President Donald Trump has launched an “all-of-government” regulatory reform blitz designed to trim permitting times for energy projects by half, not just for economic development, but for the United States to have robust energy infrastructure to win an existential race with China in mastering the artificial intelligence (AI) that will define the 21st century, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said Feb. 21.
Without dramatically accelerated energy development of all types—especially base-load fossil fuels and nuclear—the former North Dakota governor told 48 of the nation’s 55 state and territorial governors attending the National Governors Association (NGA) 2025 Winter Meeting in Washington, “We will lose the AI arms race.
“We can be ahead in technology, but if we lose on the power generation side, we still lose that AI race,” Burgum said.
That is where governors must lead, he said. The states, not federal agencies and Congress, are the spearhead, the drivers in energy development, something Trump acknowledges in his administration’s commitment to clear away tiers of bureaucratic clutter to “unleash American energy,” Burgum said.
In canvassing the nation’s energy leaders as Interior secretary and chair of the newly created National Energy Dominance Council, all want the government to move at “the speed of business,” he said.
“How long does it take to build a pipeline? How long does it take to build a key piece of energy infrastructure?” Burgum continued. CEOs “give me a number and I’m like, I can’t go in a meeting with the president and tell him that because he wants that to be half of that time. He wants to cut these times in half.
“We have the speed of government and then there’s a new thing—the speed of Trump. He expects [federal agencies] to go faster than the states and faster than business.”
The president wants governors to have the throttle—and whatever federal resources they need—at their fingertips, Burgum said.
“Your role as governors is key to driving America forward,” Burgum said. “Give us every idea you have because we have to go faster–not just for reasons of affordability for the American people and for economic opportunity and creating better jobs. It’s because we’re in a competition against other countries who don’t have the same level of bureaucracy.
“When we generate energy here, it’s cleaner, safer, smarter than anywhere in the world,” he said. “When we do that, it’s good for the global environment, it’s good for our economy, and it’s good for our allies. We want to champion innovation over regulation.”
“It shouldn’t take longer to approve a project than it takes to build it,” Stitt said. “Permitting reform is one of those issues where both Republicans and Democrats recognize the problem. We largely agree on solutions and Congress gets close year after year to doing something, but somehow it just never crosses the finish line. The U.S. is among the slowest nations in the developed world in approving infrastructure projects—particularly when it comes to energy.”
Permitting delays weaken U.S. economic growth, security, and competitiveness, he said.
“So I was like, there’s no way I can let a Democratic governor beat me on something like this. So I signed and got an executive order [that] copied his,” Stitt said. “It’s a great idea, and I required all of my government agencies to have their permits done in 30 days, or it’s free to the business.”
‘Energy Addition’ Not Transition
Burgum said Trump’s national energy emergency declaration is not about favoring one form of energy generation over another but about boosting electrical capacity as quickly, as inexpensively, as reliably as possible. And that, he said, will require more fossil fuels, especially natural gas.“We are not in a point of an energy transition. We need energy addition,” he said. “We can have all the wind we want, but on the days when the wind isn’t blowing, the sun’s not shining, we also need an entire other investment around base load, whether it’s nuclear, whether it’s hydro, whether it’s geothermal, and whether it’s the fossil fuels that we need right now just to power our country. We can’t run a full-time society on part-time power.”
Intermittent energy sources feeding the grid is fine, Burgum said, but the Biden administration’s emphasis on, and subsidization of, renewable energies has created an imbalance that imperils the nation’s capacity to expand a grid that will need to double in size in the coming decade.
“One of the main reasons why President Trump declared a national energy emergency wasn’t just the price at the pump. It was that we’re in a dangerous situation where demand is going up at record levels for electricity, and that’s driven a lot by AI,” he said.
With as many as 100 coal-fired power plants across the nation shuttering because of emission rules adopted under the Biden administration, the nation’s capacity to meet the growing need for electricity is being imperiled just when that production is needed most, he said.
“The way that we prevent this catastrophe” is “to get going,” Burgum said. “We’ve got to get every electrical plant in the country to produce more [to] expand by 10 or 15 percent.
“We want to do that,” he continued. “If we can permit new plants and new construction, we need to do that. Transmission lines, natural gas pipelines, all of this infrastructure has to happen for us to be able to deliver energy, to help produce electricity, heat homes, keep the lights on across the country.”
And, Burgum said, to win a war China is overtly waging on the United States while the nation fiddles away time in self-induced permitting and litigative limbos.
“It’s key that we win the AI arms race with China because if China gets ahead of us in the AI arms race and they launch agentic attacks—meaning that the AI can keep trying to break a code, break a code, break a code, keep going; it’s sort of like robot software, developers coming at you, coming at you, coming at you—they would have the ability to take down our electric grid, the ability to disrupt everything we know in our country,” he said. “They wouldn’t have to put a single soldier on the ground” to “completely disrupt us in our economy.”
Winning this existential war means powering up fast, Burgum said.
“Winning that AI arms race doesn’t just take software developers—it takes more electricity,” he said.
