Last week saw two more high-profile officials from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency take their leave. Gosh, what will the government do without rich industrialists play-acting at being federal employees?
The biggest departure was Tyler Hassen, the oil executive whom President Donald Trump installed as shadow secretary of the interior. You might remember Hassen from the bloodless coup in April, where the nominal secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum, essentially signed full control of the agency over to Hassen, the very epitome of an unelected, unaccountable bureaucrat.
As of Aug. 1, the government won’t have Hassen to kick around any longer. He’s stepping away from pretending to be in government service, presumably to spend more time with his money. The New York Times piece on Hassen’s departure mentions none of Hassen’s accomplishments while at Interior, likely because there aren’t any.
No word on whether Burgum will get a new babysitter who currently works at a hedge fund or something, but for the moment, the former North Dakota governor put his big boy pants on to go tour Alcatraz with Attorney General Pam Bondi. Nothing says “managing America’s precious public lands and natural resources” like reopening a prison that is, at the moment, a tourist attraction.
Also out at DOGE: Antonio Gracias. While on the team, Gracias was responsible for … well, it’s not clear. Gracias is a pal of former DOGE leader Elon Musk, and he was an investor in Tesla. While in government, he kept busy by attacking Social Security and yelling about supposed voter fraud, but beyond that, who knows what he did. Gracias had a pretty sweet deal, though, as he was able to keep his day job running a private equity firm where he managed $2 billion in assets for nine public pension funds.
Earlier this week, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten sent letters to the pension managers for those nine funds, asking them if they were at all concerned that their pension-fund fiduciary was moonlighting as a voter-fraud crank at DOGE. When Weingarten’s office emailed Gracias’ company, Valor Equity Partners, to inquire about his current DOGE employment status, the company stated that he had stopped volunteering with the government on July 1, although neither the government nor Gracias had mentioned this until Weingarten followed up.
Hassen and Gracias are the latest DOGE employees to leave, but they are two of many who departed following the ugly Trump-Musk breakup, which started in late May. A string of DOGE officials followed Musk out the door over the next few months. At least eight of the core DOGE staffers are gone, including Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, who now apparently just works for Elon? And at least seven DOGE engineers, many of whom had unprecedented access to private government data, are also out the door, with more on the way, according to Politico.
To be fair, the taxpayers are lucky enough to still be paying for Edward “Big Balls” Coristine and other DOGE kidlets who now have regular government jobs where they all make well over $100,000, despite still having no relevant experience.
These departures highlight how ridiculous it was for the administration to pretend that money managers and tech titans would somehow step in and run the government while also retaining their day jobs as masters of the universe, because how hard can running the government be?
Turns out, a lot harder than Musk and his ilk realized. Now they all get to go back to their incredibly lucrative positions, and we all suffer the consequences of their haphazard, ill-informed cuts to government services. Sweet deal for them, at least.