By Dino Grandoni, Maxine Joselow · The Washington Post (c) 2025
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has given a former oil executive and aide to Elon Musk broad latitude to cut costs and consolidate work within his vast department, which oversees more than 500 million acres of land across the United States.
In an order issued Thursday, Burgum put Tyler Hassen, who came to the Interior Department as a representative of the U.S. DOGE Service, in charge of a sweeping effort to “create significant efficiencies” and eliminate “redundant efforts” across the department. Hassen’s broad portfolio includes IT, human resources, training, financial management, international affairs, contracting, communications and other tasks.
With this unusual move, Burgum appears to be going further than most other Cabinet members in granting power to a DOGE representative who has not gone through a Senate confirmation process. Hassen’s decisions could have major implications for how Interior – which is responsible for maintaining national parks, protecting endangered species, and overseeing drilling in public lands and waters – operates going forward.
Conservationists accused Burgum of improperly ceding oversight to an unaccountable leader from DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, though it is not a Cabinet-level agency.
“If Doug Burgum doesn’t want this job, he should quit now,” Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement. “Instead, it looks like Burgum plans to sit by the fire eating warm cookies while Elon Musk’s lackeys dismantle our national parks and public lands.”
Before joining the Trump administration, Hassen worked for Basin Energy, an oil field equipment manufacturer and services company. After the inauguration, he was embedded in Interior as a representative of DOGE, and since March he has been delegated the authority of assistant secretary of policy, management and budget.
Sitting for a Fox News interview alongside Musk and other DOGE members in March, Hassen said his team was reviewing “every single contract, every single grant” at Interior.
“When things come to my attention that don’t make sense, I’m bringing them to Secretary Burgum,” Hassen added. “He’s a businessman. He’s very supportive of DOGE.”
Hassen has been scrutinizing all grants and contracts worth $50,000 or more, according to an Interior employee briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to comment publicly.
A second DOGE aide named Matt Luby has been deciding whether to approve new spending and has requested access to GrantSolutions, the internal system used to control all grant awards, the employee said. Luby is the chief of staff and childhood friend of Vivek Ramaswamy, who helped launch DOGE with Musk before departing to run for governor of Ohio.
The DOGE team at Interior has asked each office to provide a list of its grants that could be terminated, according to the employee familiar with the matter and emails reviewed by The Washington Post.
“In light of this very large existing grant program and our efforts to maximize taxpayer savings, we would appreciate it if you could please provide us with a list of $30-50M in discretionary grants that could potentially be terminated in the near future,” Hassen wrote in a January email to officials in the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement.
Hassen and Luby have also requested a list of all Interior grants going to Maine, the emails show. Trump has threatened to withhold federal funding from Maine unless the Democratic-led state complies with his executive order barring transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams.
In addition, Hassen has sought for his team to have access to a major personnel payroll system housed at Interior that serves more than 50 agencies and 276,000 employees across the federal bureaucracy.
Officials including Anthony Irish, one of Interior’s top career attorneys with about two decades of experience at the department, spelled out in a memo concerns over the unusual nature of such a request and the legal risks of allowing broad access to sensitive personnel files.
“Such elevated access to critical high-value asset systems is rare with respect to individual systems and no single DOI official presently has such access,” they wrote.
In response, Hassen sought to remove Irish from his job, accusing him of “subverting, obstructing and delaying” the granting of access. Irish remains on leave as of Monday, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which is representing Irish in challenging his proposed removal.
“Tony Irish is being punished for doing his job,” PEER executive director Tim Whitehouse said. “Elevating important concerns up the chain of command is how government is supposed to work.”
When reached for comment, the Interior Department declined to say when the reorganization will be complete and how many employees will be impacted. In a statement, Interior spokeswoman J. Elizabeth Peace said the department is “implementing necessary reforms to ensure fiscal responsibility, operational efficiency and government accountability.”
One of Hassen’s first tasks after President Donald Trump’s inauguration was visiting a Northern California water pumping station to push one of Trump’s long-standing priorities: rerouting water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state.
During his first campaign for president, Trump argued that too much water is allocated toward protecting an imperiled river fish called the delta smelt instead of going to farmers.
More recently, Trump accused California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) of protecting an “essentially worthless fish” instead of sending water to Southern California during the historic fires. But many experts dismissed Trump’s claim that the blazes could have been averted by transferring water from the north.
DOGE employees have also sought to control spending and staff at other environmental agencies. Reuters reported that the DOGE team at the Environmental Protection Agency is using artificial intelligence to monitor employees’ emails for hostility toward Trump and his agenda.
During a Monday briefing with reporters, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin declined to confirm the report on the use of AI. But he emphasized that he is overseeing the DOGE team at the agency, which has an office on the third floor of the EPA headquarters near his own executive suite.
“Anyone inside of the agency who’s working on a mission related to DOGE works for EPA,” Zeldin said. “We don’t have any non-EPA employees here inside of this building.”