in the administration that he wanted to use “zero-based budgeting,” where all spending has to be justified starting from zero.
“I’m very sympathetic, because there was [sic] good people who left government, like really good people, and those are friends, those are colleagues,” he said. “But I do believe they moved over to higher productive use in the private sector.”
Among the GSA workers laid off was the entirety of the agency’s government technology consultancy group, 18F. The agency shuttered the office weeks after Musk posted that it had been “deleted” in response to a tweet from a rightwing activist calling the 18F a “far left” group.
More recently, the White House launched a government design initiative and associated hiring push, following the Trump administration laying off many designers and researchers across tech hubs in government, like 18F and the U.S. Digital Service, now DOGE.
Asked about the decision to close 18F — pinned on GSA and administration leadership at the time — Ehikian said that “across the board, my approach was to work my direct reports and their leaders to come up with a strategy for reduction. I gave specific targets. They worked with their teams, and they came back to me with a solution.”
“Ultimately it was reducing redundancy and throughout the agency, increasing speed and trying to be more efficient overall,” he said.
Part of the “build back” phase, Ehikian said, is AI. GSA rolled out a centralized AI platform for agencies, dubbed USAi, in August.
“I looked at the GSA role as providing the absolute best tools to our employees to be as productive as possible. … There’s so much opportunity to layer in more, larger, vertical applications of AI that I think we’re just in the beginning stages of evaluating,” he said, pointing to the potential beyond chatbots deployments in agencies to the use of the technology to automate procurement.
The former acting head of GSA is now working as the new chief executive officer of enterprise AI company C3 AI.
Ehikian said he was impressed with the company when he sat in on a demo as part of his work trying to deploy more AI at GSA. However, he can’t sell to GSA in this new role and isn’t involved in any discussions there, he said.
C3 AI recently saw shares tumble after it announced its fiscal first quarter results. The company is also the target of a new class action lawsuit from investors alleging that the company and its leadership made misleading statements.
Federal, state and local governments are a focus for Ehikian, he said, as well as “doubling down” on high-tech manufacturing, oil and gas and utilities. The federal sector was 20% of the company’s total bookings in fiscal 2025, per the company, which says that state and local business is also growing.
“I just think C3 has built a solution over 15 years that is the exact capabilities the United States government needs right now,” said Ehikian. “We do not have enough engineers in governments. We need help, and we are one of many partners that can be of service to the government.”