U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum just handed the country’s public lands over to a DOGE staffer and former oil exec.

Last Thursday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued a nighttime order mandating a drastic overhaul of the organization of his expansive department, which oversees everything from national parks to energy permits to Native American reservations to fire management. The move effectively centralizes control over the entire department’s operations—putting the power to shape staffing, spending, and priorities for the department’s thousands of duties into the hands of a single office.

Burgum announced that the internal administrative functions necessary for running all aspects of the Department of the Interior—that is, for individual staffing and budgetary decisions at 11 different bureaus—will be consolidated into the overarching office. What’s more, Burgum would be transferring all of his authority on those matters to one of his top-ranked deputies: the assistant secretary for policy, management, and budget.

This move may sound merely bureaucratic on the surface, but a little probing reveals deep cause for alarm. For one, this indicates that Burgum, who underwent Senate confirmation for his position, is abdicating a sizable portion of his responsibilities to a staffer who—as this official order fails to note—is purportedly acting in a temporary capacity and has not been approved by Congress as required. This newly empowered official is also a member of Elon Musk’s disastrous Department of Government Efficiency: He is Tyler Hassen, best known as one of the staffers who, in January, flew to California on the taxpayers’ dime for a photo-op in support of DOGE’s false claim that Donald Trump opened federal water supplies to fire-stricken Los Angeles. And further, as the Center for Western Priorities noted, “The order does not require Hassen to report back to Burgum regarding the reorganization, nor does it reserve any authority to Burgum if Hassen were to fire thousands of public lands managers, park rangers, or wildfire specialists across the country.”

In essence, a Musk acolyte and longtime oil-and-gas baron who has no governmental experience outside of DOGE has just been handed sweeping powers over an essential department that his ostensible boss is already slashing to death. Just in time for National Parks Week and Earth Day, no less. In an email to Slate, an Interior spokesperson declined to “comment on personnel matters,” but declared that “we are implementing necessary reforms to ensure fiscal responsibility, operational efficiency and government accountability.”

We don’t know yet how Hassen will choose to exercise his role, but it’s easy to guess, based on DOGE’s other rampages, that this acting secretary will impose yet more arbitrary cuts on an already strapped, underresourced, and underfunded department. Interior was already suffering from DOGE’s arbitrary limits on government credit-card spending, which have let many essential functions fall into disrepair. And late last month, as Wired’s Makenna Kelly reported, Hassen teamed up with a couple of other DOGE affiliates to demand untrammeled access to sensitive employee information within Interior’s payment and HR systems. When career department officials refused, they were forced out of their jobs.

Whatever Hassen decides to do, his most destructive tendencies will have already been enabled to the max by Burgum, who now will have more time to devote to his simultaneous roles on the National Security Council and the recently formed, fossil fuel–pumping “National Energy Dominance Council.” Or, much more likely, he will be delegating tasks for political appointees at Interior that include baking cookies, artfully stacking firewood, removing labels from water bottles, and readying federal helicopters for personal travel, per the Atlantic.

A former Republican presidential candidate and two-term governor of the fracking mecca known as North Dakota, Burgum was once widely perceived as one of Donald Trump’s more palatable, less radical Cabinet picks. Despite the fact that onshore wind turbines make for a significant portion of North Dakota’s energy production, Burgum was always a staunch fossil fuel booster. As governor, he supported the notorious Dakota Access Pipeline, signed a law protecting other oil-and-gas pipelines from protesters, and threatened to sue Minnesota after Gov. Tim Walz signed a 2023 law mandating that all electricity transmitted to and consumed by the North Star State be carbon-free by 2040. Burgum ramped up such advocacy after he dropped out of the Republican presidential primary, eagerly supporting Trump’s reelection bid and brokering that infamous meeting where Trump demanded $1 billion in campaign contributions from myriad oil-and-gas executives.

Nevertheless, because he’d once pledged to make North Dakota “carbon-neutral” by 2030 (primarily by greenlighting inefficient, unscalable carbon-capture tech) and voiced support for an “all of the above” national energy strategy, Burgum’s Cabinet nomination earned some support from unexpected sources, like solar-power associations, pro-environment orgs such as REI and PeopleForBikes, and some Native American tribes. (Burgum did return a favor for his Indigenous supporters when he purposefully excluded tribes from an anti-“DEI” executive order that could have affected their federal support.)

But ever since his confirmation—which earned the favor of 26 Senate Democrats—Burgum has been just another faithful steward of Trump’s climate-denying, service-slashing, revanchist agenda. In his short tenure so far, he’s persuaded Google and Apple to accept Trump’s “Gulf of America” renaming, restored Mount McKinley’s non-Indigenous name, reopened protected lands to drilling, narrowed wildlife regulations, and fired thousands of Interior staff (including park rangers and geological surveyors), among many other things. Despite claiming to support “all of the above” energy, he’s also paused major renewable projects, rolled back crucial conservation efforts, and attempted to revive already dead coal plants.

At the very least, it’s been enough to get REI to rescind its endorsement and apologize for backing Burgum. It’s also been more than enough to devastate American natural wonders, hold up the everyday functions of our parks, and put us on a course for devastating climate disasters. All at the expense, it should be noted, of what the American people actually want. Last year saw a record-breaking number of national park visits, at a total of nearly 332 million. Polls indicate that Americans, especially in the West, overwhelmingly prefer that public lands be used for environmental conservation efforts rather than for resource extraction. Majorities of voters of all ideological persuasions also want the United States to use public lands for renewable energy development, and they want their government to facilitate, not blockade, the energy transition. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, they overwhelmingly prefer that public lands stay public and not be sold off for greedy private enterprise.

No wonder, then, that Americans planned nationwide Earth Day protests. Three months into this term, Trump and Burgum have done everything they can to decimate the wildlife and destroy the natural beauty that actually does make America great. And now, with a DOGE guy all but running the Interior as Burgum munches his cookies, that exploitation is going to get much, much worse.