The General Services Administration (GSA) is shifting its modernization efforts from experimentation to execution, Administrator Ed Forst said Oct. 20 at Google Public Sector Summit 2026 in Washington, D.C. He outlined plans to give employees greater freedom to pursue ambitious projects and deliver results faster.
Forst said GSA’s next phase will build on a first year focused on encouraging experimentation and giving employees the confidence to try new approaches.
“The first year for GSA has been experimentation. Get people comfortable. This next year is going to be about how do we embolden people to take big steps for what we see and what we can do next,” Forst said.
Forst described GSA as “the machine to the mission of the government,” pointing to its role in supporting federal agencies through real estate, procurement, technology, and other services.
GSA manages approximately 8,500 real estate assets across all 50 states and oversees $126 billion in products and services through federal contracts. Forst said the scale of those responsibilities makes it critical for the agency to operate more efficiently and improve outcomes.
One effort, Project 410, challenges employees to rethink how much they can accomplish within a set period. Named for the 410 days it took to build the Empire State Building, the initiative uses the landmark’s construction timeline as a benchmark to accelerate progress.
“In that amount of time, how much can you get done?” Forst said. “How do we go ahead and accelerate from the successes of today?”
GSA is also looking to its workforce for new ideas through GSA Labs, a program launched in April 2026 to identify high-performing early- and mid-career employees and organize them into small teams with executive sponsorship to tackle agency challenges.
Forst said the program is intended to give employees more freedom to develop solutions outside their existing management structures.
“We want to embolden people, we want to unshackle people from their existing leadership structure,” he said.
GSA Labs drew more than 300 internal applicants, and 25 employees were selected for its initial cohort. Participants are working on projects aimed at solving agency problems and improving interoperability across systems and processes.
“A lot of that was about how do we take these tools and what can we do next to make the American people better, to make the federal government better,” he said.