Inside DOGE: Reforming US Government Spending From The Inside With Tyler Hassen| Hoover Institution

We look at government workers and it's like it's sacred, right? And everyone kind of thinks about them as if they're a firefighter or they're a policeman or they're a soldier or whatever. It's not always the case. And that doesn't mean they're not great people. But in the Department of Interior, we had 50 HR offices with over 2,000 HR professionals for 65,000 people.

This is the Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century podcast, an official podcast of the Hoover Institution Economic Policy Working Group, where we talk about economics, markets, and public policy. I'm John Hartley, your host. Today, my guest is Tyler Hasson. Tyler is the author of the new book, Inside Doge, The Real Story from a Senior Insider. Tyler joined Doge and the Trump administration in early January 2025 and subsequently served as Assistant Secretary for Policy Management and Budget at the U.S. Department of the Interior under Secretary Doug Burgum. Before entering government, Tyler spent roughly two decades in business, He was CEO of Basin Holdings, an energy and industrial business operating across five countries, and earlier worked in Maureen Stanley's Global Energy Group in New York and London. He studied politics at Princeton and is now the founder and CEO of Sablecrest Holdings. Tyler, welcome to the podcast. Really thrilled to have you here.

Thank you so much for having me on, John. I'm excited to be here.

So before we get into Doge, I want to go back and hear a little bit about your own origin story. Where did you grow up? How did you first become interested in business and government? And how did you eventually find your way into the energy industry?

Well, I haven't told a lot of people this, but I live in Houston now, but I was actually born in New York, in New York Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. And, you know, I went to boarding school. And as you said, I studied politics at Princeton. And my first week in college was September 11th. And so that had a massive impact on my life in terms of just wanting to understand what happened in politics and all these different things. And it also made me want to live abroad. And so I lived abroad actually for close to seven years. I lived in London for a while, ended up in Dubai during my career after college. And what that did was really generate a tremendous amount of respect for what we have in our country. You know, I don't always think people appreciate what we have because they've never necessarily left or some people. And so as I've kind of gone through my career, I've been watching the debt, the national debt. And when I graduated college in 2005, we had $8 trillion of debt, but we had $13 trillion of GDP. So there was a 60% increase of GDP to debt. Today, we have over $40 trillion of debt, and our GDP is not that close to 40. It's in the kind of lower to mid-30s. And so I look at my five-year-old daughter, and I think about 20 years from now, where is debt going to be? And even by the own government's projections, it's going to be at $100 trillion if we don't do something about it. That's $3.5 trillion of interest, give or take. And when I think about what we're spending on national defense, you