In his confirmation hearing on Thursday, former North Dakota Republican Gov. Doug Burgum, Trump’s nominee for Interior secretary, told lawmakers he would restore responsible management to America’s public lands while unleashing the nation’s energy potential.
“The American people have clearly placed their confidence in President Trump to achieve energy dominance,” Burgum said in his opening statement. “By energy dominance, that’s the foundation of American prosperity, affordability for American families, and unrivaled national security.”
“Today, America produces energy cleaner, smarter, and safer than anywhere in the world,” Burgum added. “When energy production is restricted in America, it doesn’t reduce demand. It just shifts productions to countries like Russia and Iran, whose autocratic leaders not only don’t care about the environment, but they use their revenues from energy sales to fund wars against us and our allies.
But while Burgum emphasized his commitment to reclaiming energy dominance as “America’s big stick,” senators also pressed Trump’s pick for Interior secretary about the myriad public lands issues that have frustrated Republicans under the outgoing administration for years.
Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, the Republican chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, presided over the hearing and opened the question period with a condemnation of Democrat presidents exploiting the Antiquities Act to establish quasi-national parks without congressional approval.
Passed in 1906, the Antiquities Act was first used by President Theodore Roosevelt to protect the Wyoming site at Devil’s Tower. The site roughly 1,300 acres in compliance with the law’s mandate to preserve the “smallest area compatible” with proper care. President Biden, however, established 10 new national monuments without congressional approval under the Antiquities Act and expanded several others, with the size of protections larger than entire national parks.
“These have become something of a political football,” Lee said, referencing the monument designations of colossal sites at Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Joe Biden’s reinstating their Obama-era boundaries. The monuments cover more than three million acres, making them larger than nearby parks at Zion and Bryce Canyon.
“This is the size of two Delawares within my state that have been moved into this very restricted use classification,” Lee said. “The point is not that there aren’t beautiful things to protect in the state, but the line was drawn so big, and the monument was made so expansive in part because local leaders weren’t consulted.”
Designating public lands as monuments removes the multiple-use mandate that allows residents to capitalize and more freely recreate on public property.
Lee asked Burgum to cooperate with lawmakers to reexamine the monuments’ boundaries and make a trip to Utah to “meet with those whose voices were ignored by the Biden administration.”
Burgum agreed with Lee’s assessment of the law’s abuse.
“It states very clearly that it’s the ‘smallest possible area’ to protect those objects,” Burgum said. “Its original intention was really to protect as it says, ‘antiquities,’ areas like, I would say, Indiana Jones-type archeological protections.”
While Burgum testified in pursuit of Senate confirmation as the nation’s public lands chief, a pair of western GOP House members introduced the “Ending Presidential Overreach on Public Lands Act,” which would give the authority to unilaterally establish national monuments to Congress instead of the president. The bill’s sponsors, Reps. Celeste Maloy of Utah and Mark Amodei of Nevada, both come from states where two-thirds or more of land is owned by the federal government.
“Congress trusted Presidents with a narrow authority to declare national monuments in the Antiquities Act,” Maloy said in a press release. “Unfortunately, Presidents have continued to abuse that narrow authority to designate millions of acres of land in Utah and across the West without proper Congressional oversight.”
Early in the hearing, Burgum was also asked by Sen. Steve Daines, a Republican from Montana, whether the new administration would objectively reexamine the Biden administration’s recent ruling on grizzly bears. Last week, the Fish and Wildlife Service denied petitions from Montana and Wyoming to delist the bears in each state as endangered despite exceeding their recovery goals. The ruling, Daines said, “punishes Montana’s successful grizzly bear recovery efforts.”
“We should be celebrating the recovery, but instead we are now having to sacrifice to adjust living with the bear with its predation losses by livestock producers as well as human safety,” Daines said. “Sadly, many Montanans have been killed, badly mauled by grizzly bears, so the people back home take this very, very seriously.”
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“The Service keeps moving these goalposts for delisting and returning these bears to state management,” Daines added. “Would you acknowledge that the data shows the recovery of these two populations and commit to working with me to delist them?”
Burgum said he agreed with the senator’s assessment.
“We should be celebrating when species come off the endangered species list as opposed to … fighting every way we can to try to keep them on that list,” Burgum said.
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