Senate Confirms Burgum to Serve as Trump’s Interior Secretary

President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, testifies before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on Capitol Hill in Washington on Jan. 16, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

Former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum has been confirmed by the Senate to lead the Department of the Interior (DOI) where he will manage 500 million acres of public lands and 1.7 billion offshore acres in orchestrating President Donald Trump’s “unleash American energy” agenda.

The Senate endorsed his ascension to Interior Secretary on Jan. 30 in a 79–18 vote that saw few objections to the wealthy former software executive assuming the mantle of the 70,000-employee DOI and its $18 billion annual budget.

As DOI secretary, Burgum will set policy for 11 agencies and 14 offices, including the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, and Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement.

“We live in a time of tremendous abundance, and we can access that abundance by prioritizing innovation over regulation,” he said at the confirmation hearing.

In naming him his DOI nominee during a Nov. 14 America First Policy Institute gala at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said Burgum is “going to be fantastic” in spearheading his administration’s drive “to do things with energy and land … that [are] incredible.”

Burgum, 68, served two terms as North Dakota governor. His initial 2016 election campaign was his first foray into politics after retiring in 2007 from Microsoft, which purchased his Great Plains Software start-up in 2001 for $1.1 billion.

He was largely unknown beyond North Dakota when he launched his 2024 dark-horse Republican presidential campaign in June 2023. He dropped out of the GOP primaries in December 2023 and endorsed Trump a month later.

In a November 2023 interview with The Epoch Times sister media NTD before he withdrew from the race, he listed energy among his top concerns, alongside the economy and national security.

“As a governor, I have a front-row seat,” he said, going on to list initiatives from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Both entities sit under the interior secretary.

As governor of a natural gas-rich state that boomed with the “shale revolution,” Burgum supported a variety of energy sources and pledged to make North Dakota carbon neutral by 2030 through hydrogen cell development, biofuels, and carbon-capture, a technology that has not yet proven commercially viable.

During his Jan. 16 nomination hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Burgum tempered previous enthusiasm for renewable energies by stating he’d be “aggressive” in opening public lands to oil and gas development to reverse an “imbalance” in federal leasing policy short-circuiting the nation’s capacity to generate the base-load electricity needed to win “the AI race with China.”

“The thing we’re short of most right now is base load. We need more [energy]. We need an all-of-the-above strategy, but it has to be a balance,” he said.

Burgum said among the swiftest, least expensive ways to boost base-load electricity would be lifting Biden-imposed restrictions on fossil fuel development on public lands and offshore, which Trump did in an “Unleashing American Energy” executive actions package four days later, immediately after his inauguration.

The new secretary said an estimated $1 trillion in tax credits, low-interest loans, and grant programs subsidizing renewable energy development over the next decade through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) “may have been too successful in that we now have significant investment in projects … that are intermittent and not consistent” in achieving base load “affordability and reliability” needed to power a 21st century economy.

“If you don’t have base load reliability, you can’t have intermittent” renewable energy development drawing public and private resources away from sustaining the energy infrastructure most needed, like natural gas pipelines, Burgum said.

He advanced to the full Senate confirmation after an 18–2 Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee vote of approval on Jan. 23.

Ranking member Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) said while he has reservations, Burgum is qualified for the post, knowledgeable about energy development and policy, and has demonstrated a willingness to garner consensus in making difficult decisions.

“We also heard him share his love of the outdoors and his shared commitment with Teddy Roosevelt to protect public lands,” he said during the Jan. 16 nomination hearing.

However, Heinrich added, Burgum’s “belief that wind and solar energy represent unreliable energy sources that are not cost-competitive with thermal generation, and that battery technology is not ready for commercial deployment,” are not only untrue, but alarming because investments in nascent, emerging energy technologies are now beginning to bear fruit for commercial application.

Trump has repeatedly said that Burgum will chair a newly-created National Energy Council but, as yet, has not announced its formation.