U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is reassigning roughly 30 senior department staffers to positions outside their areas of expertise, a shakeup that, according to NOTUS, has set off a major outcry among department insiders — who fear Burgum will fill the vacant positions with cronies of President Donald Trump.

The department those career staffers run day to day is vast: Interior manages roughly 500 million acres of public land — about a fifth of the U.S. land surface — along with offshore energy leasing and the National Park and wildlife refuge systems, work that depends on career specialists in permitting, land management and scientific research.

Journalists Eric Katz and Anna Kramer report in NOTUS that lawmakers and federal government workers are also "worried about the Trump administration's erosion of institutional knowledge at the agency."

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

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

Another Interior source told the outlet 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."

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is publicly sounding the alarm about the moves. "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," Heinrich told NOTUS. "The American people deserve better than this."

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. Those bureaus anchor the department's mission: the Bureau of Land Management administers about 245 million surface acres, more federal land than any other agency; the Fish and Wildlife Service carries out the Endangered Species Act and the National Wildlife Refuge System; and the U.S. Geological Survey produces much of the federal government's science on earthquakes, water and other natural hazards. The employees were given two weeks to decide whether they would accept the new role or resign from government — a deadline that puts the question of who ultimately fills the resulting vacancies at the center of insiders' concerns.

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."

The moves come in Burgum's first months in office and against a broader administration push to shrink the federal workforce. A former two-term governor of North Dakota, Burgum was confirmed as interior secretary in late January 2025 and also chairs the National Energy Dominance Council, the White House initiative to expand U.S. energy production that emphasizes speeding up permitting decisions.

Mass reassignments also took place at the Interior Department in 2017, during Trump's first presidency, when the agency was headed by Ryan Zinke. Those moves drew congressional scrutiny at the time, and Interior's inspector general later found the department had not developed or applied defined criteria in deciding which senior executives were reassigned. Ray Limon, who served as deputy human resources director at the time, described that period as one of chaos for the department.

"It felt like people were just being moved around without identification of where new work needed to go," Limon told NOTUS. "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."