'Get in line': Massive shakeup rocks agency as MAGA prepares for takeover

At the U.S. Interior Department, Secretary Doug Burgum is reassigning roughly 30 of its senior staffers — and they're being moved to positions outside their areas of expertise. This shakeup, according to NOTUS, is setting off a major outcry from department insiders — who fear that the Burgum will fill the positions with cronies of President Donald Trump.

"Lawmakers and federal government workers," journalists Eric Katz and Anna Kramer

report in NOTUS, are also "worried about the Trump administration's erosion of institutional knowledge at the agency."

One of the reassigned Interior Department staffers, interviewed on condition of anonymity, describes the reassignments as "punitive."

"They want us all to leave and be replaced by more political," the staffer told NOTUS.

Another Interior source told NOTUS that the reassignments "don't make sense," adding, "I think they're just trying to send a message. If you don't get in line, maybe this is what's going to happen."

One lawmaker who is publicly sounding the alarm about the reassignments is Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Heinrich told NOTUS, "Shuffling seasoned scientists and land management professionals around into roles outside their areas of expertise means Americans can't get what they need from our lands agencies, including timely permits for projects, protection from wildfire, and science-based management of our lands and waters. The American people deserve better than this."

Mass reassignments at the Interior Department also occurred in 2017 during Trump's first presidency, when the agency was headed by Ryan Zinke. Ray Limon, who served as deputy human resources director at the time, describes the reassignments as a time of chaos for Interior.

Limon told NOTUS, "It felt like people were just being moved around without identification of where new work needed to go. Absent information of why people were being moved, that information gap will typically lead to confusion and not generate, necessarily, a lot of good will. There wasn't necessarily a logic or a pattern to which individuals got reassigned and which didn't."

Katz and Kramer report that Interior has "shifted some of its most senior, longest-serving career staffers from the Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey, Bureau of Land Management, central agency headquarters and some smaller offices, according to a dozen current and former employees familiar with the moves. The employees were given two weeks to decide if they would accept the role or resign from government."

A U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) employee, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told NOTUS, "Agencies have, in good faith, been justifying everything to the nth degree with hope of approval and continuation of their good work. Upending the remaining executive leadership means starting all over, reeducating new leaders, which means further delays of partnerships and good work."