DELTA SMELT

9 26 //

-=-=

thinc

Experts on everything. DOGE whiz sought to dump water farmers will need this summer, and take a selfie doing it.

These are the same guys rifling thru your financial and medical data.

A group of Department of Government Efficiency agents repeatedly pressured a federal official to open a large water pump system in California — and then flew there to do it themselves, according to a new report.

DOGE staffers attempted to pressure the acting head of the Bureau of Reclamation to open a water pump system, CNN reports. The staffers wanted to send the water to Los Angeles amid the devastating wildfires in January — even though the system wouldn’t have allowed it to reach the scorched city, CNN reports.

Despite this, they still decided to take matters into their own hands.

In January, DOGE staffers called the Bureau of Reclamation claiming President Donald Trump wanted water pumps turned on at the Jones Pumping Plant, which sends water to the state’s Central Valley, CNN reports.

But when the official didn’t give in, staffers Tyler Hassen and Bryton Shang flew to California to open the pumps themselves and get a photo while doing so, CNN reports. But two issues stopped them.

First, the power was off due to planned maintenance. Second, Shang wasn’t an official federal employee yet, meaning he couldn’t access the pump. Hassen couldn’t do it either, CNN reports, because he had to fly back before the power would be restored.

“They didn’t get their photo op,” an unnamed source with knowledge of the incident told CNN, adding it represented “what DOGE has been this entire time — this slapstick operation of 20-somethings they’re seeing as whiz kids but have zero knowledge.”

Instead, the DOGE X account posted a photo of Shang and Hassen in front of a map, along with other pictures of the plant.

–

Soon after the visit, Trump ordered the US Army Corps to open up two Southern California dams at the end of January. This release sent water rushing toward farmland in the San Joaquin Valley, the Los Angeles Timesreports, prompting concern from farmers.

“This is going to hurt farmers,” water consultant Dan Vink told the outlet. “This takes water out of their summer irrigation portfolio.”

ABC 30 Fresno:

But word of a water release out of both Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Lake Success came as a shock to many.

South Valley farmers weren’t happy to see the outward flow. That stored water represents their spring and summer supply, and irrigating crops isn’t their priority right now.

“There’s enough snow above Lake Kaweah to, essentially if it all melted off, fill it halfway full. So the idea to release any was questionable,” Zack Stuller with the Tulare County Farm Bureau said.

Stuller says farmers usually get a 10-day to two-week heads up when water will become available.

“But the fact to release that much that quick where we can’t use it was bizarre,” Stuller said.

The Hill:

Jay Lund, an environmental engineer at the University of California, Davis, also noted the breadth and complexity of water management efforts in California, which involve diverse water demands; hydrology and infrastructure; substantial decentralization; and numerous laws, regulations and contracts. As such, he continued, state and federal projects that proceed without intergovernmental and local coordination can falter in terms of effectiveness and wastefulness.

“The recent federal orders to release additional water from some small Tulare basin reservoirs did not have substantial benefits for farmers, who it seems would have preferred to have these releases later and coordinated with them for summer irrigation or groundwater recharge,” said Lund, who is also vice director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis.

“The releases were disconnected from and had no effect on water availability in the Los Angeles region,” he added. “The releases seem to have been more symbolic of some rough longer-term federal intention.

-=-=

EXMR

NO LNX CITE TO SPECIF

Posts by William Perry Pendley

Read the latest stories and analysis from William Perry Pendley.

An Elon Musk insider shares what he found in Washington — and it should terrify youOp-Eds

An Elon Musk insider shares what he found in Washington — and it should terrify you

William Perry Pendley

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.

paste fail see dogebags

txt

-=-=

EXMR

NO LNX CITE TO SPECIF

Posts by William Perry Pendley

Read the latest stories and analysis from William Perry Pendley.

An Elon Musk insider shares what he found in Washington — and it should terrify youOp-Eds

An Elon Musk insider shares what he found in Washington — and it should terrify you

William Perry Pendley

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.

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.

TRUMP FOUGHT UNELECTED BUREAUCRATS. NOW THEY’RE BEING CODED INTO IMMORTALITY

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.

-=-=

WAPO

In his first major interview about his tell-all memoir, Tyler Hassen describes the culture clash surrounding DOGE’s mission and the backlash that followed.

September 21, 2026

By Elizabeth Dwoskin

Tyler Hassen’s initiation into Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, started as a series of tests.

The Houston oil executive says he was given vague instructions to show up at an unfamiliar D.C. address. He hastily packed three suitcases and flew east, taking an Uber to a building that he soon learned belonged to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. He was whisked to a private office, acutely aware that his tailored suit stood out among the hoodie-clad engineers “too locked in” to their laptops to look up. He was ordered to go through the website of the Department of Commerce and, within days, find two to five ideas to present to Musk.

He checked into a nearby J.W. Marriott and told his wife he didn’t know how long he would be gone.

Thus began an 11-month stint at the center of a national firestorm — an exhilarating, chaotic and sometimes scary experience, Hassen told The Washington Post, in his first major interview detailing his forthcoming memoir and plans. The memoir, “Inside DOGE: The Real Story From a Senior Insider,” which recounts his time working for the secretive cost-cutting group, is the first tell-all to emerge from one of the most controversial periods of President Donald Trump’s time in office — a moment Hassen said he would gladly live through again.

“There’s this misconception that we all just went in there and didn’t really think about what we were doing,” Hassen said, speaking virtually from a hotel room in San Diego. “I spent 24/7 thinking about it, waking up at 3 in the morning thinking, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ … And I know I did.”

At the heart of the book is a split screen: For many Americans, Musk’s project was a callous showcase of bending government to a billionaire’s will, associated with tens of thousands of federal layoffs, reams of lawsuits, an AI-enabled effort to kill off wasteful contracts and the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

But Hassen’s memoir enters a different vision into the historical record: He portrays a period marked by a clash in worldviews, in which hardcore capitalists are granted unprecedented power to change a system that they argue operates under completely different incentives, logic and norms.

Tyler Hassen said he wanted to do something to bring down the national debt. (Courtesy of Tyler Hassen)

To Hassen, whose pre-government career involved turning around distressed companies, “DOGE was not radical,” he writes in the book. It was “not a wrecking ball, but a catalyst.”

In conversation, Hassen comes across as mild-mannered, a distant temperament from Musk, who famously brandished a red metallic chainsaw as a metaphor for cutting government waste. A 43-year-old dad with Boy Scout energy, he doesn’t cut the image of the nerd-engineer DOGE bro. He spent his entire adult life “hiring, firing, reorganizing and rescuing failing businesses” in industrial manufacturing and the energy sectors — a skill set that appealed to Musk, his longtime deputy, Steve Davis, and Baris Akis, a venture capitalist who served as a volunteer recruiter.

But for years, Hassen seethed with rage over the national debt, now at $40 trillion. He felt angry that the amount the U.S. spends annually just to service that debt is more than the government spends on national defense and many other public benefits.

So he raised his hand — making a cold outreach to Musk through a network of business world connections, he said in the interview, and pressed the point.

“I’m staring at my daughter, who is 5, and thinking about her at 25 with $100 trillion of debt. And I know if we don’t do something about it now, we’re going to be there,” he said. “We’ve got to fix it now.”

Hassen on DOGE's mission

In an exclusive interview with The Post, Hassen on Sept. 18 addressed what he considered a misconception behind DOGE's mission. (Video: The Washington Post)

By its own accounting, DOGE fell far short of the $2 trillion Musk claimed he would save, and an independent report from the Government Accountability Office has found DOGE’s own savings figures to be flawed. But Hassen told The Post he believes the effort was a success.

“Did we eliminate the deficit? No. Of course not,” he said. “But we made it on the top of everyone’s minds, albeit briefly, for a few months, that this deficit is something that we need to fix.”

In the book, he argues that “DOGE fit squarely” within a tradition practiced by some Democratic presidents, from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, who also sought to shrink bloated government. DOGE was different, he goes on to concede, because of its speed, “faster than Washington was ready for and faster than its defenses could absorb.”

But Hassen insists that DOGE was not cruel, a word that appears six times in the memoir, often in relation to laying off federal workers. The refrain can read as a plea for reconsideration of an effort he argues was poorly understooD.

“In the private sector, there’s an understood bargain,” he writes. “You’re hired to create value. If the value disappears, so does the job. It isn’t personal. It isn’t cruel. It’s the operating system of capitalism.”

Government, he argues in the book, runs on a different logic. Value is “presumed,” “permanence is the default,” and “the moral burden of proofs falls on anyone who questions headcount — no matter how bloated the system becomes.”

After the screening process, Musk and Davis deployed Hassen to the U.S. Department of the Interior, a sprawling agency that manages roughly 500 million acres of federal land and property, national parks, and tribal territories. He took the assignment, he wrote, because he knew “very little” about the agency and the challenge was appealing.

Hassen was eventually promoted by Doug Burgum, the wealthy businessman who heads the agency, whom Hassen described as something of a kindred spirit. He became acting assistant secretary of policy, management and budget and stayed on until November — months after Musk himself had left Washington.

During his tenure at DOGE, Hassen says, he put in 14-hour days, working nights and weekends. During the chaotic period he saw his then-4-year-old daughter only a handful of times. He said he relished the minutiae of the job: poring over grants written in what appeared to him to be bureaucratese, disassembling bloated org charts and consolidating departments.

He says he encountered a bureaucracy more labyrinthine and redundant than he could have ever imagined. He caught spelling errors in a project description written by a vendor charging hundreds of millions of dollars, which he saw as proof of a systemic malaise. The contract, he writes, “stopped me cold.” (To drive home the point, a photo of the paperwork with the spelling error is published in the book.)

He told The Post he was exhilarated to get deep into the bowels of the bureaucracy and deploy his corporate-honed skill sets to attack a problem that had long troubled him.

During his first week at DOGE, the team met in a sparse conference room on the top floor of the SpaceX offices — empty except for a giant American flag on the wall, “because it reminded us why we are here,” he told The Post. “We had billionaires to 22-year-olds who had dropped out of Harvard, all sitting there on our laptops working with public information — trying to figure out how we can help solve this deficit, this crisis that we’re in.”

As the group grew, the meetings moved to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. There, he told The Post that he would present to Musk on a weekly basis, receiving the world’s richest man’s undivided attention. “He has this ability to grasp so many things, from California water to certain contracts,” he said. “We would talk about certain departments for 45 minutes — and how can we fix this — and we’d stay until 2 in the morning.”

One time, after a particularly grueling session, Hassen said, he had to sneak out of the White House grounds to sleep. “I was so tired,” he said.

During his time at Interior, Hassen was almost like a Where’s Waldo character, popping up at key moments that caught the country’s attention. When wildfires struck California, Hassen made an unusual decision to fly to the state to grill local officials about why the state’s largest water plant wasn’t running at full capacity.

The image of him at the Jones Pumping Plant in California became one of the first posts from the DOGE X account identifying its members — prompting a flood of hateful messages and threats to Hassen and his family, he said.

When Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico, it fell to Hassen to officially register the rechristened Gulf of America in the Interior Department’s Geographic Names Information System — a move that then triggered a broader recognition of the name change on Google Maps and other online directories.

Hassen says he felt the difference in mindset between the public and the private sector every day. “It showed up in the way career staff spoke about ‘the workforce’ as something apart — almost sacred,” he writes. “Until we can say out loud that government is a workforce like any other — noble in purpose, human in composition, and subject to reality like everything else — reform will look like cruelty before it looks like competence.”

Former DOGE staffer defends his work

Defending his work under DOGE, Tyler Hassen on Sept. 18 said he would do it all over again if given the chance. (Video: The Washington Post)

There is a clear cognitive dissonance between DOGE insiders like Hassen, who saw himself taking on a deeply patriotic project, and many Americans, who according to polls viewed DOGE disapprovingly.

Not surprisingly, Hassen believes the media is one culprit — treating “every reduction as a moral offense” and framing DOGE leaders’ demands for accountability as a “cruelty experiment,” he writes.

But in the book, Hassen also reflects on how DOGE’s failure to communicate hurt its reputation.

Though DOGE was announced with great fanfare — and its website broadcast tallied savings — in practice the project was highly secretive, with DOGE members often showing up in agencies wielding great power before ever appearing on an org chart.

In the six months before the ill-fated cost-cutting effort imploded, its staff gave just a handful of interviews. Two, including one with Hassen, were on Fox News, and he told The Post that he almost backed out. They were done, Hassen writes, only in response to prodding from then-White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Katie Miller, the political operative and podcaster who acted as a communications liaison for Musk’s effort.

DOGE members were private citizens, fearful of being personally targeted and unfamiliar with the media apparatus that is part of Washington culture, he says. But fundamentally, the DOGE crew wanted to stay completely focused on the mission itself, he writes. The team was well aware that they needed to move with speed, as they might soon be slowed down by lawsuits, Congress or other bureaucratic forces.

“We were there to work. We weren’t there to be public figures,” he said in the interview.

In the book, Hassen implies that this was, to some degree, a miscalculation. “Once we stepped back, others were happy to define the work for us.”

Ultimately, DOGE did lose control of the narrative, leading to a dramatic split between Trump and Musk five months after DOGE began and leaving the project in the lurch. The night of that split, Hassen said, he paced around the Interior Department like a ghost. The next morning, he went to the agency gift shop and bought his daughter a T-shirt that said “Future Secretary of the Interior.” He thought it might be his last night in D.C.

Hassen’s experience working with AI for the first time at DOGE led him to take a new job leading Zone Frontier, a former cleaning supply firm with a new mission to provide infrastructure and permitting to the data center industry. Musk’s longtime lawyer, Alex Spiro, has also joined the board of directors, something Hassen said was a pure coincidence.

He says he hopes the legacy of DOGE will be that the country’s most gifted citizens will seek to serve their government. Instead of draining the swamp, he says, he wants to flood it with talent and energy.

“These are some of the best and brightest we have in America,” he said of the DOGE team. “I’m honored to be even a part of them.”

Faiz Siddiqui contributed to this report.

-=-=

WAPO? CITY DESK NTBCW JRNL BS

https://citydesk.org/2025/04/21/interior-secretary-gives-doge-aide-sweeping-powers-to-remake-department/

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.”

-=-=

Controversial Interior Department Aide From DOGE to Leave Agency

Tyler Hassen, a former oil executive who had spent time on Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team, faced criticism because he had been given broad authority to make changes at the department.

Tyler Hassen, a former Texas oil executive from Elon Musk’s government efficiency team who was given sweeping powers to overhaul the Department of the Interior, is leaving the agency, he confirmed on Friday.

“It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve our great country under President Trump’s historic administration,” Mr. Hassen said in a statement to The New York Times. He said his six-month commitment to the agency had “come to a close.”

A former member of Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Hassen initially came to the Interior Department as an assistant secretary for policy, management and budget. The Associated Press reported that was changed in April to “principal deputy assistant secretary,” a position that, unlike assistant secretary, does not require Senate confirmation.

The Musk-led office, DOGE, was controversial in part because it wasn’t an official government agency, yet it had taken on broad authority to cut government staff and spending. Mr. Musk stepped away from DOGE in recent months as his relationship with President Trump soured and as sales of his Tesla electric vehicles faltered.

Several people on Friday said that Mr. Hassen had informed them during a staff meeting that his last day would be August 1. Aubrie Spady, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, confirmed Mr. Hassen’s departure and in a statement called him a “true American patriot” dedicated to making the agency more efficient.

Doug Burgum, the secretary of the Interior, granted Mr. Hassen in April broad powers to oversee and reorganize the agency, which is responsible for more than 500 million acres of public lands and employs about 70,000 people across the country in numerous agencies including the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service.

According to a secretarial order that Mr. Burgum wrote, Mr. Hassen was given authority to take “all necessary actions” to carry out “consolidation, unification and optimization” at the department and its bureaus. That move drew criticism from many Democrats and environmental activists, who said Mr. Burgum had turned over too much authority to Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

The decision demonstrated a “willingness to freely hand over the keys to the Department to a DOGE representative,” Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, wrote in a letter to Mr. Burgum. “Delegating sweeping authorities and responsibilities to a non-Senate-confirmed person in violation of the Vacancies Reform Act is baffling and extremely troubling,” he wrote.

Before joining DOGE, Mr. Hassen spent nearly two decades as an executive at Basin Holdings, which describes itself as “a green energy metals exploration and development company.” He was previously chief finance officer for Basin Holdings, “a global diversified oil field/industrial supply and services company,” according to his LinkedIn page.

Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.

Share full article

-=-=

Musk’s DOGE ‘whiz kids’ flew to California to try and release water themselves during LA fires

Katie Hawkinson

Fri, March 7, 2025

Musk’s DOGE ‘whiz kids’ flew to California to try and release water themselves during LA fires

DOGE staffers attempted to pressure the acting head of the Bureau of Reclamation to open a water pump system, CNN reports. The staffers wanted to send the water to Los Angeles amid the devastating wildfires in January — even though the system wouldn't have allowed it to reach the scorched city, CNN reports.

Despite this, they still decided to take matters into their own hands.

But when the official didn't give in, staffers Tyler Hassen and Bryton Shang flew to California to open the pumps themselves and get a photo while doing so, CNN reports. But two issues stopped them.

DOGE staffers Bryton Shang (left) and Tyler Hassen flew to California to turn on a major water pump system themselves in the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires, according to a new report (Department of Government Efficiency)

First, the power was off due to planned maintenance. Second, Shang wasn't an official federal employee yet, meaning he couldn't access the pump. Hassen couldn't do it either, CNN reports, because he had to fly back before the power would be restored.

"They didn't get their photo op," an unnamed source with knowledge of the incident told CNN, adding it represented "what DOGE has been this entire time — this slapstick operation of 20-somethings they're seeing as whiz kids but have zero knowledge."

Instead, the DOGE X account posted a photo of Shang and Hassen in front of a map, along with other pictures of the plant.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told The Independent that the administration wanted to turn on the water to "prevent another tragedy like the recent California wildfires." However, experts say there is no evidence that a water shortage caused the California wildfires, CNN reports.

"He will continue to protect America's abundant natural resources while streamlining federal agencies to better serve the American people," Kelly said.

A White House official also told The Independent Hassen and Shang are Department of Interior employees. Hassen has been previously identified as a DOGE staffer by The New York Times.

Soon after the visit, Trump ordered the US Army Corps to open up two Southern California dams at the end of January. This release sent water rushing toward farmland in the San Joaquin Valley, the Los Angeles Times reports, prompting concern from farmers.

"This is going to hurt farmers," water consultant Dan Vink told the outlet. "This takes water out of their summer irrigation portfolio."

Trump ordered the release after claiming that water access issues caused the wildfires that killed nearly 30 people. Trump falsely claimed the LA fires were a result of the state's water policies.

"Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California," Trump said in January 31 post on X. "Today, 1.6 billion gallons and, in 3 days, it will be 5.2 billion gallons. Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago – There would have been no fire!"

The Independent has contacted Hassen and Shang for comment.

-=-=