Trump taps North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum to lead Interior Department

President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday that he would nominate North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) to lead the Interior Department, a role overseeing roughly 500 million acres of federal land and more than a billion acres offshore that will be key to his plans to boost U.S. oil and gas production.

Some Alaska legislators had publicly speculated that the job could be handed to Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who still has two years remaining in his term as governor. Dunleavy said in a statement Thursday evening that Burgum is “a fantastic pick for Secretary of Interior.”

“Doug’s experience as Governor of North Dakota and in the private sector will be invaluable in pushing the President’s agenda regarding more oil, gas, coal and critical minerals and rare earths. Alaska stands to benefit greatly with Doug at the helm of the Department of Interior,” Dunleavy said in a social media post.

Trump made the announcement during a gala for the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank, at his private Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. Burgum attended the event alongside conservative donors and activists.

“We’re going to do things with energy and with land ... that is going to be incredible,” Trump said, adding that Burgum would be “fantastic” in the role and that a more “formal announcement” would be made Friday.

Burgum, 68, suspended his long-shot presidential bid last year and quickly endorsed Trump, developing a strong personal and political relationship with the president-elect. After Trump asked oil industry executives to help steer $1 billion toward his campaign, Burgum talked extensively with oil donors and CEOs, and he helped lead the campaign’s development of its energy policy.

At a fundraiser in Palm Beach in May, Burgum told donors that Trump would halt President Joe Biden’s “attack” on fossil fuels, according to a recording of his remarks obtained by The Washington Post.

“What would be the No. 1 thing that President Trump could do on Day 1? It’s stop the hostile attack against all American energy, and I mean all,” Burgum said. “Whether it’s baseload electricity, whether it’s oil, whether it’s gas, whether it’s ethanol, there is an attack on liquid fuels.”

Some Burgum allies had initially pushed for Trump to appoint the North Dakota governor as an “energy czar” that coordinated energy policy across multiple agencies, including the Energy and Interior departments. Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota) had advocated that role as recently as Wednesday.

“The idea is to help coordinate policy for the White House ... whether it’s land use, whether it’s environmental regulation,” Cramer told reporters Wednesday. “There are just a lot of places where you want everybody in sync with a bigger strategy, especially considering that Donald Trump has made energy really the hallmark of his economic policy, and rightfully so.”

Burgum, a Stanford business school graduate and aggressive champion of the oil industry, is seen in Trump’s orbit as having the policy expertise necessary to help the president-elect unravel federal climate policies. Trump has said repeatedly that scrapping rules that inhibit drilling, the burning of fossil fuels and the export of liquefied natural gas will be a top priority for his administration.

Burgum is a close ally of oil tycoon Harold Hamm, working with his company on an ambitious North Dakota pipeline plan that has drawn intense community opposition. The two were among Trump’s top energy advisers during the campaign. Burgum’s appointment will give Hamm expansive influence over policy related to drilling on public lands, at a time his company stands to benefit from the rule changes Trump envisions.

The two-term North Dakota governor won the office in a major upset in 2016, riding the same wave of antiestablishment sentiment that propelled Trump to the White House that year. Burgum started a software company with money from mortgaging family farmland and sold it to Microsoft in 2001 for $1.1 billion, later tapping his immense personal wealth to fund his political ambitions.

Burgum’s outlook on climate policy does not align neatly with that of the president-elect. Burgum has said he believes human-caused climate change is real, and he has supported some of the clean-energy subsidies Trump is seeking to jettison.

Those incentives are driving major investment in red states, including North Dakota. Oil companies are leaning on the clean-energy tax credits for investments in projects such as the pipeline Hamm is pursuing in Burgum’s state. That pipeline would be used to ship and store greenhouse gases that are trapped during fossil fuel production and stored underground.

Oil companies see big financial opportunity in such technologies that curb their product’s climate impact. The American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s main lobbying group in Washington, is urging the incoming administration to target clean-energy subsidies judiciously. But others around Trump, particularly those who question mainstream climate science, are pushing to erase all the Biden-era clean-energy subsidies on the grounds that they cost taxpayers money and undercut Trump’s vision for vastly expanded drilling.

In 2021, Burgum set a goal in 2021 for North Dakota - the third-largest oil-producing state - to become carbon-neutral by 2030. He stressed, however, that the goal wouldn’t be achieved via government mandates or the elimination of fossil fuels.

If approved by the Senate, Burgum would steward hundreds of millions of acres of federally owned lands and waters, a role that would prove central to Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda to expand domestic fossil fuel extraction. Concentrated mostly in the West and Alaska, the department’s sprawling system of public lands include not only national parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, but also property overseen by the Bureau of Land Management for cattle grazing, mining, and oil and gas drilling.

Interior also oversees dwindling water resources across the American West amid a climate-change-fueled megadrought. Interior officials last year brokered an agreement with the states along the Colorado River to conserve an unprecedented amount of their water supply in exchange for $1.2 billion in federal funding.

The first Trump administration fought fiercely with Democrats and advocacy groups over the president’s efforts to boost energy extraction, narrow protections for endangered species and shrink the boundaries of national monuments in Utah sacred to Native American tribes.

Minutes after Trump’s announcement, environmental groups said they are preparing to push back on his energy agenda.

“Burgum is an oligarch completely out of touch with the overwhelming majority of Americans who cherish our natural heritage and don’t want our parks, wildlife refuges and other special places carved up and destroyed,” said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’re ready to fight Burgum and Trump’s extreme agenda every step of the way.”

The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey contributed to this report. Additional information about Gov. Mike Dunleavy from ADN’s Iris Samuels.