A former senior official at the U.S. Department of the Interior says the scale of wasteful federal spending he encountered during his tenure was far worse than he expected, recounting a months-long effort to comb through thousands of government contracts in search of line items that made little sense.
Tyler Hassen, who served as Acting Assistant Secretary of Policy, Management and Budget at Interior, made the comments during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday with host Matthew Boyle, according to a Breitbart exclusive published Saturday. Hassen described a hands-on review process in which he examined roughly 10,000 department contracts and regularly walked Secretary Doug Burgum through the most questionable ones.
A Saturday ritual: Excel spreadsheets and a ball cap
Hassen said the contract reviews often stretched into weekends. He described preparing spreadsheets in Excel Cloud and walking Burgum through them on Saturdays while the secretary showed up “in jeans and a ball cap.” Together, Hassen said, they would flag agreements that defied easy explanation.
One example he cited was a $4.2 million contract to assess groundwater in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania — a project he pointed to as emblematic of spending that fails a basic relevance test.
Hassen described his guiding question for every contract as blunt: “Is this mission critical?” In his view, that standard is what the broader federal government should be applying as it confronts a national debt that has climbed dramatically over the past two decades.
He noted that when he graduated college in 2005, the federal debt stood at roughly $8 trillion. Today, he said, it sits at about $40 trillion, and he predicted it could reach $100 trillion by the time his five-year-old daughter is in her mid-twenties.
Questioning the line items — and the answers
Hassen’s skepticism extended beyond the Mauritania contract. He rattled off other examples he said he encountered: $12 million to study ocelots and $3 million for larval fish monitoring. In each case, he said, the same question applied — why is the government paying for this at all?
He described calling civil servants around the country who managed or oversaw various contracts and pressing them directly: “Why do we have this contract?”
Sometimes, Hassen acknowledged, the answers were persuasive. “Sometimes, they’d give me really good answers. And, I’d say, ‘Okay, great. That’s really helpful,'” he recalled. But he argued that the act of asking is itself essential — and that too often it simply isn’t happening.
“We should at least be asking the question because right now the waste is out of control, and it’s not just contracts,” Hassen said. “It’s also the organizations.”
A business background and a self-described ‘compulsion’
Hassen’s path to the Interior Department was unconventional. Before joining the government, he said, he was running five businesses in Houston. What drew him to Washington, he explained, was a long-standing concern about the national debt and a belief that the administration was serious about addressing it.
He said he felt “compelled” by the work of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the initiative focused on reducing waste, fraud, and abuse across federal agencies. Hassen stressed that his motivation was his own — he said he had “no connection with Elon or anything like that” — and described a process of going through interviews and arriving in D.C. during the first week of January, ready to take on the deficit.
His account offers a window into how the administration’s cost-cutting push has played out inside at least one Cabinet department, where political appointees and civil servants have been forced into direct conversations about the purpose and price tag of long-standing programs. Hassen’s framing — that even programs with plausible justifications should be forced to defend themselves — reflects a broader argument among fiscal hawks that the federal government has grown inattentive to how its money is spent.
Whether that approach yields lasting savings, or simply sparks friction with career staff who see value in the work being scrutinized, remains an open question. Hassen, for his part, described a process that was at least sometimes collaborative — and occasionally illuminating for both sides.
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/09/19/exclusive-tyler-hassen-former-interior-dept-assistant-government-waste-is-out-of-control/