Newt Gingrich talks with former DOGE official Tyler Hassen about government spending, bureaucracy, technology, and his firsthand account of the Department of Government Efficiency.
Tyler Hassen went from running an energy and industrial business in Houston to working inside the federal government in a matter of weeks. After joining the Department of Government Efficiency, Hassen became Acting Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management and Budget at the Department of the Interior, where he says he confronted billions of dollars in contracts and grants, fragmented technology systems, sprawling administrative operations, and a basic question that repeatedly surfaced: Who is accountable for how taxpayer money is spent?
On this episode of Newt’s World, Newt Gingrich talks with Hassen about the experiences behind his new book, Inside DOGE: The Real Story from a Senior Insider. Hassen recounts his first meetings with Elon Musk and the DOGE team, his unexpected assignment involving California’s water system, efforts to consolidate operations at the Interior Department, and an $830 million contract request that became a striking example of the spending he was examining. He also discusses the resistance DOGE encountered, the personal toll of government service, and what he believes its experience can teach future efforts to make government more accountable and effective.
Listen to their conversation below, or scroll down for an edited transcript.
Edited Transcript
This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Newt Gingrich
In January 2025, my guest today was running a diversified energy and industrial business out of Houston. Weeks later, he was named Acting Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management and Budget at the U.S. Department of the Interior, with authority over roughly $35 billion in spending and oversight of about 8,000 federal employees.
Tyler Hassen is out now with Inside DOGE: The Real Story from a Senior Insider, the first book-length account of the Department of Government Efficiency written by someone who actually executed the work.
Late-night West Wing meetings, a California water crisis that became an international media firestorm, an $830 million contract request he says he could have designed in high school, and the personal cost his family paid along the way. Tyler joins me to talk about it today.
Tyler, welcome and thank you for joining me on Newt’s World.
Tyler Hassen
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s an honor to be here. I’ve been admiring you since my high school days, and I’m humbled to be on.
Newt Gingrich
The offer to join DOGE came on your birthday, January 3, while you were heading out to dinner with your wife and parents in Florida. You committed to six months and ended up staying nearly a year. What made you say yes?
Tyler Hassen
I woke up after the election excited that the administration seemed focused on eliminating the deficit. I texted a few people I thought might know someone. I had no connection to Elon.
The debt has always been gnawing at me. When I graduated college, the debt was $8 trillion and GDP was $13 trillion. Now the debt has surpassed $40 trillion, and I have a five-year-old daughter. By the time she’s in her mid-20s, we’re on pace to have $100 trillion in debt.
I’ve worked in business, done restructurings, and had to cut costs in difficult industries for my entire career. I wanted to do something about it instead of just complaining.
Newt Gingrich
Your concern about the national debt was a big part of your decision. Explain that.
Tyler Hassen
I kept reading about wasteful spending. I’ve paid a lot of taxes in my life, and so have a lot of my friends. Where are those taxpayer dollars going?
I felt like I had a somewhat unique skill set. I ran oilfield services businesses, and in those businesses you unfortunately have to make very hard decisions about workforce and other things. I wanted to be part of it.
Newt Gingrich
As Speaker, I helped lead an effort that balanced the budget for four years. So I have a real interest in how you get government under control. As a citizen, how do you think about the national debt?
Tyler Hassen
I think it’s on a runaway train. The contracts I saw, for example, were mostly on autopilot.
I also don’t think this should be a partisan phenomenon. It should be bipartisan. I looked at what you did in the 1990s. The federal workforce came down dramatically under the Clinton administration, and that was widely supported by Democrats.
It’s not just about efficiency and waste. When we expose where taxpayer dollars are going and tell the American people we’re willing to do something to fix it, that helps build trust.
Then there is interest. Between 2019 and 2024, our interest bill went up about $600 billion in five years. That’s going to continue to rise. People say we’ve always had debt and it won’t be a problem, until it is a problem.
At least DOGE made it something people were thinking about.
Newt Gingrich
I’m always surprised by the scale of interest on the debt. I look at my children and grandchildren, and it seems to me that somehow we have to get across how much of their lifetime earnings will simply go to bondholders.
Tyler Hassen
It’s unbelievable. Non-military discretionary spending in 2024 was roughly $900 billion. We were paying more in interest than we were spending on things such as roads, infrastructure, and other non-military discretionary programs.
That’s one reason I wrote this book. So much of what was written about DOGE came from people outside the room. I was in the room from the first meeting when Elon came in, when Vivek was still involved, through the last meeting when Elon said goodbye.
Newt Gingrich
What were those first meetings like? You’re surrounded by astonishingly successful people tackling something enormous. Did you feel disoriented?
Tyler Hassen
I was anxious and nervous. I was honored to be among them.
You had some of the most successful entrepreneurs and people in finance sitting at plastic folding tables with an American flag on the wall in a room that didn’t even have a coffee machine. Then you had young engineers, some of whom had dropped out of school to do this and some who had won major mathematics awards.
We were all working together trying to solve the deficit.
The first meeting Elon came into, he basically said there weren’t even 50 of us and there would be millions of people who wanted us to fail. It was very inspiring.
Newt Gingrich
You write about going to SpaceX’s office wearing a tailored suit while the engineers were in jeans and hoodies. What was your first impression?
Tyler Hassen
First, I had to take off my tie.
At first, I didn’t pay enough attention to the younger engineers, and that was a mistake. I didn’t realize how critical they were to the whole process.
I had been given a few days to come up with ideas using public information about how we could reduce the deficit. My first thought was that if I didn’t do well on this test, I was probably getting sent home.
Newt Gingrich
And you were essentially starting with a laptop?
Tyler Hassen
I bought one at Best Buy because I was transitioning from the companies I had run and didn’t want to use my company computer.
I felt like I was on the clock. I had only a few days to come up with good ideas, and it was exhilarating.
I had been a CEO, but I wasn’t in the tech world. I didn’t even know how to use AI. One of the guys came over and said, “Tyler, you need to get ChatGPT and Gemini. What are you doing?”
Within hours, he helped me, and my productivity improved dramatically.
Newt Gingrich
What did you find were the differences between Gemini Deep Research and ChatGPT?
Tyler Hassen
At the time, Gemini Deep Research was most helpful because I was trying to dig deeply into public information on the Department of Commerce.
We’re talking about January 2025 models, so that’s distant history now. Things have changed, of course. I use them all today.
Newt Gingrich
What was your first assignment?
Tyler Hassen
I went into the Department of the Interior as the DOGE lead. I was trying to gather all the contracts and grants, every way we were spending money, so I could understand it.
Then I got a call saying that the federal pumps in California weren’t pumping water south and only one of six pumps was operating.
The wildfires had just happened, and I couldn’t understand how these pumps weren’t on. The suggestion was that I fly to California. I wasn’t set up on the government travel systems yet, so I used my personal American Express card and flew out.
There was no magic to what I did. I asked a lot of questions.
Why wasn’t the second pump operating? Maintenance. What about the third? Maintenance. The fourth? It was coming online the next week.
Then they said they couldn’t turn on the fifth because of concerns involving fish and regulations across different departments.
I thought, how in the world do you navigate all of this? You’ve got farmers, cities, governors, different departments and different rules.
I call it a baptism by fire and water in the book.
Newt Gingrich
Was it worse than you expected?
Tyler Hassen
Much worse. And it wasn’t just the dollars. It was the accountability.
When you go into a well-run business, people are accountable. I had about 10,000 contracts representing roughly $10 billion, and I would go through them looking for the ones that didn’t make sense.
I would ask, “Who made this decision? Why do we have this contract?” More often than not, I didn’t get an answer.
So I asked for a name associated with every single contract and grant. That didn’t make me the most popular person in the department, but I wanted accountability.
I would call people and ask questions. Sometimes I got good answers. Sometimes I didn’t.
What I also found was that the vast majority of career civil servants were wonderful people. I keep in touch with many of them. Many of them saw the inefficiencies too, and I have tremendous respect for them.
Newt Gingrich
Did that make you more confident there were enough good people to put together a solution?
Tyler Hassen
Yes. The difficult part was how fragmented everything was.
The Department of the Interior has the national parks, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Indian Affairs, offshore management, and other bureaus.
I found they were largely operating independently.
We had 50 human resources offices. There were approximately 370,000 job descriptions for about 65,000 to 70,000 people in the system. A lot of it had been entered manually.
I asked whether anyone had looked at this before. Someone showed me a 120-page consulting presentation saying consolidation could be done in five years.
I said, “Five years? What’s stopping us? Let’s just do it.”
We eventually decided to unify functions including HR, IT, and communications into one office.
Newt Gingrich
You also looked at the U.S. Patent Office. What did you find there?
Tyler Hassen
That was part of my original test using publicly available information.
I found the Patent Office charged the same fees to foreign and domestic applicants while the number of foreign companies applying for patents had grown. At the same time, American innovators were waiting longer for patents.
I wondered whether foreign fees could be increased as part of an effort to reduce the deficit and improve the system for domestic innovators.
It was simply an idea. I never had the authority to act on it because I ended up at Interior rather than Commerce.
Newt Gingrich
You ultimately chose Interior. Why?
Tyler Hassen
Partly because it seemed like the biggest challenge and partly because I looked at Secretary Doug Burgum’s résumé and it resonated with me.
We built a tremendous relationship.
One of the issues we found was permitting. There were more than 160,000 permits in the queue, with the average wait around four years. Some went back decades.
Because functions were so fragmented bureau by bureau, there were 18 chief information officers and 19 permitting systems being worked on at the same time that didn’t communicate with each other.
Any large corporation would look at that and say something had to change.
With some of the DOGE engineers, things that looked enormously difficult could sometimes be addressed very quickly.
Newt Gingrich
Part of what struck me was that there’s a whole new generation of knowledge. Sometimes a 23-year-old who really understands the technology can do radically more than somebody who knows much more about the traditional system but doesn’t understand modern technology.
Tyler Hassen
I couldn’t agree more.
There’s also a real benefit to bringing in people who aren’t interested in becoming career politicians. They came in with fresh eyes and were willing to use their judgment to do what they thought was best for the American people, within the law and with the appropriate approvals and authorities.
They weren’t constantly asking how a decision would affect their career two, four, or eight years from now. In my opinion, that kind of thinking can create inertia.
Newt Gingrich
You worked with two fascinating entrepreneurial personalities, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. What was that like?
Tyler Hassen
I only spent one day with Vivek. It was the Saturday before the inauguration.
Vivek’s argument was straightforward: If federal spending simply returned closer to 2019 levels, that would make an enormous difference.
That was the last time I saw him because he soon announced he wasn’t going to continue with DOGE.
With Elon, what struck me was his focus on details. He wants to understand the details so he can solve the problem.
I would brief him basically every week, and I knew that if I said one thing and didn’t know the answer to the obvious follow-up question, he was going to ask exactly that question.
His ability to hone in on what matters is on another level.
The other thing is urgency.
If something could be done in a week, the question was why it couldn’t be done in a day. If somebody said something should take five years, the question was why it couldn’t take three months.
That’s a mentality I’m going to take with me for the rest of my career.
Newt Gingrich
Let’s go back to California. You had only been on the job a few weeks when you flew out to understand what was happening at the Jones Pumping Plant. What did you discover?
Tyler Hassen
I wasn’t there as an inspector of federal water facilities. I was there to talk to people and understand why only one of the six pumps was operating.
Several of the answers were perfectly reasonable. There was maintenance underway.
The larger issue involved the rules surrounding the water system and the different priorities and authorities involved.
Then the story became a media firestorm. There were reports saying I tried to personally turn on pumps and do all sorts of things.
That’s when I learned you can’t control the media narrative. You have to live through it and develop thicker skin.
Newt Gingrich
How much were you actually able to change?
Tyler Hassen
For several of the pumps, things were resolved within days. I don’t want to overstate my role.
The fifth pump required going back to Washington and talking to department leadership about what authority the people on the ground had.
I had a small hand in it. We saw a problem, pressed for answers, and tried to fix it.
That’s what DOGE was in my mind. There were so many little and big things happening in government, and we were doers trying to do our best.
Newt Gingrich
When you asked for a complete list of every grant at Interior, the head of the grants office told you something that stopped you cold. What was it?
Tyler Hassen
Because the bureaus had operated independently, she told me that in roughly 20 years nobody had ever asked her for a complete list of the grants.
Eventually I got a map showing where the grants were going and looked at how the existing grant portfolio had grown over time.
What concerned me was not simply the amount of spending. It was asking: Where’s the outcome? Where are the metrics? What did taxpayers receive for the additional money?
Secretary Burgum focused on determining which grants were mission critical and which were discretionary.
Newt Gingrich
One example you mention is an $830 million request involving customer satisfaction surveys.
Tyler Hassen
That was one of the most striking things we found.
I realized that if we were canceling contracts every week but weren’t tracking new contracts and grants going out the door, we were just on a treadmill.
So I sent an email to the contract and grant officers saying I personally wanted to approve everything over $50,000.
People thought I was crazy.
I spent weekends doing it. Eventually we built a team that could help.
Then the $830 million request came up. It involved customer surveys asking things such as whether a government website was good. I looked at examples of the surveys and couldn’t understand why something like that required such an enormous amount of money.
When I asked why they wanted $830 million over the next several years and who was using the product, I didn’t get answers that satisfied me.
So we didn’t approve it.
That kind of saving doesn’t necessarily show up on a ledger because the spending never happened.
The principle became accountability and “defend the spend.” If we’re going to take hardworking Americans’ taxpayer dollars, we should at least be able to look someone in the eye and defend why we’re spending them.
Newt Gingrich
Another fascinating example is the effort to consolidate Interior’s separate administrative functions. Consultants had proposed a five-year project. Your team moved dramatically faster.
Tyler Hassen
That’s right, because it was so obvious that consolidation needed to happen.
The second step, which would have involved right-sizing those functions after consolidation, didn’t fully happen while I was there because of legal issues and other obstacles.
But the consolidation moved forward, and I’m hopeful that over the next 10, 20, or 30 years it will save taxpayers money and make government more effective.
Newt Gingrich
How rapidly did the pushback begin?
Tyler Hassen
It started with Freedom of Information Act requests. Journalists began asking for emails, text messages, and other records.
At first I didn’t understand the process. Eventually I learned I could give the IT department access to the relevant government communications and let them handle the searches.
I had nothing to hide. I’m proud of what we worked on.
Of course we made mistakes. There were contracts we cut and then somebody would call and explain why a particular contract was important. We’d look at it and, when appropriate, turn it back on.
The media attention was something I hadn’t prepared for, particularly how it would affect me and my family.
Newt Gingrich
Now that you know what you lived through, would you do it again?
Tyler Hassen
One hundred percent.
There are lasting DOGE achievements that I don’t think received enough attention. There were procurement reforms, technology projects, and efforts to improve how federal payments were documented.
But we didn’t finish the job. We didn’t get the deficit down the way we wanted.
What DOGE did accomplish, at least for a period of time, was putting these issues at the forefront of people’s minds.
I want my book to put the problem back on people’s minds. We’re again on a trajectory toward an enormous national debt by the time my daughter is 25.
I appreciate you having me on because I want more people thinking about how to solve it.
Newt Gingrich
I think what you’ve done by bringing your management skills, courage, and work ethic to this challenge is important.
If you think of this as one of many building blocks, we’re inch by inch starting to move toward a healthier future.
I recently wrote America’s Golden Age, which looks ahead to 2076. I’m an optimist that we’re going to solve these problems and that the future can be amazing.
Tyler, thank you very much for joining me.
About the Guest
Tyler Hassen is the founder and CEO of Stable Crest Holdings, LLC. In January 2025, he joined the Department of Government Efficiency and later served as Acting Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management and Budget at the U.S. Department of the Interior. Before entering government, Hassen spent 16 years at Basin Holdings, ultimately serving as CEO of the diversified energy and industrial business. Earlier in his career, he worked in Morgan Stanley’s global energy group in New York and London.
His new book, Inside DOGE: The Real Story from a Senior Insider, recounts his experience working inside DOGE and the Department of the Interior.
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