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.
“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, he 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.
“I’m staring at my daughter, who is 5, and thinking about her at 25 with $100 trillion of debt. And I know if we don’t do something about it now, we’re going to be there,” he said. “We’ve got to fix it now.”
By its own accounting, DOGE fell far short of the $2 trillion Musk claimed he would save, and an independent report from the Government Accountability Office has found DOGE’s own savings figures to be flawed. But Hassen told The Post he believes the effort was a success.
“Did we eliminate the deficit? No. Of course not,” he said. “But we made it on the top of everyone’s minds, albeit briefly, for a few months, that this deficit is something that we need to fix.”
In the book, he argues that “DOGE fit squarely” within a tradition practiced by some Democratic presidents, from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, who also sought to shrink bloated government. DOGE was different, he goes on to concede, because of 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.” [...]
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.
During his first week at DOGE, the team met in a sparse conference room on the top floor of the SpaceX offices — empty except for a giant American flag on the wall, “because it reminded us why we are here,” he told The Post. “We had billionaires to 22-year-olds who had dropped out of Harvard, all sitting there on our laptops working with public information — trying to figure out how we can help solve this deficit, this crisis that we’re in.” [...] [ed. like talking to Congress?]
During his time at Interior, Hassen was almost like a Where’s Waldo character, popping up in 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.
When Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico, it fell to Hassen to officially register the rechristened Gulf of America in the Interior Department’s Geographic Names Information System — a move that then triggered a broader recognition of the name change on Google Maps and other online directories.
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.”
During his first week at DOGE, the team met in a sparse conference room on the top floor of the SpaceX offices — empty except for a giant American flag on the wall, “because it reminded us why we are here,” he told The Post. “We had billionaires to 22-year-olds who had dropped out of Harvard, all sitting there on our laptops working with public information — trying to figure out how we can help solve this deficit, this crisis that we’re in.” [...] [ed. like talking to Congress?]
During his time at Interior, Hassen was almost like a Where’s Waldo character, popping up in 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.
When Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico, it fell to Hassen to officially register the rechristened Gulf of America in the Interior Department’s Geographic Names Information System — a move that then triggered a broader recognition of the name change on Google Maps and other online directories.
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.”
by Elizabeth Dwoskin, The Washington Post, via Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: WaPo
[ed. Nice. Can't wait for AI and the 'operating system of capitalism' (Praise the Lord!) to reduce its workforce by at least one cult memoirist.]
