An agency watchdog is taking a closer look at some of the initiatives led by the Department of Government Efficiency and whether those projects are meeting their intended goals.

The inspector general’s office for the General Services Administration, in a list of priority audits for fiscal 2026 released Thursday, said it will look at the impact of several DOGE-backed projects at GSA — including its mass termination of government leases and its decision to shutter its tech office 18F.

Early in the Trump administration, GSA became a focal point for the Trump administration’s government efficiency agenda. Officials from the DOGE set up camp within GSA’s headquarters; at one point, DOGE officials across the federal government dominated a list of personnel allowed past security on the sixth floor of GSA’s headquarters, where the administrator’s office is located.

GSA has gone through a shakeup of its leadership, and DOGE officials no longer reside in its headquarters. But DOGE’s legacy on government operations will take up a considerable portion of the IG office’s work in fiscal 2026.

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Rolando Goco, the assistant inspector general for auditing, said the audits outlined in next year’s plan “represent our highest priorities.” The list, he added, reflects legal and statutory requirements, as well as issues raised by GSA management and the IG office’s “own assessment of challenges and risks facing GSA.”

“Our goal in developing the fiscal year 2026 audit plan is to ensure we provide the audit oversight necessary to prevent and detect waste, fraud, and abuse in GSA programs and operations and make them more economical, efficient, and effective,” Goco wrote.

Mass termination of office leases

Among its priorities, GSA OIG plans to audit the agency’s mass termination of leases for government office space.

GSA OIG wrote that its audit would look at whether the Public Buildings Service’s lease terminations “were cost-effective, appropriately supported the tenant agencies’ needs, and complied with applicable laws, regulations, and PBS leasing policies and guidance.”

At DOGE’s urging, GSA tried to terminate nearly 1,000 government leases, but significantly scaled back those plans after getting pushback from tenant agencies.

At one point, GSA officials planned to carry out multiple waves of mass lease terminations in fiscal 2025, but those plans stalled.

A “wall of receipts” on DOGE’s website now estimates that these lease terminations have yielded far less cost savings than previously expected. The DOGE website says that nearly 350 leases have been successfully terminated, leading to $140 million in cost savings.

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GSA owns and leases over 363 million square feet of space in more than 8,300 buildings. Under the Trump administration, GSA sought to cut its real estate portfolio in half.

Return-to-office mandate

GSA OIG also plans to take a closer look at whether GSA employees are complying with the Trump administration’s mandate to return to the office full-time.

GSA OIG wrote that its audit would assess whether GSA employees “have returned to their official duty stations full-time,” as required by President Donald Trump just days after taking office.

Former DOGE leader Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, a DOGE champion who was originally expected to co-lead the project, called for federal employees to return to the office full-time in a November 2024 Wall Street Journal op-ed.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration is conducting a similar review to see if IRS employees are showing up to the office as often as they claim.

More broadly, GSA is helping other agencies capture data to determine how many employees are working in the office, and whether government buildings are fully occupied.

Federal News Network first reported in April that GSA leaders discussed how implementing new technology could help track federal building occupancy governmentwide.

Michael Peters, the former commissioner of the Public Buildings Service and a DOGE representative, told employees in a town hall meeting that many agencies, including GSA, do not have accurate numbers on how full offices are on any given day.

“We literally don’t know how many people are in our buildings,” Peters said during the town hall. “We kind of have an idea of how many people are in this building, which is good. But we should know it for every one of the facilities that we own or lease, because that’s a fundamental metric.”

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Peters also said that GSA is setting an 80% utilization goal for federal buildings, adding that the current occupancy of federal buildings is well below that goal.

18F contracts

GSA OIG is also taking a closer look at steps the agency took to wind down projects at its tech shop 18F, after firing all of its employees in late February.

GSA’s IG office wrote that its audit would determine the agency’s close-out of 18F projects was “in compliance with regulations, guidance, and agreements.”

In an appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board, former 18F employees said they were “unlawfully targeted” by DOGE.

In February, Musk posted on X  that 18F “has been deleted,” in response to another post questioning the team’s work developing Direct File, a free, online tax filing platform launched by the IRS last year. GSA shut down 18F a few weeks after Musk’s post.

Former 18F employees leading the MSPB appeal said that at the time of the mass layoffs, 18F had unfulfilled projects “worth tens of millions of dollars,” and other “high-impact, public-facing projects” in the works.

“GSA lost money and continues to do so because on-going projects that involved 18F staff and those in the pipeline that involved 18F staff and those in the pipeline will not be maintained or completed,” the appeal states.

Former 18F staff said the organization charged fees to other agencies for its services, and that its work “mostly paid for itself.”

Audit of GSA’s OneGov Strategy for IT Software

GSA OIG’s audit includes a closer look at governmentwide software deals that the agency struck with tech companies, often for a nominal sum far less than the value of those products and services.

The watchdog office wrote that its audit will focus on whether GSA has established “measurable targets that allow it to determine if it is meeting OneGov’s strategic goals and accurately calculates reported savings estimates.”

GSA, under its OneGov strategy, also struck lower-cost deals for governmentwide services from several companies —including Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon AWS, Box, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Salesforce, Adobe, DocuSign, Uber, ServiceNow and Elastic.

On Thursday, GSA also cut a deal with Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI to deploy its AI model Grok across the federal government, for only $0.42 per organization until March 2027.

“We look forward to continuing to work with President Trump and his team to rapidly deploy AI throughout the government for the benefit of the country,” Musk said in a statement.

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