White House Pushes GSA’s Doan Out the Door GSA Administrator Lurita Doan has resigned under pressure from the White House, ending a tumultuous 22-month tenure. “I was asked to submit my resignation, and I have just done so,” Doan wrote in an April 29 email to colleagues, obtained by Federal Computer Week. She clung to office for nearly a year after several members of Congress called for her resignation and the government’s Special Counsel urged President Bush to discipline her “to the fullest extent” for alleged ethics violations. The Special Counsel, who monitors violations of the Hatch Act, said Doan had improperly brought partisan politics into the workplace at a 2007 briefing for GSA political appointees. Several employees said she asked how GSA could help “our candidates” in the next election. Doan insisted she did not remember saying that. The White House had not commented since the Special Counsel submitted his report last May. Doan carried on a long-running public feud with GSA Inspector General Brian Miller. He accused her of improprieties and she accused him of intimidating and harassing employees. Two outside investigations cleared Miller, but Doan refused to accept the findings. She recently told Government Executive magazine, "I will stay on this issue like a dog on a bone.” That comment came just days before the White House asked her to resign. "It has been a great privilege to serve our nation and a great President,” Doan said in a message to the agency’s employees. “The past twenty-two months have been filled with accomplishments: together, we have regained our clean audit opinion, restored fiscal discipline,re-tooled our ability to respond to emergencies, rekindled entrepreneurial energies, reduced bureaucratic barriers to small companies to get a GSA Schedule, ignited a building boom at our nation's ports of entries, boldly led the nation in an aggressive telework initiative, and improved employee morale so that we were selected as one of the best places to work in the Federal government. These accomplishments are made even more enjoyable by the fact that there were lots of people who told us they could never be done. I have great faith in the abilities of GSA’s dedicated team.” Doan founded an IT services company, New Technology Management Inc., in 1990. By the time she sold it in 2005, the former 8(a) firm had more than $200 million in federal contracts. She called GSA “a turnaround.” When she took over, the agency was battling a slowdown in sales growth on its schedules, undergoing a reorganization, and offering buyouts to several hundred employees. Doan blamed many of her clashes with agency executives on their resistance to her agenda of change.