The Interior Department presents many targets of opportunity for hard chargers in the second Trump administration.
Oil and gas production could be fast-tracked in Alaska and the Lower 48 states. Budgets could be cut, science offices closed, and endangered species rules rewritten.
In what amounts to a one-two punch, President-elect Donald Trump’s Interior appointees will be positioned in the short term to rescind and reverse many Biden administration policies. In the long term, Trump’s effort to reduce the size of government — the “Department of Government Efficiency” — could seek deeper cuts to the department of some 70,000 employees, including trying to shrink the size of the workforce.
But getting rid of too many career employees might actually make it harder to move forward on Trump’s deregulation priorities or his oft-stated desire to boost oil and gas drilling on public lands, noted both a longtime Interior observer and a former department insider.
“I would expect many of the career people to take early retirement or just bail out depending on how bad things get,” said Pat Parenteau, an emeritus professor of law and senior fellow for climate policy at the Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Parenteau predicted this could create a “huge loss of institutional memory and competence that could actually impede the Trump fossil fuel agenda” because the “midlevel managers and worker bees are far more important to mission execution than the political appointees.”
One Republican former Interior secretary likewise cautioned that big cuts could backfire and undermine some of Trump’s key priorities.
“[Interior’s] managing 20 percent of the land in the United States. It’s a big responsibility,” noted Gale Norton, who served as Interior secretary under former President George W. Bush. “It’s not an area where there are large areas of employees doing the same thing.”
With its authority over 500 million acres of federal lands, 700 million acres of subsurface minerals and 23 percent of the nation’s energy production, Interior will nonetheless present a particularly inviting target for the Trump team that will include both formal officeholders and wide-roaming advisers.
Among the latter, billionaire businessman Elon Musk is recruiting like-minded activists to join him as part of the Trump administration’s commission aimed at reducing the federal budget and finding inefficiencies.
“We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting,” the Department of Government Efficiency posted on X, the social media site also owned by Musk.
Even without self-styled revolutionaries stalking departmental hallways, every new administration can try to wipe out its predecessor’s work.
Three months into her term, for instance, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in April 2021 rescinded in one fell swoop a dozen orders issued by her Republican predecessors. Any one of these rescinded GOP orders might now be revived, touching everything from energy production in Alaska to the streamlining of environmental reviews.
Crucial legal opinions, too, always invite second- or even third-guessing.
In the Biden administration’s first year, the Interior solicitor’s office withdrew six prior legal opinions issued during Trump’s first term. Likewise, Trump’s first-term Interior solicitor in roughly the first year withdrew or reversed six opinions from the preceding Obama administration.
One legal opinion that’s bounced back and forth involves the valuable mineral estate beneath the surface of North Dakota’s Lake Sakakawea. The lake within the reservation of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation was created by the construction of the Garrison Dam on the Missouri River.
A 2017 Interior solicitor’s opinion concluded the Three Affiliated Tribes held title to the riverbed mineral estate. The first Trump administration changed course and ruled the minerals belonged to the state of North Dakota.
The Biden administration in 2022 then determined otherwise, and returned the mineral ownership to the tribes.
If North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) wins confirmation as Interior secretary from the Republican-led Senate, he could direct changes in any number of secretarial orders and solicitor’s opinions, as well as regulations finalized during the Biden administration.
Potentially vulnerable regulations that have discomfited conservatives include high bonding for oil and gas leases, new conservation rules in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, and the Bureau of Land Management’s public lands rule, which requires activities like oil and gas drilling be coordinated with conservation priorities.
Under the co-leadership of Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, the new Department of Government Efficiency could meanwhile be digging into every Interior nook and cranny.
David Spence, an expert on the law and politics of energy development at the University of Texas School of Law, predicted a focus on changes that “boost mining and oil and gas production.” He added there could also be interest in reducing “the size of national monuments or other protections” that might otherwise preclude Trump’s energy priorities.
But many details concerning DOGE remain murky, other than the expectation that it will yield a report and that it will please the president.
“It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” Trump wrote in a social media posting, alluding to the development of the atomic bomb during World War II.
Trump added that it will “pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
In their own social media postings, Musk and Ramaswamy have characterized their aim as a “massive downsizing” that will “send shock waves through the system.”
Musk has noted dismay at the number of federal employees and winked at eliminating entire agencies.
“There are so many regulators that it’s like a sports game with more refs than players on the field!,” Musk said in an X post on Sunday.
Jamie Pleune, an associate professor of law at the University of Utah, said she expected Musk and his crew to operate with a slash-and-burn mentality similar to Musk’s approach to restructuring X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. She warned this could echo the first Trump administration’s decision to move the BLM headquarters to Colorado, when 87 percent of staff assigned to relocate instead took other jobs or left the government.
Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, said the staff cuts could target renewables in particular, to slow down their growth on public lands and offshore.
“They could slash the staffs in the Interior Department that grant approvals for offshore wind (Bureau of Ocean Energy Management) and for wind and solar projects on federal land (Bureau of Land Management),” Gerrard said in an email.
The Biden administration added dozens of new roles to BOEM’s staff to meet Biden’s ambitious offshore wind targets.
As governor of North Dakota, Burgum has shied away from speaking about climate change, while emphasizing that carbon capture and storage is a solution to carbon pollution. DOGE co-lead Ramaswamy adamantly denies that climate change is a serious threat.
Musk, who owns the most successful electric vehicle company in the United States, has advocated for an energy transition that doesn’t attack the oil and gas sector. Trump, though, has derided wind turbines as bird killers and solar fields as ugly.
“It’s all steel and glass and wires and looks like hell,” Trump said at a Republican roundtable earlier this year of solar farms in the desert.
A current Interior employee who’s worked for roughly a decade on federal energy development said they expected the Trump administration to specifically attack offshore wind.
Trump officials will come into power with plans “to decimate the offshore wind industry,” this employee said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak publicly.
Norton, the former Interior secretary, said she supported a government efficiency effort but cautioned that Interior agencies like BLM often need more resources to fulfill their mandate to manage oil and gas and conservation. She recounted that the George W. Bush administration sought greater energy production on public lands but faced permitting delays because of short-staffing.
Norton said one improvement that the Trump efficiency efforts could target is to invest oil and gas revenues in BLM staff, who can help manage the higher workloads.
A former Interior official from the first Trump administration said the efficiency seekers will likely focus on cutting red tape rather than cutting people.
“As far as I know, there are no predetermined outcomes,” this former official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak about transition plans. “They will have to be developed.”
The newcomers might also learn lessons from past efficiency efforts.
Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, was an adviser during the first Trump administration to one such group at Interior, called the Royalty Policy Committee. The group considered ideas such as streamlining the permit and review process for drilling on public land, but the committee ultimately disbanded with many of its potential reforms undone.
The incoming Trump administration is making an effort to start with more clarity and experience, Sgamma said.
“It will be much more experienced. I’m already sensing a shift in tone,” she said.
