Early on Jan. 23, 2025, I left a Washington hotel for my first day leading the Department of Government Efficiency team at the Interior Department. I had no idea what lay ahead. I didn’t know how hard it would be to change our national government, especially in a vast department.
The Interior Department manages more than 500 million acres of federal land, the national parks, Indian affairs, federal water systems, our fish and wildlife, and more than 2 billion acres offshore. For many Americans, the department is vital. That January, it was the most inefficiently run organization I had ever seen.
My DOGE colleagues and I found that Interior had 50 human-resources offices with more than 2,000 HR staffers for about 65,000 full-time employees. There were 18 different chief information officers and more than 2,000 IT staffers across the department. There were more than 1,000 contract officers for roughly 10,000 active contracts.
What we found was disheartening but also motivating. For example, a $4.2 million contract to assess the groundwater in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, in Africa, and a request for $830 million to spend on customer surveys so simple a grade-schooler could have created them.
When I graduated from college in 2005, the national debt was about $8 trillion. It recently passed $40 trillion and is on pace to surpass $100 trillion by the time my 5-year-old daughter is in her mid-20s. Yet what are we doing about it as a country?
Not all lawmakers seem serious about solving this crisis. But I saw what can happen when talented people leave their private-sector lives for a mission to eliminate the deficit. Did we achieve it? Of course not. DOGE’s inability to dent the debt materially has been written about. Striving for a balanced budget became a partisan phenomenon. Critics questioned whether every dollar of the $215 billion on our public savings tracker was real. But by quibbling over line-item labels and the definition of “savings” while the debt compounded, they missed the point.
To address the debt, we need to recruit more creative thinkers, whether business leaders, analysts, entrepreneurs or builders. We need people who love our country so much that they are willing to accept the challenge—and the inevitable carping. That was DOGE. I was lucky to be among such a talented group of people working together this way. I had read books and articles about our leader, Elon Musk. My experience of him? He cares tremendously about humanity and understands that an insolvent U.S. can’t solve our problems. I believe that’s why he championed DOGE.
We didn’t get everything right and we made some mistakes. But we put America’s national debt—the biggest long-term threat the country faces—at the forefront of millions of minds, albeit briefly. We also inspired people like the journalist Nick Shirley, who has identified fraud in Minnesota and California, to continue the crusade against waste and abuse.
I found substantial waste at Interior, and our team worked to eliminate much of it. We canceled more than $3 billion of wasteful contracts and led Interior through the largest functional reorganization in recent government history.
To some, $3 billion of waste isn’t much compared with $40 trillion in debt and entitlement programs growing every year. But what if we thought about this differently? What if we encouraged our most gifted entrepreneurs, engineers, lawyers and others to spend a year or two in public service at the federal and state levels?
What if it were a bipartisan privilege to be chosen for an elite group pressing DOGE’s cause of asking government to “defend the spend”? The group would help pare a national deficit that eventually will crowd out much of what government should be doing.
How would it work? Congress could create an efficiency and technology office with data access across agencies. This permanent group would issue a public report every year and consist of a rotating corps of private-sector talent serving one- or two-year tours. Governors in every state capital should create similar offices, coordinating with federal contacts to track taxpayer dollars.
DOGE proved the model works. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but something everyone who loves our country can celebrate—not criticize. Presidents Clinton and Obama had their own efficiency and federal spending initiatives, all supported by Democrats at the time.
DOGE found that waste was real—and sometimes absurd. Many of our technology systems are decades out of date. We need solutions to stop wasteful spending, to close inefficient organizations, and to track dollars moving from federal taxpayers to fraudsters. We can find those solutions by embracing what DOGE did well and learning from our mistakes. Mr. Musk, the greatest entrepreneur of my lifetime, was right about the mission. Now it’s up to the rest of us to make it permanent. Don’t just drain the swamp. Flood it with talent.
Mr. Hassen served as acting assistant interior secretary for policy, management and budget (2025), where he led the department’s DOGE mission. He is author of “Inside DOGE,” forthcoming Sept. 22.
