GSA appoints climate adviser

Jetta Wong will serve as the General Services Administration’s senior adviser to the administrator on climate, the agency announced Monday.

Most recently, Wong ran her own consulting practice and served as a senior fellow at the Center for Clean Energy Innovation at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Wong also has experience working in the legislative and executive branches of government. She served more than three years, from 2009 to 2012, on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology’s professional staff and worked for the U.S. Department of Energy in a variety of positions from 2012 to 2017. In one of those roles at Energy, Wong launched the National Laboratory Impact Initiative in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

Wong will provide climate insights to the administrator for GSA, which manages an enormous real estate portfolio of more than 370 million rentable square feet and oversees upwards of $75 billion in federal contracts.

GSA also announced the appointment Monday of Channing Grate as associate administrator in the Office of Strategic Communications. Grate had been serving as a deputy associate administrator for the past year, and as acting associate administrator since April, according to GSA.

Effective Aug. 1, Zoe Garmendia will transition from senior adviser to the administrator for COVID to deputy chief of staff for operations, and Gennie Duncan, who was a special assistant in the administrator’s suite, will move to policy adviser in the Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs.