President-elect Donald Trump has announced his choice to be the next Secretary of the Interior: two-term North Dakota Republican Gov. Doug Burgum.
“If confirmed by the Senate, Burgum would manage the more than 500 million acres of federal land as well as the fossil fuels and minerals that lie beneath the surface — making him a critical component in Trump’s promise to boost oil and gas output,” POLITICO noted, adding, “North Dakota is the third-largest oil-producing state in the country and also has more than 4 million acres under federal oversight.”
“He’s going to be announced tomorrow for a very big position,” Trump said at Mar-a-Lago Thursday night. “We’re going to do things with energy and with land, Interior, that is going to be incredible. … He’s going to head the Department of the Interior and he’s going to be fantastic. … We’ll make the formal announcement tomorrow.”
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Last May, Trump said Burgum, who ran for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination but dropped out before the Iowa caucuses and endorsed Trump, “probably knows more about energy than anybody I know.”
In July 2023, after the Biden administration’s federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) proposed regulating onshore oil and gas leases on federal lands, increasing the minimum lease bond to 15 times the previous amount, reducing areas available for leasing, and raising the minimum bid amount to five times the previous amount, Burgum stated:
These proposed changes are just the latest in the Biden administration’s long list of misguided policies that discourage domestic energy production. By raisings costs for oil and gas producers who want to develop minerals on federal lands, BLM will drive away producers and drive up energy costs for consumers, who will be forced to pay higher prices for fuels imported from countries that don’t produce energy as cleanly as the United States. We should be selling energy to our friends and allies instead of buying it from our adversaries and putting our country’s economy, energy security and national security at risk.
Even some environmental activists praised the choice of Burgum as Interior Secretary; Collin O’Mara, CEO of the environmental group National Wildlife Federation, stated, “I think he’ll be a very strong champion of the energy dominance agenda. But in North Dakota, he tried to find some level of balance to make sure that important conservation areas, important areas for tourism, weren’t harmed in the process.”