Easter Sunday’s “Fox News Sunday” featured an exclusive interview with Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. Even as one of the less visible cabinet members, Burgum’s role in managing our national parks and the country’s public lands is very visible and less opaque than some other cabinet positions. Which is probably why he has recently come under some fierce criticism.
Much of the brouhaha and outcry is from environmental watchdog groups, which are using images of temporary employees having their dream jobs rescinded and parks full of people with no rangers to open the bathrooms or guide them. Jennifer Rokala, Executive Director of Center for Western Priorities issued a statement after Burgum signed the order which read, in part:
If Doug Burgum doesn’t want this job, he should quit now. Instead, it looks like Burgum plans to sit by the fire eating warm cookies while Elon Musk’s lackeys dismantle our national parks and public lands. This order shows what it looks like when leaders abdicate their jobs and let unqualified outsiders fire thousands of civil servants who are working on behalf of all Americans and their public lands.
Here are some facts on what’s actually happening under Burgum:
The Interior Department is moving forward with sweeping reorganization and consolidation efforts that will be overseen by a former member of the Elon Musk-led workforce reduction team.
Interior began circulating basic outlines for the reorganization last week, which a department official familiar with the plan said at the time would include consolidating communications, financial management, contracting, human resources, grants, civil rights and interactive technology. Another Interior official confirmed last week that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has spearheaded President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting efforts across the government, would lead the task.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum signed a secretarial order Thursday that confirmed most of those details.
Tyler Hassen is already a DOGE embed within the department and has been tapped as the Assistant Secretary of Policy, Management and Budget (AS-PMB) to spearhead the work. Burgum signed SO 3429, a Consolidation, Unification and Optimization of Administrative Functions on Thursday, and its game plan is to reorganize, streamline, and consolidate administrative roles.
However, the deep work being done in the Interior is less about park services and customer-facing roles, and more about bloated administrative overhead. Burgum used the most apt analogy to explain this process to Fox News host Shannon Bream, after she mentioned Rokala’s statement.
Burgum said:
Again, I have to smile because, apparently… having been in the private sector for my whole life until being a governor, and then working in a state where we had to balance the budget, which is different.
I mean, if the federal government is like a ranch that, where they threw everything in the barn for 100 years, and great grandpa and grampy never threw anything away, and has accumulated everything and you never had to clean it out, that would be—that’s what the federal government is.
Anyone who has seen an episode of the TV series, “Hoarders” immediately attached to that image. From administration to administration, Democrat and Republican, they have simply thrown things into the federal barn without any assessment of whether they have any purpose or use, and instead of assessing this, they hire people to manage or oversee the barn, without assessing whether its contents are even worthy of management or oversight.
Burgum continued,
And typically the federal government would send in a committee of 25 people who pick up one object, spend two weeks talking about, should we get rid of it, what did great grandpa use this for, maybe we should save it, it might be historic. What we’re doing right now is emptying out the barn and deciding what should go back in. And what should go back in is what actually serves the American people.
Burgum dovetailed beautifully into the visible roles that are the makeup of our national parks, but pointed to the fact that a majority of those employed do not even work at an actual park:
Take national parks for an example. There is so much overhead of people that work for the park system that don’t work in a park. We could actually increase the number of people. Like this summer, we’ll have more people working in Yellowstone than we had in 2020. More people working, but we could end up with fewer people across the whole park system. Because, guess what? We may not need that many people in IT, we may not need that many people in HR, there’s things that we can do to streamline. And if we’ve got people who are in this business because they care about the environment and they care about our lands, we’ve got customer-facing, land-facing jobs available. We have 5,000 jobs posted to go work in the parks[..]. wildfire fighters, people that are for summer help, come work for us. But work in a job where we’re serving the public as opposed to in D.C. or in a regional location, where you’re just doing overhead that’s part of the barn that’s never been cleaned out.
Bullseye. This clear-as-crystal presentation of the issues at hand, and how the Trump administration seeks to solve them, is a welcome hallmark in this MAGA cabinet. We’re here for it.
WATCH:
Elon Musk and DOGE are bringing much-needed accountability to our out-of-control bureaucracy as they take a chainsaw to rampant waste, fraud, and abuse.
Help us continue to report on DOGE’s accomplishments and expose Big Government corruption. Join RedState VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.
