(Houston, TX) – United States Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum carried a tone of gratitude throughout the majority of his lunchtime remarks at CERAWeek by S&P Global Wednesday, calling companies developing projects on federal lands “customers” and making it clear the Trump administration would bend over backwards to support oil and gas development. He also accused former President Joe Biden of stealing trillions of dollars “with the stroke of a pen” by halting offshore drilling without acknowledging the hypocrisy of President Trump doing something very similar recently with his offshore wind policy.
“I’m going to share two words that I do not think that you have heard from a federal official in the Biden administration during the last four years,” Burgum began, sporting an American flag lapel pin. “And those two words are: Thank you.”
The former North Dakota Governor described how his former role granted him a firsthand opportunity to see risk takers and innovators transforming the U.S. energy economy from one of the world’s biggest oil and gas importers to its largest exporter.
“In the past three years, all of this occurred because you took the risks,” Burgum told the standing room only crowd of energy and finance executives. “You had the ideas, you went into the areas where people said it’s impossible to develop these resources. You get it, and you’ve continued to do it in the face of your own government that’s done everything it can to try to slow you down.”
Burgum, who leads President Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council alongside Energy Secretary Chris Wright, specifically called out a need for permitting reform and claimed the previous administration’s climate ideology actually led to more emissions. He extended an extra courtesy to the attendees constructing projects on parts of the more than 500 million acres he oversees.
“When you’re developing resources on public lands in America, you’re taking the risk, you’re hiring the team members, you’re doing the work, and at the end of the day, we receive revenue from your work,” Burgum said at CERAWeek, minutes removed from a main course of turkey with some sort of cranberry sauce and vegetables that I didn’t try.
“If I was in the private sector, which I was my whole life, if someone was sending me revenue, guess what they were? They were the customer, in my mind.”
Burgum intends for the Department of the Interior to function the same way, even if that means disregarding some previous environmental scruples that he believes unnecessarily complicated the permitting process.
“If you’re working to send us a check, whether you want to cut a tree on federal lands and bring back the timber industry, or if you want to mine for critical minerals and give us a revenue share or send us a check, or if you want to graze cattle on BLM and forest service land and send us a check, you’re the customer,” Burgum continued. “And if you want to do oil and gas development, we love you, because the checks that you send us are going to help us pay down our debt, balance our budget, and make America strong economically.”
America’s balance sheet and Biden’s heist?
Secretary Burgum asked the audience if they were aware that the United States is $36.5 trillion in debt and wondered aloud if anyone has ever tabulated the other side of America’s balance sheet and calculated its total assets, implying the nosediving financial markets might be swayed.
“Our national assets far exceed the $36.5 trillion in debt,” he quipped. “Just showing the markets what that number is would probably reduce the 10-year long term interest rate.”
“You could not run your businesses if you only tracked your liabilities,” Burgum leveled with the room of C-suite execs.
The Secretary of the Interior then steered his sights back to the previous administration, lamenting President Biden’s actions in January to ban offshore oil drilling in more than 625 million acres of federal waters, including the entire Atlantic and Pacific coastlines, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and parts of Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea.
“President Biden, with the stroke of a pen, said those are off limits. We’re taking it off the balance sheet,” Burgum grieved. “Was that a theft of trillions of dollars from you, your kids, and your grandkids, and every American? If every American is told their own portion of the debt, then every American ought to be outraged when a politician, for political reasons, says we’re taking a chunk of your balance sheet and just taking it away from you.”
“And this happens again and again and again,” Burgum alleged. “Our balance sheet is taken in with action, and they shrink it. They shrink it, and when they do that, we don’t affect the demand for energy resources. We just shift the supply, and so we hurt Americans, we hurt the environment, and we shift that supply into our adversaries around the world. So in the Trump administration, we recognize these are assets.”
Burgum pointed out that President Trump had unwound the ban on federal drilling in those offshore waters, pausing for a scattered applause, but curiously never breathed mention of Trump’s ban on offshore wind development, a roughly $1 trillion industry expected to create 90,000 American jobs by 2050. One of Trump’s first acts as president in January was to order a freeze on both leasing federal areas for new offshore wind projects and issuing federal permits for ones in progress.
“We are going to have a policy where no windmills are being built,” Trump said shortly after he was elected, adding that they “litter our country” like “garbage in a field.”
“Nobody wants them and they are very expensive,” the President recently asserted.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) indicates that roughly 22.9 GW of planned land-based wind capacity is still in early development and is vulnerable to the ban. Much of this expansion will be supported by domestic manufacturers of nacelles, blades and towers. Based on capital cost estimates from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), that amount of land-based wind capacity represents a total investment of nearly $45 billion.
Was that a theft of trillions of dollars from you, your kids, and your grandkids, and every American?
No more environmental studies?
At the end of his CERAWeek luncheon, Burgum sat for a few questions from S&P Global vice chairman Daniel Yergin, who did not address the Interior Secretary’s offshore drilling/offshore wind logic. Yergin did ask about how the National Energy Dominance Council might navigate permitting reform. Burgum said he planned to reduce costs and cut red tape by eliminating overlap of agencies who have oversight creeping into other departments as a part of a larger effort to “right-size” government.
“In my home state, I talked to people in the private sector who would say they’re on their 13th different agency trying to get approval to do one thing,” the Secretary insisted. “I think we can easily get rid of 20 to 30% of the regulations and just get back to the organizations and figure out who is the one person who says yes or no.”
The one person saying yes or no, as you may have guessed, is likely to be Trump himself. Last month, the President issued an executive order (sure to have its run through the court system) asserting supervision over all independent regulatory agencies, including the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Federal Election Commission (FEC).
“The Order notes that Article II of the U.S. Constitution vests all executive power in the President, meaning that all executive branch officials and employees are subject to his supervision,” reads part of the order. “Therefore, because all executive power is vested in the President, all agencies must: (1) submit draft regulations for White House review—with no carve-out for so-called independent agencies, except for the monetary policy functions of the Federal Reserve; and (2) consult with the White House on their priorities and strategic plans, and the White House will set their performance standards.”
Under the pretense of fiscal responsibility, the order grants final approval over all major actions of independent regulatory agencies to the Attorney General and the White House, establishing them as sole interpreters of laws for the executive branch. Although the White House has had the power to review the decisions of government agencies for more than 30 years, independent regulators of business and energy markets have largely been exempted, deemed by Congress to be protected from executive overreach.
Burgum explained how the Energy Dominance Council works to the CERAWeek audience on Wednesday.
“We’re not doing reports. We’re not doing studies,” the Secretary revealed. “Think of us as a small tiger team of people with private sector experience. We will identify strategic projects that need to happen, with the authority of the President, who declared a national energy emergency.”
Burgum expects to take projects with eight to 10 year timelines and get them wrapped up in two to four years by cutting red tape. He said he generally has to report back to President Trump on a given task in 15 or 30 days, indicating the council won’t necessarily have time to thoroughly flesh out every decision.
“We’re going to help solve the problem and identify what else we can just get rid of in the federal government,” the Interior Secretary suggested. “We are in a serious, serious position right now with the grid where we tilted way too far to intermediate [sic], unreliable sources, and that was driven by a tax code that is suppoeted by a climate ideology that said one degree of climate change by the year 2100 was the existential threat. We believe the existential threats we’re facing are Iran producing a nuclear weapon, that can’t happen, and two, losing the AI race to China. The only way we win the AI arms race is against China is because we have electricity.”
