The Interior Department has reassigned around 30 of its most senior staffers to teams largely outside their areas of expertise, alarming lawmakers and federal government workers already worried about the Trump administration’s erosion of institutional knowledge at the agency.
The reassignments mirror an approach President Donald Trump employed in his first term, when the Interior Department, under then-Secretary Ryan Zinke, suddenly shifted around dozens of career Senior Executive Service personnel. The move was met with widespread condemnation from congressional Democrats and led to whistleblower complaints and lawsuits, which accused the administration of sidelining key staff working on climate change and other issues it disfavored.
A subsequent inspector general report faulted Interior for allowing political appointees to exclusively determine the assignments and for failing to justify the moves.
This time, Interior, helmed by Secretary Doug Burgum, 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.
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The personnel moves follow new policies that have tightened the administration’s grip on the Senior Executive Service staff — the top career employees in federal government who serve as a direct liaison between political appointees and rank-and-file workers — to ensure they fully adhere to the president’s policies.
One of the people reassigned to a different bureau within the Interior Department described the reassignments broadly as “punitive.”
“They want us all to leave and be replaced by more politicals,” this person said.
Before the shake-up, Interior had already shed around 40% of its senior executive cadre since Trump took office, largely through deferred resignation and deferred retirement programs intended to shrink the agency.
The reassignments, described by one 20-year veteran of Interior as “highly unusual,” represent at least 20% of the most senior career employees who still remain at the agency. The actual percentage could be far higher, because some of these executives have agreed to step down at the end of September.
In a statement, the Interior Department said it would not comment on individual personnel matters, but called reassignments “a routine management tool used across administrations.”
“The Department continues to align senior leadership and resources to best support its mission, improve organizational effectiveness and deliver results for the American people,” a spokesperson for the agency said.
Employees said the reshuffling of top staff would lead to a loss of expertise. While these management positions were designed to lead any team and therefore be moved around, many of those impacted by the recent moves had spent their entire careers in one office because of their technical knowledge in that area.
Cynthia Martinez, until this week the longtime director of the National Wildlife Refuge System, had worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service since 1993 and the Refuge System since 2010. Her educational background is focused on biology, fisheries and wildlife science.
She has been reassigned to the USGS Natural Hazards Mission Area, which monitors natural hazards and natural disasters, according to multiple people familiar with the change.
“She has spent her whole career in refuges,” one USGS employee said. “She knows nothing about volcano or earthquake science.”
FWS also reassigned Jerome Ford, who led the related Migratory Birds program since 2011. Funding for the lands that make up the National Wildlife Refuge System largely comes from fundraising by the Migratory Birds program, and now both organizations have lost the civil servants who led them for more than a decade.
David Applegate, who served as USGS director in the Biden administration and was most recently its chief scientist and head of the Natural Hazards office, is moving to Interior headquarters. One source briefed on the overall reassignment effort said moves like that one “don’t make sense,” and that the administration may be trying to curb his influence.
“I think they’re just trying to send a message,” the source said. “If you don’t get in line, maybe this is what’s going to happen.”
Martinez, Ford and Applegate did not respond to requests for comment.
“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,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, the top Democrat on the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “The American people deserve better than this.”
As Interior has instituted more political oversight of all department operations, employees expressed concern that executives who helped win political appointee support for key programs would now be sidelined.
“Agencies have in good faith been justifying everything to the nth degree with hope of approval and continuation of their good work,” another USGS employee said. “Upending the remaining executive leadership means starting all over, reeducating new leaders, which means further delays of partnerships and good work.”
A senior FWS employee said senior executives develop institutional knowledge that help offices function through relationships both inside and outside government.
“They have relationships with people throughout the organization in a way that makes things tick, and have relationships with state and local government, tribal government, NGOs, and other key partners that have a stake in the organization’s mission,” the employee said.
Ray Limon, who served as deputy human resources director at Interior during the mass reassignments in Trump’s first term, called that era a “crazy time” when midnight emails alerted staff of their new roles. Limon subsequently became the top HR official for the department and, with then-Secretary David Bernhardt’s backing, helped institute new rules to provide more structure for that process.
“It felt like people were just being moved around without identification of where new work needed to go,” Limon said of the 2017 reassignments, noting he was not directly involved in that decision-making process. “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.”
Limon’s process was meant to give executives 30 days’ notice for an intra-agency move within the same geographic area, or 90 days if it was to a new agency in a new location. It also allowed the employees to ask questions and push back.
It does not appear that Interior followed that process for this month’s reassignments.
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