DOGE's Man at DOI
Tyler Hassen is an Ivy League graduate and energy executive working on behalf of DOGE at the Interior Department.
A week after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Government Efficiency sent operatives to northern California to push for one of the President’s longstanding priorities — increased water delivery to agriculture interests in the state. The DOGE team was there to meet with the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages a vast system of dams, canals and pumps that move water out of the Sacramento River and ship it south to grow almonds, vegetables and other products. The President has sought for years to weaken protections for imperiled fish like salmon and smelt in order to boost the share of water that agriculture users can draw from this public system, known as the Central Valley Project. He has used the Los Angeles fires as a justification to press for these priorities in recent months.
The DOGE delegation was led by Tyler Hassen, a Princeton and Deerfield Academy graduate turned energy company CEO. An X (formerly Twitter) account under Hassen’s name has him following key figures in the Trump orbit, including Trump himself, David Sacks, the official DOGE account, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the official Interior Department account as well as right-wing influencers like Libs of TikTok and Catturd. It is unclear how Hassen was recruited into DOGE service, but he is now embedded at the Interior Department.
While in California, Hassen and his team took a tour of the Jones Pumping Plant, which runs huge pumps that draw water out of the Sacramento River and funnel it through canals to farmers in the south. Their visit quickly prompted a self-congratulatory social media post from the official DOGE twitter account, which featured pictures of Hassen and the Jones Pumping Plant.
“Congratulations to the Administration and DOI’s Bureau of Reclamation for more than doubling the Federally pumped water flowing toward Southern California in < 72 hours,” the Jan. 28 post to X read. “Was an honor for the DOGE team to work with you. Great job!”
But DOGE’s public message doesn’t quite capture what happened during Hassen’s visit to California. Based on its X post, it would be easy to assume that DOGE itself, working on behalf of the administration, had required the Bureau of Reclamation to increase pumping at the Jones plant to deliver more water to southern California. What really happened is more mundane – several pumps at Jones had been offline in late January because the local electric utility was conducting maintenance work on transmission lines. The pumps turned back on once the utility finished its maintenance work, thus increasing the flow of water to the south. The resumption of increased pumping at Jones was planned prior to DOGE’s visit. As California’s Department of Water Resources wrote on X on Jan. 28: “The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days.”
DOGE, nevertheless, appears to have used the planned resumption of pumping as a publicity stunt. According to FOIA records obtained by Public Domain, Hassen texted a BOR official to ask what days the Jones pumps were coming back online, and was told that four pumps would be operational by Jan. 28. It was on that day that DOGE applauded itself on X. By the following day, Jan. 29, one of Jones’s pumping units was briefly back offline due to another planned outage, according to the texts.
When it comes to Trump’s push for more water deliveries in California, DOGE in this instance accomplished little more than an brief PR coup. In fact, DOGE’s cost cutting mission may actually be threatening the agency’s ability to fulfill the President’s priorities. As part of mass firings across the Interior Department in recent days, some 40 employees were eliminated in BOR’s California-Great Basin region, which manages the Jones Pumping Plant and other essential Central Valley Project infrastructure. Among those fired were maintenance mechanics, civil engineers and mechanical engineers, with more firings likely on the way that could undermine efficient infrastructure operations.
Hassen, meanwhile, is not the only DOGE-related figure embedded within the agency. Others include a woman named Katrine Trampe, who is serving as DOGE’s advisor to the Interior Secretary. Trampe, who appears to hold the title Comtesse in connection with aristocratic European heritage of some kind, has a very light online footprint. Public Domain is working to obtain her resume and financial disclosure statements as well as those of Hassen and the many other political appointees being brought into DOI.
In the meantime, sweeping personnel cuts continue to ripple across Interior.
One senior Interior Department executive who resigned last week told Public Domain that new political appointees instructed him to fire numerous people within his office on the faulty pretext that they were poor performers. “They were not poor performers, they were some of the best performers we had from among my 200 person staff,” said Jacob Malcom, a civil servant at Interior who served as the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and Environmental Management. “But they were within the probationary period, and they were being fired solely because probationary period staff have very limited recourse.”
“I am done,” he said. “I am not going to help them destroy stuff.”
Another Interior Department employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, told Public Domain that the Trump administration’s actions have disrupted the family lives of agency workers.
“I’m so angry right now,” the person said. Staff at DOI are “in fear for their jobs, keeping their homes, feeding their kids. Basically losing everything they’ve worked so hard for.”
Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, all of them multi-millionaires or billionaires, have spent their first days in office “terrorizing employees so they resign, retire or just quit,” according to the source.
The Interior Department, in response to questions about Hassen, Trampe and the ongoing mass firings, said it does not discuss personnel matters.