GSA Shared Services Has the Framework but it still Needs Follow-Through

What a decade of modernization reveals about the inhibitors that keep adoption from paying off.

The federal government spends roughly $25 billion a year on mission support functions like payroll, HR, financial management, cybersecurity, and grants management. In2019, OMB estimated that shifting more of that work to shared services could save between $1.25 billion and $7.5 billion a year. GSA answered with a governmentwide push to consolidate these functions instead of letting every agency run its own version. A GAO report released in February 2026 checked in on how the push is going. Adoption is climbing, but the obstacles slowing it down are the same ones GSA named when it built its first modernization framework back in 2016.

‍$25B spent yearly on mission-support functions

$7.5B top-end annual savings OMB projected

167 agencies now on a shared cybr service

2016 year the M3 framework launched

GSA Built the Framework

Instead of every agency building its own payroll or HR platform, OMB designates lead agencies as Quality Service Management Offices, or QSMOs, to run these functions for everyone. GSA coordinates the work, convening the Shared Services Governance Board, setting performance standards, and maintaining a catalog of what agencies can buy. In2016 it added the M3 framework to guide migrations: a six-phase plan, a playbook drawn from more than 100 shared services experts, and a mandatory Investment Review Process so OMB could catch problems early. The scaffolding has kept maturing. OMB pre-designated GSA in March 2026 to stand up an Acquisition QSMO, and in May the Federal Acquisition Service reorganized around five portfolios, one of them an Office of Shared Services Delivery.

The Same Inhibitors, a Decade Later

GAO's February report, Federal Shared Services: Adoption Challenges Underscore the Need for Consistent Leadership, found real growth. 167 agencies or subagencies now use shared services for cybersecurity, 165 for general HR, 134 for financial management, 112 for grants management, and 110 for payroll. Agencies reported efficiencies, savings, and stronger security. They also flagged the same obstacles GSA set out to fix in2016: too few options that meet an agency's requirements, legacy technology, not enough staff to run a transition, systems too deeply embedded to integrate cleanly, and no reliable data on pricing or vendor lock-in. Ten years after M3, GSA is still being asked to fill the same governance seats and build the same data pipeline the original framework assumed would already be in place.

Legacy Integration Is the Hard Part

Integration is the toughest technical problem, because the systems shared services need to reach were never built to connect to anything. Agencies that stall are usually the ones trying to rip out and replace. The ones that move modernize around the core instead, linking the systems they already run so operations keep working while the foundation is rebuilt. In practice that means connecting data across the legacy and cloud platforms already in use, rather than forcing agencies to start over.

GSA and the QSMOs are on the right track. The work now is to connect, scale, and customize what they built.

Migration Stalls Without the People

The other half of the picture is people. Migrations bog down when staff do not understand the new processes and quietly fall back on the old ones. Closing that gap takes human-centered design, clear training, and deliberate change management, so the people expected to use new systems actually do. It also takes leadership and GAO's central finding is that the governance seats accountable for implementation keep going unfilled, and without consistent leadership the rest of the effort drifts.

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Data and Grounded AI Close the Gap

GSA's next move is less about shared services themselves and more about the evidence and tools that make them work. It starts with the performance data the framework always assumed, real-time dashboards that track compliance and cost, so leaders can see what is working and fine-tune the rest. Automating case management frees up the staff agencies say they do not have. And secure AI tools, grounded in an agency's own data instead of generic models, give people output they can trust. Flexible, scalable solutions that connect what agencies already run are what let shared services work across agencies and line up with each mission.

GSA built a workable framework with M3 in 2016, and the adoption numbers in GAO's latest report  show agencies used it. What is missing a decade later is the leadership commitment and performance data that were supposed to follow, plus technology that fits the systems agencies already rely on. Close that gap and shared services will finally deliver the savings OMB projected in 2019. Connecting legacy and cloud systems, standing up real-time dashboards, automating the  busywork, and deploying AI that agencies can trust is exactly the work HumanTouch does best.