Doug Burgum is charging Interior Department agencies a premium to subsume their employees

The Interior Department is consolidating employees and resources in its secretary’s office and charging its bureaus significant fees for the effort, according to staff and internal documents. 

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced earlier this year that his office would absorb thousands of employees from the bureau level working in back-end functions like human resources, IT, finance and others as part of a consolidation effort at the department. Those employees no longer report to the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management or Fish and Wildlife Service, for example, but instead to Burgum’s office. 

To compensate for the change, Interior’s Office of the Secretary is charging bureaus for each consolidated employee’s pay and benefits, as well as $5,000 per employee and an additional 10.5% of the combined pay and benefits and $5,000 charge for each worker, according to a document obtained by Government Executive and officials briefed on the matter. The exact amounts may vary by function area, but follow that general structure. 

Several employees noted that staff inherently come with overhead costs and some offices were already kicking up payments to their bureaus to compensate for shared services like IT and human resources. The question, according to one employee at an impacted Interior bureau, will be whether the payments now directed to the secretary’s office “will be fairly administered or whether they will be taking more money to pay for whatever other costs they need to cover.” 

Another senior official echoed that at the bureau level, there will be questions about what they have to gain from the transition. 

“You’ve lost your staff,” the official said. “Now you’re being asked to pay that staff. And now there’s a worry about the services you’re going to get.”

Interior said its budget office would calculate pay and benefits for consolidated employees and issue centralized billings to bureaus and offices, the documents show. The $5,000 fee would cover things like training, travel, equipment, communications and utilities, according to an internal document. The 10.5% fee would go toward other “overhead expenses.” 

The two-part fee for those costs struck some employees as overkill. 

“It is kind of nickel and diming when they also wanted additional $5,000 for equipment and stuff,” one official said. 

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility has issued a Freedom of Information Act request to solicit information on Interior’s reorganization and what the fee structure looks like and recently filed a lawsuit after failing to get a timely response. Jeff Ruch, PEER’s senior counsel, said the fees being charged to bureaus “adds insult to injury” after they lost their staff. Bureaus, he said, are now “shortchanging their budgets” to adjust to the fees. 

Around 5,700 employees have shifted to Burgum’s office, according to PEER’s estimate, which normally would trigger a reprogramming request to Congress. Current law requires Interior to seek congressional approval when it reallocates funds from one budget line-item to another or when it undertakes any reorganization effort that impacts at least 10 employees. It did not appear that Interior had received such approval for its current effort, though the department did not respond to a request for comment. 

Congress has not yet passed full-year appropriations for Interior for fiscal 2026. It can opt in that bill to restructure the department’s funding stream to accommodate Burgum’s consolidation effort. For now, the department is continuing to charge the fees to its bureaus. 

Tim Whitehouse, PEER's president, expressed concern that Burgum was concentrating power within his own office and leaving leadership vacuums at the field level. He also highlighted potential budgetary concerns created by the fee structure. 

“In building this bureaucratic empire, Secretary Burgum may be further impoverishing the very agencies responsible for carrying out Interior’s mission,” Whitehouse said. “Secretary Burgum has put his own office on steroids without monitoring for the adverse side effects he is causing.”

John Trezise, who served at Interior for 35 years, including most recently as its budget director, said the fees could create some double costs for bureaus as they phase out existing operations. He called the separation of employees from their funding ill-advised, and suggested both changes should have happened at once with congressional approval. 

While the fees represent costs the agencies largely would have already expected to absorb without the consolidation, Trezise, who now sits on the board of directors at NatureServe, said the tightened budget the Trump administration has sought to implement means the change “inevitably will be disruptive.” 

That disruption would be on top of the significant reductions to other parts of their workforces as Interior has looked to shed thousands of employees through various incentives. It also planned to lay off thousands of employees—many of whom were expected to be part of the consolidation—but those efforts were blocked through at least January by the spending deal that ended the recent shutdown.

Interior largely rolled out its consolidation effort on paper only and without overhauling operations in any practical way. Several employees lamented that there has been little communication on what the next steps of the reorganization will look like.

“There’s a lot of people wondering how this is all going to play out,” the senior official said.