This summer, America’s national debt crossed the $40 trillion mark—a grim milestone that put an exclamation point on the abject failure of DOGE, Elon Musk’s effort to reshape the federal government. This week, Tyler Hassen, the former oil executive who ran DOGE’s operation inside the Interior department, published a memoir of revisionist history titled Inside DOGE in which he tries to rehabilitate his and Musk’s image. But DOGE’s record is permanently written in scars across American landscapes and etched on the headstones of hundreds of thousands of children.
Hassen, who now runs a cleaning supply company that has pivoted to building AI data center infrastructure, concedes in the Wall Street Journal that DOGE never dented the national debt. “Did we achieve it? Of course not,” he writes, before dismissing critics as quibbling over the definition of savings and calling for a permanent DOGE housed in Congress. He cites a $215 billion savings tracker; POLITICO examined $32.7 billion of DOGE’s claimed contract savings and could verify only $1.4 billion.
The memoir does not mention that the National Park Service has lost roughly 4,000 permanent employees since DOGE’s arrival, about 24 percent of its permanent workforce; or that the U.S. Geological Survey fell from 8,400 employees to 6,800. Hassen defends the layoffs on the grounds that firing people is simply how capitalism operates. “It isn’t personal. It isn’t cruel,” he writes. Records obtained by E&E News show Interior spent $156.5 million on administrative leave between Trump’s second inauguration and the end of 2025, paying employees to stay home for months. That figure covers only the Office of the Secretary and excludes every Interior bureau.
Hassen at the White House, New York Post on X.com
Hassen closes his WSJ op-ed by invoking his five-year-old daughter and the debt she stands to inherit. He should sit her down and explain the rest of it: how his buyouts left taxpayers paying employees to sit at home and do nothing instead of protecting our public lands; that the federal government spent $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave in a single year, six times what it spent in 2023; that the debt passed $40 trillion on August 18, which made the number printed on his own book jacket obsolete five weeks before it shipped; and that he admits in print that none of it worked, and then asks for a chance to do it again.
Hassen should also explain the part that never shows up on a savings tracker. Independent modeling found DOGE’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development led to at least 750,000 deaths in the first year alone, most of them children. Yet Hassen complained to the Washington Post that the media treated “every reduction as a moral offense,” as if hundreds of thousands of dead children are an acceptable price to pay for imaginary savings.
Across America’s public lands, thousands of park rangers are gone. Hydrologists who measure what’s left in the Colorado River are gone. Scientists who protect imperiled species are gone. Tyler Hassen got paid for eleven months, then got a book deal, then got a job building data centers. Everyone else got the bill. He calls this moral and patriotic. Millions of Americans would choose a different word.
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