Remember when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) came in hot and basically wiped out thousands of federal employees? Well, plot twist: one of the agencies hit hardest by those cuts is now planning to bring hundreds of people back on board.

The General Services Administration (GSA), which basically runs the government’s IT infrastructure and real estate portfolio, is looking to hire approximately 400 new employees. The move was announced in an internal email sent by PBS chief of staff Donna Dix to employees on Monday. The Public Building Service (PBS) division, which manages federal buildings under the GSA umbrella, is focusing its hiring efforts on three main areas: facilities management, acquisition, and project management.

This is pretty wild considering what went down just over a year ago. Back in March 2025, PBS hemorrhaged hundreds of employees following the DOGE cuts. On top of that, the agency was ordered to sell off more than 500 government buildings, some of which literally housed government agencies and U.S. senator offices. One building on the chopping block was a sensitive facility in Northern Virginia that housed a CIA operation. Eventually, the GSA walked back those aggressive selling plans, but the damage to the workforce was already done.

Since then, things have gotten even messier. Instead of focusing on selling buildings, the GSA and PBS have been busy helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) expand its office presence across the country. Talk about a complete 180 from the original “slim down the government” pitch.

This isn’t even the first time PBS has tried to rehire cut employees. Back in September, hundreds of workers who’d accepted deferred resignation offers were given the chance to return to work. Basically, their forced time off became an extended paid vacation.

Stephen Ehikian, who was the acting head of the GSA, left the agency in September 2025 after overseeing massive layoffs. By May of last year, 2,100 workers had taken deferred resignation packages and another 1,000 were straight-up laid off. Ehikian claimed at the time that they were “restructuring” the agency to make it lean and mean, positioning it to “build back the way they want”. His wife, by the way, used to work for Elon Musk’s social media platform X.

Ehikian has since moved into the private sector, where he’s now running the enterprise AI company C3 AI. That gig hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing either, the company announced significant workforce cuts earlier this year, and its stock tanked 17 percent following the announcement.

So here we are: the GSA is hiring hundreds of workers after a year of chaos and disruption. Whether this is a genuine recognition that cutting too deep was a mistake, or just another chapter in the government’s ongoing identity crisis, remains to be seen.