Tyler Hassen, the former Acting Assistant Secretary of Policy, Management and Budget at the U.S. Department of Interior spoke about his experience rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse within the federal government and how government “waste is out of control.”
During an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday with host Matthew Boyle, Hassen spoke about how he would look over contracts in the Department of Interior and would even show them to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
“I was running five businesses in Houston, and the debt has always really bothered me, and I saw what this administration wanted to do about the debt — you know, looking at the waste, fraud, and abuse,” Hassen explained.
Hassen explained that he felt “compelled” by DOGE’s effort to tackle “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
“I just felt compelled to do it. I didn’t have any connection with Elon or anything like that, I just kind of manifested it — went through all the interviews, and showed up in D.C. first week in January ready to go to attack the deficit.”
Hassen explained that he “looked at ten thousand contracts in the Department of Interior.”
“I would literally show them to Secretary Burgum on Saturdays — he’s just a fantastic guy, he would come in in jeans and a ball cap, and we would go through — on a screen with Excel Cloud, that I had prepared for him, and we would go through the contracts and find all these ones that made no sense. For example, one of them was a $4.2 million contract to assess the ground water of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.”
When asked what his advice was to people “as they work in the federal government in this space” and what they need to do and “look for,” Hassen said, “I asked everyone, ‘Is this mission critical?’ and I think that’s the way we need to be thinking about this. You know, something might be nice to have, but we’re at a point where we have $40 trillion in debt. When I graduated college in 2005, we had $8 trillion in debt, so we went from eight to forty, and it’s going to be at $100 trillion by the time my five-year-old daughter is in her mid-twenties.”
“I want to have everyone in our government looking at these contracts, thinking, ‘Okay, why are we spending $12 million to study ocelots, $3 million on larval fish monitoring?’ A bunch of these things. Sometimes I would call people on teams, civil servants, and they could be anywhere in the country, and I’d say, ‘Why do we have this contract?’”
“Sometimes, they’d give me really good answers. And, I’d say, ‘Okay, great. That’s really helpful.’ But, we should at least be asking the question because right now the waste is out of control, and it’s not just contracts. It’s also the organizations.”
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