The General Services Administration is the agency behind the Multiple Award Schedule, the federal buildings most contractors visit and the systems, from SAM.gov to USAspending.gov, that the contracting community uses daily. It is also an agency with a story: born of a postwar effort to make government more efficient, reshaped by every major procurement reform since, and still evolving. A short history explains why it does so many different things.
Postwar consolidation
After World War II, the federal government found itself with sprawling, duplicative administrative operations. A commission chaired by former President Herbert Hoover studied the executive branch and recommended consolidating supply, property and records functions into a single agency. Congress responded with the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949, and GSA was established on July 1 of that year. It absorbed several existing bodies, including the Bureau of Federal Supply, the Public Buildings Administration and the War Assets Administration, which had been disposing of surplus wartime property. The National Archives was also part of GSA for several decades before becoming independent in 1985.
Supply schedules and centralized buying
The idea of a government-wide schedule of pre-negotiated prices predates GSA, but the new agency made it a central tool. Federal Supply Schedules allowed agencies to order common products from approved vendors without running their own competitions, saving time and leveraging the government’s buying power. Over the decades the schedules expanded from supplies into services and information technology, and in a major consolidation completed in 2020, GSA merged dozens of separate schedules into a single Multiple Award Schedule with one set of terms. Today the schedule program is one of the largest contract vehicles in government and a common entry point for small businesses.
Buildings, vehicles and technology
GSA’s Public Buildings Service became the government’s landlord, constructing, owning and leasing office space for civilian agencies and managing a portfolio that includes courthouses, border stations and historic buildings. A separate line of business manages the federal motor vehicle fleet. In the 1990s and 2000s, as information technology became a dominant category of federal spending, GSA developed governmentwide acquisition contracts for IT and, in 2005, merged its Federal Supply Service and Federal Technology Service into a single Federal Acquisition Service.
The systems contractors use
GSA also became the steward of much of the government’s acquisition infrastructure. The System for Award Management consolidated several older registration and reporting systems into SAM.gov, and GSA manages related databases on contract awards, performance information and federal spending. Its role in maintaining the FAR, as one of the three signatories to the regulation along with the Defense Department and NASA, gives it a hand in the rules themselves.
What the history explains
- GSA is both a buyer and a service provider; it negotiates schedules that other agencies use and manages facilities and systems for the whole government
- Its schedule program carries decades of accumulated practice, which is why its terms, pricing rules and reporting requirements are detailed
- Its data systems are the public face of federal contracting, from registration to award records
- Its mission of efficiency and consolidation, present since 1949, continues to shape how categories of spending are managed across government
For a contractor, understanding GSA means understanding the vehicles and systems through which a large share of federal business flows. The agency publishes its history, program guides and current schedule information at gsa.gov. Knowing how the pieces came to be makes the current landscape far less bewildering.