The Senate confirmed former North Dakota Republican Gov. Doug Burgum to serve as the 55th secretary of the Department of the Interior Thursday night with a vote of 79 to 18.
Burgum was recommended for confirmation by an 18-2 vote in the Energy and Natural Resources Committee last week. Democrat Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, were the only two members of the panel to oppose the nominee. Burgum will now succeed former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who held the job throughout the Biden administration after just one term in the House.
President Donald Trump made harnessing the nation’s rich natural resources to usher in a 21st-century American “golden age” a centerpiece of his second inaugural address.
“The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices,” Trump said, announcing a formal declaration of a “national energy emergency” after four years of environmental zealotry shackled producers from cheap and reliable power generation.
“We will drill, baby, drill,” Trump said, promising from the Capitol Rotunda that America “will be a rich nation again.”
“And it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it,” the president said.
Burgum, who completed his second term as North Dakota governor in December, pledged at his confirmation hearing days before Trump’s inauguration to restore responsible land management to the Interior Department and reclaim “global energy dominance” as “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,” said Burgum in his opening statement. “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.”
As interior secretary, Burgum will execute Trump’s agenda outlined in a series of immediate executive orders to unlock the nation’s rich reserves from decades of restrictions. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Biden administration issued oil and gas leases on fewer acres than every president through his first two years since Harry Truman. The Washington Free Beacon reported last summer the “administration has approved more than 1,000 fewer oil permits in its first three years than the Trump administration did in the same timeframe.”
But while Trump is eager to transform America into the world’s supplier of oil and natural gas, Republicans in the Senate seemed just as enthusiastic about the incoming Interior secretary’s commitment to peel back the Biden administration’s excessive land grabs. New restrictions on public lands have frustrated residents primarily in western states while the federal government neglects routine maintenance such as proper wildfire management.
Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, the Republican chairman who presided over Burgum’s hearing, opened the question period with a condemnation of Democrat presidents exploiting the 1906 Antiquities Act to establish quasi-national parks without congressional approval. Biden abused the century-old law to establish 10 new national monuments and expand several others to cover regions larger than surrounding national parks.
“These have become something of a political football,” Lee said, referencing the monument designations of Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Biden’s reinstatement of their Obama-era boundaries. The monuments cover more than three million acres, making them larger than Utah’s national 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 added with the request that Burgum meet with constituents whose objections were “ignored by the Biden administration.”
Burgum agreed with the senator’s assessment about the presidential abuse of the 1906 law.
“Its original intention was really to protect as it says, ‘antiquities,’ areas like, I would say, Indiana Jones-type archeological protections,” said the former North Dakota governor.
Biden’s aggressive pursuit to lock up 30 percent of the nation’s land and waterways by 2030, known as the “30 by 30” initiative, culminated in nearly 700 million acres placed under additional federal protections.
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