But Interior staff reorganized into Burgum’s office who later left say they encountered a hostile, inefficient work culture designed to push people out. Russell Vought, the powerful director of the federal Office of Management and Budget, said in a private speech between Trump’s two terms that “we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected” by going to work, ProPublica reported in 2024.
“They’re sucking the soul out of the agencies and they’re doing it on purpose,” said Tim Whitehouse, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit that provides legal services to public employees. Administrative workers newly reorganized to Burgum’s office “have no clear management structure,” he said. “They often have no clear lines of authority. This is part of the effort by Secretary Burgum—the buck stops with him—to deconstruct his agency by creating trauma.”
