Tyler Hassen, who Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency embedded at the Department of the Interior, has written an extraordinary book: Inside DOGE: The Real Story from a Senior Insider — must reading if you care about America’s future.
Hassen’s findings made news in late March 2025 on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier. Musk referenced a billion-dollar contract for a customer service survey that, writes Hassen, “I could have done … in high school.” (He would not have had misspellings.) Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whom Hassen extols, killed it after Hassen’s briefing, but not before Interior spent $100 million!
A Princeton graduate who held executive management positions with postings in New York, London, and five countries over his 20-year career, Hassen is the founder and CEO of Stable Crest Holdings LLC in Houston. In Washington in 2025, dressed like a banker amid engineers in hoodies and staff in jeans and T-shirts, Hassen, armed with his laptop, confronted bureaucratic gobbledygook. Worse: “No briefing packet. No onboarding manual. No list of priorities. Just: Figure it out.” Fortunately, Hassen and his colleagues figured it out.
Hassen was there because the national debt gnawed at him. “It wasn’t politics — it was math. We’ve grown used to the illusion that the bill never comes due. But the number is now over $39 trillion and rising.” Musk was his leader, and President Donald Trump (whom Hassen lauds as the reason DOGE existed) and Burgum were his bosses, but his clients were taxpayers.
At Interior, he found “two worlds colliding — [career employees] preserving how things have always been done [and political appointees] trying to change them in real time.” That produced resilience but also resistance that made it “almost impossible to know who truly believed in what we were trying to do. [Hassen] didn’t have the luxury of discovering it slowly.” He pursued competence, clarity, and “people who answered directly, moved quickly, and didn’t hide behind jargon.” Fortuitously, he found them and applauds their value, vision, and vigor.
Immediately, he flew to California to referee a water crisis, a “baptism by fire into the media world,” where Hassen “went from an anonymous executive in Houston to a public figure in one of the most politicized water fights in America.” “[P]erception isn’t just reality; it’s a weapon.” If a “narrative sets, facts become secondary.”
In Washington, Hassen scrutinized government contracts for “waste,” which Musk described: “Money is most poorly spent when you’re spending someone else’s money on people you don’t know. That’s the federal government.” After Hassen cracked the code concealing the worst waste and issued precise “data calls” forcing answers from bureaucrats, he found billions in “waste hiding in plain sight.” Equally profligate were 25,719 previously unreviewed grants totaling a “staggering” $26.7 billion.
Hassen uncovered a department awash in waste: Federal Advisory Committee Act creations of which Interior had 79, squandering time and money; “nonprofits” whose sole funding source — Interior — supported fat-cat executives; and 160 leases for empty offices countrywide. DOGE’s focus on “external vendors exploiting government inefficiencies” yielded a blind spot, which Hassen exposed: “[A] sprawling ecosystem of hidden service shops and embedded consultants, moving billions of dollars in ways most people … never saw.”
Despite Hassen’s and DOGE colleagues’ efforts, contracts continued to be issued, grants kept getting made, and employees were still being hired. Initially horrified by the suggestion, he agreed to lead one of Interior’s most important posts: assistant secretary for policy, management, and budget. “PMB wasn’t a niche policy office,” Hassen found out. “It was the nerve center of Interior.” There, Hassen controlled contract issuance, grant making, and reductions in force, including freezing the onboarding of probationary employees.
Hassen ascertained the Interior had 50 human resources offices with 2,000 employees coast-to-coast, ensuring chaos: 300,000 separate job descriptions for 70,000 employees! IT was no better: 18 chief information officers supervised 2,000 staffers. Worse was procurement: over 1,000 officers managed five contracts apiece! An expensive consulting firm spent five years studying consolidation and proposed another five years to oversee it. Hassen’s team took five weeks.
Musk warned: “There aren’t even fifty of us in this room — but there are millions of government workers who want us to fail.” Unfortunately, millions of others declared war on DOGE. Hassen, many of whose DOGE colleagues vote for Democrats, wondered when believing the federal bureaucracy is bloated and inefficient became a partisan issue.
DOGE’s “incredibly gifted” people suffered “long hours, data discipline, and a willingness to absorb criticism without flinching” while declining opportunities with “tremendous salaries and equity,” to “work for the American people.” In return, they got death threats! Nevertheless, the “turmoil” over DOGE did not alter its mandate to “reduce waste, streamline bureaucracy, and increase accountability.” Hassen remains hopeful for DOGE 2.0.
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Hassen characterizes Musk’s famous email to federal employees (“What did you do last week? Please write 5 accomplishments.”) as a mirror that, once held up “inside a bureaucracy, [reveals] who is willing to look — and who would prefer to turn it away.”
Hassen holds up a mirror to the people. Will they continue treating federal workers as untouchable, even sacred? If they do, public good becomes secondary, and reform becomes impossible. Having endured a similar experience at Interior during the first Trump administration, I hope Americans heed Hassen.
William Perry Pendley, a Marine, Wyoming attorney, and Colorado-based public-interest lawyer for three decades with victories at the Supreme Court of the United States, served in the Reagan administration, and led the Bureau of Land Management for President Donald Trump.