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Interior Secretary Doug Burgum signed a secretarial order late last week giving up oversight of the Interior department and handing full control of the department’s organization and staffing over to Tyler Hassen, Elon Musk’s DOGE operative who also serves as Interior’s acting Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management, and Budget.
The order gives DOGE carte blanche to run “consolidation, unification, and optimization efforts” across the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, and other Interior bureaus. The secretarial order does not require Hassen to report back to Secretary Burgum regarding the reorganization, nor does it reserve any authority to Secretary Burgum if Hassen were to fire thousands of public lands managers, park rangers, or wildfire specialists across the country.
“This order shows what it looks like when leaders abdicate their jobs and let unqualified outsiders fire thousands of civil servants who are working on behalf of all Americans and their public lands,” said Center for Western Priorities Executive Director Jennifer Rokala in a statement.
This latest secretarial order arrives as Interior employees await expected department-wide layoffs. So far, Interior employees have been offered two rounds of deferred resignation and retirement, though it’s unknown exactly how many took the offers. The next round of firings would kick off a process in which employees have to compete against each other, jockeying for remaining positions using tenure, veterans’ preference, length of service and performance ratings, referred to in an E&E news headline as “Hunger Games for feds.”
“DOGE’s unelected bureaucrats in Washington have no idea how to staff a park, a wildlife refuge, or a campground. They have no idea how to manage a forest or prepare for fires in the wildland-urban interface. But Doug Burgum just gave DOGE free rein over all of that,” Rokala said.
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Capacity right now is at a tipping point that puts both the economic and the conservation vitality of the National Wildlife Refuge System at risk.”
