Senate Confirms Trump Nominee Burgum as Interior Secretary

The Senate on Thursday voted 79-18 to confirm former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) as Interior secretary, as President Donald Trump moves forward with implementing his energy agenda.

Burgum will oversee the Interior Department, which manages more than 600 million acres of public land and all federally-owned oil, natural gas, and other minerals. He’ll also be responsible for endangered species recovery, managing much of the West’s water supply, overseeing tribal lands and Indian education, and operating national parks.

Burgum, whose home state is among the top oil producers in the US, is central to Trump’s energy plans, which are focused on removing constraints to fossil fuels development. Trump also tapped Burgum to be his energy czar.

“Too often, under the Biden administration, the Interior Department was the tip of the spear in restricting development of America’s resources,” Senate Republican leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said on the chamber’s floor Thursday. “The Biden administration seemed to believe that land use and conservation were mutually exclusive.”

“I’m pleased that Governor Burgum is committed to restoring the multiple-use approach to managing public lands,” he said. “I look forward to working with him to protect our public lands and leverage some of America’s greatest assets for a safer and more prosperous future.”

North Dakota during Burgum’s term as governor regularly challenged Interior Department conservation measures enacted during the Biden administration. The state was the lead plaintiff in cases challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s rule cutting waste methane emissions from oil and gas wells and the BLM’s Conservation and Landscape Health rule, which defined conservation as a “use” of federal land.

The state also challenged the Interior Department’s cancellation of oil and gas leases in the state, and it joined with 14 other states in a brief supporting Utah’s challenge to presidential use of the Antiquities Act to create large national monuments, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.

Burgum said during his Jan. 16 Senate hearing before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, that the need to develop baseload electricity generation mainly using natural gas and coal is essential to “balance” a grid that includes wind and solar power generation.

The Interior Department has sole jurisdiction over offshore wind leasing and development in federal waters, but has limited control over most onshore wind development in the US. Wind farm development has been widespread on non-federal land across the Great Plains, especially in Texas. Interior’s Bureau of Land Management oversees wind and solar development on about 245 million acres of federal land, mostly in the West.

“Without baseload, we’re going to lose the AI arms race to China,” Burgum said during his confirmation hearing. “AI is manufacturing intelligence, and if we don’t manufacture more intelligence than our adversaries, that affects every job, every company and every industry.”

Burgum said he believes that the US is amid a grim “energy crisis” and pledged to fight the “weaponization of the nation’s rules” blocking progress on energy and other development.

He said intermittent renewable energy sources, mainly wind and solar, serve to destabilize the electric power grid.

“If the sun’s not shining and the wind’s not blowing, and we don’t have baseload, then we’ve got brownouts and blackouts, we have higher electric prices for every American,” he said at the hearing.