Inside the Federal Audit: How a Former Interior Department Official Found Billions of Dollars Lost in Needless Contracts

When Tyler Hassen stepped into the interior‑department’s budget office in early 2024, he didn’t expect to be staring at spreadsheets that read like a novel. The former Houston entrepreneur, who had run five small businesses, found himself sifting through what he later described as “ten‑thousand‑plus” contracts—many of them, he says, made little sense at all.

“I was looking at a $4.2 million contract to study groundwater in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania,” Hassen recalled during a recent interview on Breitbart News Saturday. “That’s not something the Interior Department should be spending money on.” He laughed, noting that the contract’s very existence felt like a typo in the budget.

Hassen’s daily routine quickly turned into a kind of forensic audit. Every Saturday, he’d pull up an Excel‑powered dashboard on a laptop, head down to the Secretary’s office, and walk through the numbers with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum—who, by Hassen’s description, showed up in jeans and a ball cap, ready to tackle the same data he was.

“We’d go line‑by‑line, asking the simple question: Is this mission‑critical?” Hassen said. “If it’s a nice‑to‑have, we have to ask whether we can afford it when the nation’s debt is swelling from $8 trillion in 2005 to over $40 trillion today.”

The answers weren’t always crystal‑clear. Some civil servants he called could give solid justification for a contract; others simply shrugged. “Sometimes they’d give me really good answers, and I’d say, ‘Okay, great, that’s helpful.’ But other times, it was just a shrug and a ‘we’ve always done it that way.’”

Beyond the contracts, Hassen warned that the problem is systemic. “It’s not just about the paper trail,” he emphasized. “It’s about the entire organizational culture that lets waste, fraud, and abuse slip through the cracks.” He believes the current administration’s push to trim the deficit—what he loosely calls the “DOGE effort”—was what pulled him into the public‑service world, despite having no prior ties to any high‑profile tech figures.

When asked what he’d advise anyone working in federal procurement, Hassen’s mantra was straightforward: keep asking, “Why?” He urged his former colleagues to scrutinize even the most obscure expenditures—whether it’s $12 million for an ocelot study or $3 million for larval fish monitoring.

His hope? A government that treats every dollar with the same scrutiny a small business owner would. “If we keep spending on projects that aren’t essential, we’re just adding to a debt that could reach $100 trillion by the time my five‑year‑old daughter is in her mid‑twenties,” he warned.

Hassen’s story serves as a reminder that even the biggest institutions can benefit from a fresh set of eyes—eyes that look for waste, demand accountability, and ultimately, try to keep the nation’s finances on a steadier footing.