He spent 11 months inside DOGE. Now he wants to set the record straight.

The Washington Post ^ | September 21, 2026 | Elizabeth Dwoskin

[Twotone]

Tyler Hassen's initiation into Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, started as a series of tests.

The Houston oil executive says he was given vague instructions to show up at an unfamiliar D.C. address. He hastily packed three suitcases and flew east, taking an Uber to a building that he soon learned belonged to Elon Musk's SpaceX. He was whisked to a private office, acutely aware that his tailored suit stood out among the hoodie-clad engineers "too locked in" to their laptops to look up. He was ordered to go through the website of the Department of Commerce and, within days, find two to five ideas to present to Musk.

He checked into a nearby J.W. Marriott and told his wife he didn't know how long he would be gone.

Thus began an 11-month stint at the center of a national firestorm - an exhilarating, chaotic and sometimes scary experience, Hassen told The Washington Post, in his first major interview detailing his forthcoming memoir and plans. The memoir, "Inside DOGE: The Real Story From a Senior Insider," which recounts his time working for the secretive cost-cutting group, is the first tell-all to emerge from one of the most controversial periods of President Donald Trump's time in office - a moment Hassen said he would gladly live through again.

"There's this misconception that we all just went in there and didn't really think about what we were doing," Hassen said, speaking virtually from a hotel room in San Diego. "I spent 24/7 thinking about it, waking up at 3 in the morning thinking, 'Am I doing the right thing?' … And I know I did."

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TOPICS: Government; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: debttruth; doge; dogetruth; mediabias; tylerhassen

[Twotone]

Not behind a paywall for a change. Good article. Amazing it's from the WP.

[subterfuge]

Good read.

[EandH Dad]

” Barack Obama, who also sought to shrink bloated government”

Bathhouse Barry did everything he could to grow the government. Government hires far outnumbered private hires in an effort to shrink the unemployment numbers. Also took tens of thousands off unemployment by moving them to disability. The biggest thing DOGE did was trigger “reams of lawsuits” from the dems to stop Elon and Trump. Lawyers saw their wallets get really fat.

[Celerity]

An oddity article from WaPo, and no paywall? It’s a trap.

Almost like they want to bring back a DOGE sort of thing but weaponize it against Trump.

[sit-rep]

I wonder how he feels about all his work going to waist the second Trump leaves office? Since, to date, not one single person has been hauled in and even questioned about all the findings of his hard work. Since no one is held responsible, sends a clear message that you can rip off the US Government inside the beltway, and nothing will happen to you.

The fact that to date, not a single person has been arrested and jailed, makes me suspect it was all BS...

[mikey_hates_everything]

Please, the big brains coming in to long-running entrenched bureaucracies with sledgehammers and not bothering to seek out actual willing insiders who could have helped them worked out well. USAID was their one big victory but there was so much more that they didn’t know about other than some highly-publicized contract cancellations, which were quickly worked around. No one was going to lose their next fiscal year’s budget money. Why, they have nearly wiped out the deficit and look at all the moochers they took off the payrolls. Practically crashed the DC area housing market! Wait, none of that happened. I was all for it and could have made it very easy for them with much more info that didn’t exist in official records but they came off as arrogant or paranoid. What I was able to do to help them probably got me forced into retirement which I was long prepared for. Oh well, it made for good bread and circuses.

[Democrat = party of treason]

ANOTHER of DJT’s disappointments to those who backed him. He should NEVER have walked away from it regardless of the fallout. The ONLY reason people voted for him was exactly because we thought that despite the left and their toadie news media, DJT would DO what needed done.

Seriously, we are watching the demise of this Nation in real time. History IS being made, the destruction of America from within.

[ridesthemiles]

I STILL THINK THE PIC OF BARRY BEING STYMIED BY AN OPEN UMBRELLA AT A GATE SAYS IT ALL.......

HE IS A GROOMED IDIOT

[Sacajaweau]

that’s a favorite...along with gore and his rifle...

[bobbo666]

Ah, another fake MAGA troll.

Are you real or just a CCP bot?

[GOPJ]

During his time at Interior, Hassen was almost like a Where's Waldo character, popping up at key moments that caught the country's attention. When wildfires struck California, Hassen made an unusual decision to fly to the state to grill local officials about why the state's largest water plant wasn't running at full capacity.

The image of him at the Jones Pumping Plant in California became one of the first posts from the DOGE X account identifying its members - prompting a flood of hateful messages and threats to Hassen and his family, he said.

...

Hassen says he felt the difference in mindset between the public and the private sector every day. "It showed up in the way career staff spoke about 'the workforce' as something apart - almost sacred," he writes. "Until we can say out loud that government is a workforce like any other - noble in purpose, human in composition, and subject to reality like everything else - reform will look like cruelty before it looks like competence."

He says he hopes the legacy of DOGE will be that the country's most gifted citizens will seek to serve their government. Instead of draining the swamp, he says, he wants to flood it with talent and energy.

"These are some of the best and brightest we have in America," he said of the DOGE team. "I'm honored to be even a part of them."

Great find Twotone... also more proof the MSM doesn't do the job of reporting what's happening outside their bubble-view. Why? Because they're blind to it. Hello MSNOW, Politico and CNN...