Tyler Hassen defends DOGE: Dont just drain the swamp, flood it with talent

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...