The General Services Administration (GSA) is an independent agency of the United States government, established in 1949 to help manage and support the basic functioning of federal agencies. The GSA supplies products and communications for U.S. government offices, provides transportation and office space to federal employees, and develops government-wide cost-minimizing policies, and other management tasks.
GSA employs about 12,000 federal workers and has an annual operating budget of roughly $26.3 billion. GSA oversees $66 billion of procurement annually. It contributes to the management of about $500 billion in U.S. federal property, divided chiefly among 8,300 owned and leased buildings and a 210,000 vehicle motor pool. Among the real estate assets managed by the GSA are the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, DC, the largest U.S. Federal building after The Pentagon and the Hart-Dole-Inouye Federal Center which had previously been the Battle Creek Sanitarium run by John Harvey Kellogg.
GSA's business lines include the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) and the Public Buildings Service (PBS). Other divisions include the Office of Governmentwide Policy, and various Staff Offices, including the Office of Small Business Utilization, the Office of Civil Rights, and the Office of Citizen Services and Communications. The official U.S. government web portal, USA.gov, and the Spanish-language web portal to U.S. government services, GobiernoUSA.gov, are members of the Office of Citizen Services and Communication’s family of websites, which also includes pueblo.gsa.gov (the Federal Citizen Information Center), Kids.gov, ConsumerAction.gov, and WebContent.gov.
Read more about General Services Administration: History, Organization
Famous quotes containing the words general and/or services:
“The first general store opened on the ‘Cold Saturday’ of the winter of 1833 ... Mrs. Mary Miller, daughter of the store’s promoter, recorded in a letter: ‘Chickens and birds fell dead from their roosts, cows ran bellowing through the streets’; but she failed to state what effect the freeze had on the gala occasion of the store opening.”
—Administration in the State of Sout, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The community and family networks which helped sustain earlier generations have become scarcer for growing numbers of young parents. Those who lack links to these traditional sources of support are hard-pressed to find other resources, given the emphasis in our society on providing treatment services, rather than preventive services and support for health maintenance and well-being.”
—Bernice Weissbourd (20th century)