Interior pick Burgum endorsed broad energy policy as governor

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump said he intends to nominate North Dakota Republican Gov. Doug Burgum to serve as secretary of the Interior.

Trump made the announcement Thursday at a gala for the America First Policy Institute held at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

“I won’t tell you his name. It might be something like Burgum,” Trump said. “He’s going to head the Department of Interior, and he’s going to be fantastic.”

If confirmed, Burgum would lead the department that manages roughly three-fourths of the nation’s federal public land and houses agencies including the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service.

Burgum was first elected as governor of North Dakota in 2016. He briefly ran for president in the Republican primary last year before dropping out due to poor polling, and then endorsed Trump. His name had been floated as a potential vice presidential candidate.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources ranking member and majority whip for the 119th Congress John Barrasso, R-Wyo., praised the nomination.

“He recognizes how important our federal lands are for energy and mineral production, grazing, and recreation,” Barrasso said in a statement. “As North Dakota’s governor, he’s shown he can balance environmental stewardship with record energy development.”

As Interior secretary, Burgum would be tasked with fulfilling Trump’s campaign promise of increasing oil and gas production and mining on public lands. Trump campaigned on a slogan of “drill, baby, drill,” including on ecologically fragile areas such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

During a July rally, Trump said that Burgum “knows more about energy than anybody I know.” North Dakota is home to the oil and natural gas rich Bakken Formation and produces the third most crude oil of U.S. states, much of which is obtained through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

But as governor Burgum stressed his belief that the U.S. should maintain an “all-of-the-above energy policy” to ensure that the U.S. is not reliant upon other nations to meet its energy needs.

The Biden administration had taken significant steps to promote renewable energy production on lands controlled by the Interior Department, particularly wind and solar power. Trump has strongly criticized offshore wind, which is under the purview of the department.

Burgum also supported decarbonization policies while still allowing for the burning of fossil fuels. In 2021, he set a target for the state to reach carbon neutrality by 2030, which he said would be accomplished “without a single mandate” in part by using the state’s underground storage capacity for carbon capture.

His nomination was criticized by some environmental groups, many of which frequently challenged the first Trump administration’s Interior Department in court.

“Burgum will be a disastrous Secretary of the Interior who’ll sacrifice our public lands and endangered wildlife on the altar of the fossil fuel industry’s profits,” Kierán Suckling, executive director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement.

A former software executive, Burgum sold his company Great Plains Software Inc. to Microsoft Corp. in 2001, worked for Microsoft for a time and then co-founded a venture capital company.