Thomas Shedd is out as the chief information officer at the Labor Department.
The longtime Tesla engineer and current head of the Technology Transformation Services at the General Services Administration has been double-hatting as the acting head of Labor’s technology office since mid-March while also holding a leadership role at the General Services Administration.
Shedd was offboarded on Friday evening, Mangala Kuppa, Labor’s chief AI officer and chief technology officer, told employees in an internal meeting Monday morning, details of which were obtained by Nextgov/FCW. The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A new permanent CIO hasn’t been decided on yet, Kuppa said during the meeting, acknowledging that it “has been a time of change”
“It’s hard,” she said. “There will be a light at the end of the tunnel.”
Shedd’s departure comes as the tech office has lost over 40% of its staff through voluntary departures, one current employee told Nextgov/FCW. Shedd’s work at Labor was meant to be time limited from the start, they said on background as they weren’t authorized to speak on the record.
Beyond the tech shop alone, Labor has lost about 20% of its employees to the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program, early retirements and other voluntary departures, the Guardian reported in May.
“Most of the work has come to a stop. We are forced to justify every dollar spent,” the current employee said of the CIO office. “Most of that effort is spent on educating [Shedd] instead of trusting seasoned technical staff or setting clear budget goals managers can prioritize [their] work around.”
Other departments and agencies have also installed new red tape around purchases, as the Washington Post has reported.
There was a goal to “to reach a specific threshold in cuts,” the current employee said. “But in practice it’s clear there was no intent for actual savings. The losses in services, and time wasted fixing systems because a critical purchase as small as a website certificate was held up was significant.”
For now at least, it appears that Shedd is still in his positions at GSA as the head of the Technology Transformation Services and deputy commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, according to two current GSA employees, despite the recent departures of many day-one appointees at the agency. GSA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Shedd entered GSA at the start of the administration and has since sought to accelerate artificial intelligence adoption while slashing staffing at the tech shop.
