A seasoned businessman with experience turning companies around, Tyler Hassen didn’t fit the popular image of DOGE members as hoodie-clad twenty-somethings slashing spending.
Now, he’s on the offensive with his new book “Inside DOGE: The Real Story from a Senior Insider” (Republic Book Publishers, out now).
“So much of the narrative about DOGE has been written from people who weren’t inside the room,” Hassen, 43, told me. “I think part of [the issue was] we were there to work, not to do a bunch of media and tell our story.”
But now he is doing just that — and arguing that the cuts DOGE made are far more significant than the short-lived agency got credit for.
Hassen asserts that DOGE fundamentally changed how the government approached spending by cancelling contracts that otherwise would have renewed; consolidating purchasing by creating OneGov, rather than having agencies negotiate separately with the same vendors; and implementing new guardrails around wiring money by placing a tracking code on payments that had previously gone out unlabeled.
While the book arrives shortly after the national debt hit a new high of $40 trillion, Hassen told me he still strongly stands by the DOGE edict, “take care of the billions and the trillions will take care of themselves.”
Hassen, who was one of less than 100 DOGE staffers according to his own estimate, knew he wanted to get involved in cutting the deficit immediately after Trump was elected.
“I wanted to look my kids in the eye someday and say I tried to fix it,” he told me of his motivation to do his best for his 4-year-old daughter. “The bill always comes due. The only real question is whether we face it on our own terms—or hand it to the next generation with an apology and a shrug.”
When he got the job offer, he willingly left his perch in Houston, Tex., as CEO of Basin Holdings, a diversified energy and industrial business, to put his private-sector skills to work in Washington.
Hassen arrived in the nation’s capital with just three suitcases and a goal to cut waste, fraud and abuse. He was given a laptop and basic instructions to research the Commerce Department, then told to come up with a handful of ideas that he’d ultimately present to Musk to make cuts and improve efficiency.
That would become a weekly missive. Even after he switched departments and move to Interior, Hassen continued attending those DOGE meetings with Musk that he says could run until 2 a.m.
Weekends were often even busier with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who was busy traveling during the week, coming in to review contracts and cuts with him.
Hassen’s book pushes back on the image of DOGE taking a rusty chainsaw to government spending. His account describes painstaking contract reviews, not just sweeping cuts. He recounts that he would spend 14 hours a day reviewing awards, grants and any agency spending of more than $50,000 in painstaking detail.
When I asked whether it felt discouraging to be in the weeds, sometimes cutting just hundreds of thousands of dollars while the government spent trillions, he didn’t bite.
“Let’s say the American pays five hundred thousand dollars of taxes in their lifetime … when we cut a $4 million contract that saves eight families in Texas their lifetime tax payment,” he said.
While DOGE reported savings of more than $200 billion, that number remains disputed and is much smaller than the initial $2 trillion they aimed to cut.
But even more significant than that number, Hassen argues that DOGE’s impact extends beyond the contracts it canceled — he believes that it created a ripple effect that has encouraged oversight at both the federal and state level.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has established a fraud task force led by Vice President JD Vance, while citizen journalists such as Nick Shirley and Katie Daviscourt have drawn attention to allegations of taxpayer money going to fraudulent daycares and medicare scams.
That would become a weekly missive. Even after he switched departments and move to Interior, Hassen continued attending those DOGE meetings with Musk that he says could run until 2 a.m.
