Bill Zielinski, the assistant commissioner of the Information Technology Category (ITC) for the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service, is leaving federal service after 30 years.

In an email to colleagues, which Federal News Network obtained, Zielinski said he has taken a job as a CIO of a large city out west. He didn’t specifically say where he was heading.

He said his last day at GSA will be June 5. Laura Stanton, currently the deputy assistant commissioner for ITC, will take over on an acting basis.

“Although leaving GSA was a difficult decision, I am most confident that you are in good hands and will continue to transform the federal IT market and make great things happen on behalf of GSA, the agencies we serve and the American people,” Zielinski wrote in the email. “I will be proud to call myself an alumnus of GSA. There are so many newsworthy accomplishments of which GSA and ITC are a part and I’ve loved being able to tell my family how we help to improve the lives of the people of this country every day. We are often the silent partner whose name is never publicly mentioned, but the value we provide is clear.”

Additionally, GSA named Vera Ashworth as the new ITC deputy assistant commissioner. She will start May 26.

Ashworth comes to GSA from CGI Federal where she has been a vice president since 2005 focusing on agile and devops methods, business intelligence solutions and data analytics and cloud migration programs. This is her second stint in government. She worked at the Environmental Protection Agency for eight years in the early 1990s.

Zielinski  is  a big loss for the federal IT community as he leads several major initiatives.

He is leading the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) network and telecommunications modernization effort as well as the e-commerce platform initiative and a host of other hardware and software programs.

Zielinski came to GSA in 2016 as the deputy assistant commissioner for category management and became first the acting commissioner and then the full-time commissioner.

Before coming to GSA, he worked at the Office of Management and Budget for nine months as the branch chief for the agency oversight office. Before that, he was the CIO at the Social Security Administration for two years and regional commissioner for the San Francisco Region. He also spent two years as the associate director for retirement services at the Office of Personnel Management.

Stanton, who is well known throughout the federal community, has been with GSA for more than 22 years. She started as a national management intern in Chicago and worked her way up to be the deputy commissioner of the ITC starting 18 months ago.

Over her career, Stanton led the effort to create an acquisition gateway for agencies and vendors; most recently she is leading the e-commerce platform initiative and category management initiatives.

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