The Senate voted to confirm Edward Forst, a long-time Wall Street executive, to lead the General Services Administration (GSA) as its next administrator.
Before leaving town for the holidays on Thursday, the Senate approved Forst’s nomination in a 53-43 vote along with almost 100 other Trump administration appointees.
In a post to LinkedIn announcing Forst’s Senate confirmation, GSA said he is “fired up and ready to get to work and execute the White House’s agenda.”
During his confirmation hearing in October, Forst said he would further investigate federal agencies’ use of Grok, the artificial intelligence system developed by xAI, which is owned by former senior White House Advisor Elon Musk.
Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., said Grok has been found to generate antisemitic and biased content, and he asked whether Forst would temporarily halt its use. Grok won a GSA OneGov deal and is deployed throughout the Pentagon.
The content “would concern me, and I’d like to learn more,” Forst said, and agreed with Peters that it could send “the signal we would [not] necessarily want to send to the country.”
President Donald Trump nominated Forst in July. GSA has been without a Senate-confirmed administrator since Robin Carnahan left in January during the transition from the Biden administration to the second Trump administration.
Forst’s nomination came weeks after Trump had tapped Michael Rigas, the deputy secretary of state for management and resources, to serve as the acting administrator of GSA.
Rigas took over the role from Stephen Ehikian, who had served as the acting administrator since January.
Forst most recently served as a chairman and partner of Lion Capital, a private equity firm headquartered in London, from 2020 to 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Forst also spent 16 years at Goldman Sachs, and he was briefly an advisor to the Treasury secretary between 2008 and 2009.