Elizabeth Dwoskin, (c) 2026 , The Washington Post

Mon, September 21, 2026 at 1:59 PM EDT

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.”

At the heart of the book is a split screen: For many Americans, Musk’s project was a callous showcase of bending government to a billionaire’s will, associated with tens of thousands of federal layoffs, reams of lawsuits, an AI-enabled effort to kill off wasteful contracts and the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

But Hassen’s memoir enters a different vision into the historical record: He portrays a period marked by a clash in worldviews, in which hardcore capitalists are granted unprecedented power to change a system that they argue operates under completely different incentives, logic and norms.

To Hassen, whose pre-government career involved turning around distressed companies, “DOGE was not radical,” he writes in the book. It was “not a wrecking ball, but a catalyst.”

In conversation, Hassen comes across as mild-mannered, a distant temperament from Musk, who famously brandished a red metallic chainsaw as a metaphor for cutting government waste. A 43-year-old dad with Boy Scout energy, he doesn’t cut the image of the nerd-engineer DOGE bro. He spent his entire adult life “hiring, firing, reorganizing and rescuing failing businesses” in industrial manufacturing and the energy sectors – a skill set that appealed to Musk, his longtime deputy, Steve Davis, and Baris Akis, a venture capitalist who served as a volunteer recruiter.

But for years, Hassen seethed with rage over the national debt, now at $40 trillion. He felt angry that the amount the U.S. spends annually just to service that debt is more than the government spends on national defense and many other public benefits.

So he raised his hand – making a cold outreach to Musk through a network of business world connections, he said in the interview, and pressed the point.

its speed, “faster than Washington was ready for and faster than its defenses could absorb.”

But Hassen insists that DOGE was not cruel, a word that appears six times in the memoir, often in relation to laying off federal workers. The refrain can read as a plea for reconsideration of an effort he argues was poorly understood.

“In the private sector, there’s an understood bargain,” he writes. “You’re hired to create value. If the value disappears, so does the job. It isn’t personal. It isn’t cruel. It’s the operating system of capitalism.”

Government, he argues in the book, runs on a different logic. Value is “presumed,” “permanence is the default,” and “the moral burden of proofs falls on anyone who questions headcount – no matter how bloated the system becomes.”

After the screening process, Musk and Davis deployed Hassen to the U.S. Department of the Interior, a sprawling agency that manages roughly 500 million acres of federal land and property, national parks, and tribal territories. He took the assignment, he wrote, because he knew “very little” about the agency and the challenge was appealing.

Hassen was eventually promoted by Doug Burgum, the wealthy businessman who heads the agency, whom Hassen described as something of a kindred spirit. He became acting assistant secretary of policy, management and budget and stayed on until November – months after Musk himself had left Washington.

During his tenure at DOGE, Hassen says, he put in 14-hour days, working nights and weekends. During the chaotic period he saw his then-4-year-old daughter only a handful of times. He said he relished the minutiae of the job: poring over grants written in what appeared to him to be bureaucratese, disassembling bloated org charts and consolidating departments.

He says he encountered a bureaucracy more labyrinthine and redundant than he could have ever imagined. He caught spelling errors in a project description written by a vendor charging hundreds of millions of dollars, which he saw as proof of a systemic malaise. The contract, he writes, “stopped me cold.” (To drive home the point, a photo of the paperwork with the spelling error is published in the book.)

He told The Post he was exhilarated to get deep into the bowels of the bureaucracy and deploy his corporate-honed skill sets to attack a problem that had long troubled him.

the project in the lurch. The night of that split, Hassen said, he paced around the Interior Department like a ghost. The next morning, he went to the agency gift shop and bought his daughter a T-shirt that said “Future Secretary of the Interior.” He thought it might be his last night in D.C.

Hassen’s experience working with AI for the first time at DOGE led him to take a new job leading Zone Frontier, a former cleaning supply firm with a new mission to provide infrastructure and permitting to the data center industry. Musk’s longtime lawyer, Alex Spiro, has also joined the board of directors, something Hassen said was a pure coincidence.

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.”

Faiz Siddiqui contributed to this report.