Former DOGE Insider Reveals What Musk’s Team Was Really Like

OK, first, before we give you the facts of the day, Run Hide Fight in Fadelles is streaming now only on Daily Wire. It's an ode to the great action movies of the '80s and '90s. There is even a love story which nobody expected. And you can support Daily Wire's mission to continue making movies that people actually want to watch. Go check it out. Imagine setting your makeup. Then for getting, it's even theirs. Meet new grippy setting mist from Mabelie, New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all-day comfy grip. No tightness, no stickiness, no residue. Just plump, dewy, hydrated skin. That still feels like your skin. Try new grippy setting mist from Mabelie, New York. Maybe it's Mabelie. In the early days of President Trump's second term, the Department of Government Efficiency or Doge was formed with the goal of reducing bureaucratic bloat and wasteful spending throughout the federal government. Headed up by Elon Musk, the organization became a lightning rod for controversy among media outlets with many legacy networks questioning its authority within the hierarchy of the federal government. Doge ceased operations in July of this year, but now a former member of the organization is publicly telling his story in a new book titled Inside Doge. In this episode, we sit down with the author, Tyler Hassan, to discuss the success, failures, and long-term lessons from the Doge experiment. I'm daily wire executive editor, John Bickley, with Georgia Hal. This is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. (upbeat music) - You know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself reaching for over and over again? The sweater that works with everything, the jeans that you know will always fit, and the bag that you carry everywhere. These are the pieces that earn a permanent place in your wardrobe. That's exactly what Quince does so well. 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It's the best way to support the show. - Joining us now is the author of the book Inside Doge Tyler Hassan. Tyler, thanks for coming on. - Thank you, thank you for having me on. - So you've been very successful in your career, you've been an oil executive. You served in the department of the interior under Secretary Doug Burgham, who we've talked to you too. You were tapped then to serve in Doge. How were you chosen and what were you doing within Doge? - Well, so I woke up after the election and was really excited about the focus on the deficit. The national debt has really bothered me. When I graduated college, it was $8 trillion. Now today it's over $40 trillion. And so I kind of just reached out to some friends and said, do you know anyone that might be involved with this administration? Got in touch with someone in Mar-a-Lago. Had a few interviews and got connected with Elon's team and kind of ended up in DC. It was wild. And at first, my wife thought I was a little bit crazy and by the end of it she was all on board, which was great. - So what was it like actually working in the organization? Tell us about how it evolved and what your role was. - So I first started at SpaceX in the SpaceX office in DC with a bunch of engineers, a bunch of business leaders and surprisingly a bunch of women as well. One of the things I talk about in my book and a lot of people don't realize that how great these young patriots were and also how many women were involved 'cause they didn't want to step into the spotlight. But so we were given opportunities to be Doge Lee. It's a lot of us. And I chose the department of interior because Secretary Bergon was a fantastic guy and I thought we would get along great. And so a few days after the inauguration I was in the department actually before Secretary Bergon. And so I had an interesting story in my book where actually I was sent to California to help with the wildfires that were happening over there in the federal water situation. So that was kind of a wild experience, but I came back and I focused on taxpayer dollars. Contracts, grants, workforce, I wanted to be a steward for the American taxpayer. Were you surprised by what you found? Shocked, I was shocked. And you know, it's not about the people. The career civil servants that I met, the vast majority of them were incredible people, really smart, really hardworking, really care about this country. It's the organization that shocked me. So for example, in the department of interior alone was 65,000 people. We had 50, 50 human resources offices. All separate, separate, operating mostly independently. We had IT that was a lot manual, you know, from decades old IT. And so it was just crazy, we had over 2,000 HR personnel because our IT was so bad. And then of course, we had over 2,000 IT personnel. So we had over 4,000 HR and IT in one department. I couldn't believe it. Having run businesses in five countries, it was just an affimatesment. With HR, like a running joke, nationally, in terms of the thing you most don't want to work with, that sounds like a nightmare. Was it overwhelming? I mean, where do you start? So a lot of it is like the technology is so behind, but you also have a course major bloat in terms of staffing. How did you, how'd you prioritize where to start? So contracts. We had 10,000 existing contracts across all of our bureaus from national parks to bureau of land management and bureau reclamation, all these different areas. And what I realized is they were all operating independently, but I wanted to see them all in one place. So that took a few days to get it all. And then what I did is I went back to my investment banking analyst days, and I separated all in Microsoft Excel and sent emails to over 500 contract officers. And I wanted to know, are the contracts mistreating critical? And if so, why? Are they doing a competent job of these contractors? And I wanted a name for every single contract. So a lot of people think that those just went in and just cut everything indiscriminately. That was not my experience. And that's part of the reason why I wrote the book. I go into detail about what exactly I did. And then I would get responses back. And one group, one bureau had, I sent 900 contracts to them, and they said that 897 of them were mission critical. I said, really? Yeah. So let's go through those. And so we went into some detail, and I found some crazy contracts. Did you find-- this is what I'm imagining, but did you find a lot of bureaucrats, very reluctant, to give up anything that was under their control? Yes. And I think that's just part of the system, right? I mean, I think there's inertia is kind of built in. You can only really get in trouble if you make a decision that goes badly. If you just let things continue as they go, then everything's fine. And so what we've found were a lot of contracts on autopilot. So when you look at New York Times and political articles and things like that, and they say, oh, we're wrong about some of the calculations of their savings, the reality is we cut a lot of contracts that had already been spent through that contract, because it would have started another one, right? And so a lot of things that I think were misunderstood by the American people, but I just couldn't play. So one example, hundreds of millions of dollars for customer service surveys that eighth graders could pull together, that we were spending through a procurement arm and interior for departments all across the government. When we were on a Brett Barron review in March of 2025, and it was the first thing Elon said, because I got a request for $830 million to spend more on that. And you see what happened today. There are those folks that led America.gov. It gives me goosebumps, and I'm so excited for Joe Gabi and big balls as part of it. He was on stage with the president. I mean, it's just so cool to see, because everyone thinks that we were just breaking things down and we-- no, we are builders and catalysts as well. And I talk a lot about that in the book. Imagine inviting about a dozen friends to pray in your home and then your city telling you to get the government's permission first. That's what happened to Daniel Grand de Valt-Orthodox you in University Heights, Ohio. When he planned a small prayer meeting at home, the city ordered him to get a permit, classified his house as a place of religious assembly, and even recruited his neighbors to spy on him and report any violations. 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Again, that's join adf.com/wire or text wire. extra wire to 83848. - So looking back and looking at how things are now, how well do you think doge did its job? Do you think there are permanent improvements and also are there permanent reductions in some of the fraud, waste and abuse? - Yeah, so great question. So we clearly didn't dent the deficit the way that we wanted, right? There's no debate about that. You know, it obviously disappoints me and it disappoints all of us. However, we did prove that there's a lot of waste and inefficiency in this government and sometimes it's completely absurd. You know, there was a presidential address where he was listing them all off. I mean, there are so many examples on the doge.gov website and on our ex-handle and all these things of all these absurd things that we found. I just mentioned these organizations. That's like the entire government is run that way. And so, you know, I looked back and I think to myself, we shouldn't just call doge a failure and move on. We should build from it and we should learn from it. And my view is we're never gonna tackle this debt, which by the way in 20 years is gonna be $100 trillion if we don't do something about that. Unless we get bipartisan backing for this. The debt doesn't care if you're Republican or Democrat. The debt just is building and compounding and we're getting to the point where we're spending three times the amount on interest that we do on national defense. - Now Elon Musk was, you know, a lot of the focus of criticism from media outlets. He got a lot of pressure from his efforts in doge. Working with him as you did, what was it like for you? I mean, how well do you think he performed in leading this organization? - Well, so inside the room, he was just fantastic. You know, you can imagine, you know, sweaty palms, the first time I'm presenting to him is we would go around, you know, department by department, agency by agency, a lot of times there'd be 30 or 40 of us in a room in the, as in our executive office building in the White House, on the White House grounds. And we would stay from seven PM, eight PM 'til two in the morning sometimes, just going around and he might spend 45 minutes asking questions about a specific problem for the American people that he wanted to solve. And I think that's why his companies do so well is because he grills, you know, and he gets to the bottom of it and he has a BS detector like nobody else in this world. And so we were able to really get to the bottom of it and we wouldn't stop until we could until we had a next step in action item that we would move forward. And so an interior, you know, we talked about a lot of different things that we were finding and we were very focused on regulations and some of these contracts that are international that don't make sense. But I have so much respect for him mostly because when the attacks really started to come and get worse and worse and worse, when Tesla's getting fire bond, he worked harder. He worked harder and I saw it firsthand. - Now, something that the media really glommed on to was that some of these doge staffers were quite young and there was a lot made of the fact that some very young people were maybe making consequential decisions about some of these agencies or offices. What do you, what did you feel about those concerns? - Well, first of all, these are some of the best and brightest people around, you know. So a lot of them were put into different departments. So I got to see some of the resumes and they just blew mine out of the water. (laughs) Let's just put it that way. And so, you know, when we think that they were just running recklessly, that's just not right. There were a lot of people that were talking with them daily about what we were focused on. I was focused head down on interior working very closely with Secretary Burgham. So, you know, things like USAID and things like that. I learned about that pretty much when the rest of the world did, right? And so, all I know is those guys are brilliant patriots who were working 24/7. And a lot of them were living in government buildings, didn't even have apartments and just did incredible work. And they had skill sets that I didn't have. You know, we talk a lot about access to systems. One of the reasons why doge got access to systems is because we would talk about doing things and then some of the career civil servants just simply wouldn't do them. You know, we'd say, "Okay, cut this contract." And then they'd say, "Okay, yep, we're gonna cut it." And then it wouldn't get cut. And so, we then realized, "Okay, we have to actually make sure we know it, got cut." And that was part of the reason. It wasn't anything malicious at all. - Yeah, a lot of resistance. And we saw some of that really play out publicly. Final question, you know, you kind of answered some of this, but closing thoughts here. After working with doge, are you more or less confident that Washington can actually be changed? That some of this bloat in spending in the government ways can actually be controlled? - I know it can. I know it can. But what it needs is we need to, instead of just draining the swamp, we need to flood it with talent. We saw it today, America.gov. You see all those people on the stage. They took their private sector careers like Joe Gabia, a lot of these young engineers, a lot of them doge people that I know and they decided, I want to help the American people. If we had more people on both sides of the aisle, enter the government with unique skill sets, not people that want to be politicians for the rest of their lives, but people with unique skill sets, I know we can accomplish it, but we need to come together as Republicans and Democrats not keep fighting about it. - Well said, Tyler, thank you so much for coming on. - Yeah, thank you, thank you for having us. - That was Tyler Hassan, author of the book Inside Doge, and this has been a Weekend Edition of Morning Wine. (bell ringing) Imagine setting your makeup, then forgetting it's even theirs. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours with flexible all day comfy grip. Just plump, dewy, hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. - Maybe it's Mabelie.