Tyler Hassen, a former Texas oil executive from Elon Musk’s government efficiency team who was given sweeping powers to overhaul the Department of the Interior, is leaving the agency, he confirmed on Friday.
“It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve our great country under President Trump’s historic administration,” Mr. Hassen said in a statement to The New York Times. He said his six-month commitment to the agency had “come to a close.”
A former member of Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Hassen initially came to the Interior Department as an assistant secretary for policy, management and budget. The Associated Press reported that was changed in April to “principal deputy assistant secretary,” a position that, unlike assistant secretary, does not require Senate confirmation.
The Musk-led office, DOGE, was controversial in part because it wasn’t an official government agency, yet it had taken on broad authority to cut government staff and spending. Mr. Musk stepped away from DOGE in recent months as his relationship with President Trump soured and as sales of his Tesla electric vehicles faltered.
Several people on Friday said that Mr. Hassen had informed them during a staff meeting that his last day would be August 1. Aubrie Spady, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, confirmed Mr. Hassen’s departure and in a statement called him a “true American patriot” dedicated to making the agency more efficient.
Doug Burgum, the secretary of the Interior, granted Mr. Hassen in April broad powers to oversee and reorganize the agency, which is responsible for more than 500 million acres of public lands and employs about 70,000 people across the country in numerous agencies including the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service.
According to a secretarial order that Mr. Burgum wrote, Mr. Hassen was given authority to take “all necessary actions” to carry out “consolidation, unification and optimization” at the department and its bureaus. That move drew criticism from many Democrats and environmental activists, who said Mr. Burgum had turned over too much authority to Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The decision demonstrated a “willingness to freely hand over the keys to the Department to a DOGE representative,” Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, wrote in a letter to Mr. Burgum. “Delegating sweeping authorities and responsibilities to a non-Senate-confirmed person in violation of the Vacancies Reform Act is baffling and extremely troubling,” he wrote.
Before joining DOGE, Mr. Hassen spent nearly two decades as an executive at Basin Holdings, which describes itself as “a green energy metals exploration and development company.” He was previously chief finance officer for Basin Holdings, “a global diversified oil field/industrial supply and services company,” according to his LinkedIn page.
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
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