Make America Beautiful Again: An Interview With Doug Burgum, Secretary Of The Interior

The following is an edited transcript of an interview between Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum on a weekend edition of Morning Wire.

Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has laid out an ambitious agenda for his department, which manages one-fifth of the land and waters of the United States. Among his priorities – making America energy independent and Making America Beautiful Again. We sat down with Secretary Burgum to hammer out his plan to use energy dominance to defeat China and help President Trump end wars.

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JOHN: Joining us now is Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, the former Governor of North Dakota. First of all, thank you so much for joining us.

DOUG: Great to be with you, John. Thank you for having me on your show.

JOHN: The first meeting of cabinet secretaries was this week, we wanted to ask you about that first, you were there, obviously. What stood out to you about that meeting?

DOUG: Well, two things. One, having been a CEO for most of my life and then a governor for eight years, is leadership. President Trump is exhibiting all the great qualities of leadership, starting with: Are you giving your team clear direction? The executive orders he’s given provide very specific actions for the cabinet leaders to go execute on the promises he made to the American people. So that’s clear direction. The second thing is, you have to hire a great team. When I look around that room, a number of those folks are friends of mine, people I’ve known, people that have had great success in the private sector, people who are making big sacrifices to come and do public service working for the government to try to solve these problems that people think are intractable — like our $2 trillion deficit. He’s empowering everybody. I mean, it’s like, let’s go — and go quickly because these are big, important issues for ourselves, our kids, our grandkids. So that’s the second thing. So, clear direction, hire a great team, and number three, empower them. And number four, hold people accountable. And President Trump does that better than almost any CEO in the country. He holds people accountable for what they do. So, I felt the energy in the room was really electric. People were excited to be there, to be in the cabinet room, to be part of this historic team. The amount of talent in the room is really high. And I’m very excited about what everybody’s going to get done working together for the American people.

Elon Musk’s Role In The Administration

JOHN: I do want to talk to you about some of the priorities he laid out for your department, but first, I want to talk about the team, Elon Musk in particular. He came up a lot. The legacy media has reported on this from a negative angle and a lot of Americans feel very differently about his involvement in the government so far. Trump said, during the meeting, “Does anyone have a problem with Elon? If they do, we’ll kick them out of here.” How are the other secretaries receiving Mr. Musk? And how do you feel about him?

DOUG: Well, I can only speak for myself, but I think the excitement around the idea that you’ve got not just an entrepreneur, not a business leader, not a visionary, not someone who’s obviously brilliant — but for me, the reason I get excited is because Elon grew up in Tech. That’s where I spent my career, in tech, being a tech CEO is different than other categories in Tech. There are no natural barriers. No one has a monopoly. New entrants show up tomorrow, completely out of the blue, and you have to be better, faster, cheaper for your customers tomorrow than you were yesterday, or you go out of business. So, competition drives innovation. We do have parts of our nation — we don’t pick airlines, railroads, public utilities — These are regulated businesses with limited amounts of competition. The folks that have survived in tech really know about innovation. Government has essentially been regulated. Most of what government does is often a monopoly. They’re the only place that can give you a permit. They’re the only place you can get a driver’s license. You have to get permission from the federal government. And that’s why the federal government ends up being a 9:00am to 4:30pm economy, where the rest of the economy is 7 x 24 x 365. So, bringing that Tech sense in is something I’m super excited about because once you do the cost cutting, then you have to bring on the backside — Elon opens up his jacket and it says ”Tech Support” — we’ve got to come in and we have to arm the people that work for government at the state and federal level with the same tools that their private sector counterparts have. And we haven’t done that. We’ve under-invested in technology, the business processes and the productivity tools aren’t there. We can have fewer jobs, but they can be more meaningful and more purposeful. We can get rid of the mind-numbing, soul-sucking work that’s buried in a lot of these jobs, and in the jobs that we do have, allow people to really make a difference in people’s lives. So, I get excited about the path that we’re on and where we’re going. This is also a major right-sizing of the federal government. That’s never happened before and in my mind it’s long overdue.

Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images

National Energy Dominance Council

JOHN: Well, you started off talking about the energy in the room, and I do feel like this is an energetic administration so far. I wanted to talk to you specifically about your department – and what new things you’re going to do. For the sake of our listeners, a Secretary of the Interior is responsible for managing one-fifth of U.S. land and waters. A lot of people, however, don’t understand all the roles you do play. Can you talk to us about what your priorities are in your new role?

DOUG: Well, I’m happy to. I’ve actually got two roles because, in addition to being the Secretary of the Interior, president Trump has created the National Energy Dominance Council, and has asked me to be chair and Chris Wright, the Secretary of Energy, to be the vice chair. About half of the cabinet leaders in the cabinet meeting yesterday are also on the National Energy Dominance Council. The whole idea behind it is that we’ve got to have affordable, reliable energy for all Americans and we’ve got to produce more energy of all kinds. We need more electricity; we need more liquid fuels; we need more biofuels. We need all sorts of all of the above. And that can be reliable and affordable. If we do that, then we can sell energy to our friends and allies and have them stop buying from our adversaries. There are two proxy wars president Trump is trying to end right now. One with Russia and Ukraine, the other is funded by Iranian oil sales in the Middle East where they’re funding 24 terrorist groups. We have a chance to literally change the whole world when we change U.S. energy policy, and that’s going to take the whole of government. Where does the Department of Interior come in? Well, it comes in, as you say, because the interior controls 500 million acres of land, but also 700 million acres of subsurface. We used to have a great mining culture in America. Now we’re completely dependent on our adversaries for the critical and rare earth minerals we need for technology and for defense. There are a couple billion acres of offshore that we own that have an enormous resource we can develop safely and securely and be great for our environment. So this is the balance sheet of America. If Interior was a separate company, it would be the largest balance sheet in the world. And when Theodore Roosevelt put away those hundreds of millions of acres, it was specifically stated, “This is for the benefit and the use of the American people.” He understood the strength of that balance sheet. Whether it was having an actual timber industry, a paper industry, as opposed to importing all of our timber from other countries. He understood that. When we do things like that — like be smart about how we’re harvesting timber from mature forests — we also reduce forest fires. So there are many, many win-win opportunities across our land use, which is great for the environment, great for the public, and it gives us an opportunity. The interior is a money-making department. Our efforts can help pay down the debt, we can help fund better experiences in our National Parks. We can use that money to help protect our last best places. We can do all of that, but we’ve got to manage it smartly and manage it according to law, the way it was intended.

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The Future Of Nuclear Energy

JOHN: I wanted to ask you specifically about nuclear energy. We’ve talked a lot about it over the decades, maybe ramping it up or a lot of times pulling back on it. We’ve seen Europe struggling internally over this. What are your goals in terms of the nuclear potential the U.S. has?

DOUG: Mid to long-term nuclear is essential for our country. Both Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and I agree on that. There are some big changes coming, we have to change our approach. We’ve basically choked this industry in our country for the last 30 years with red tape, yet it’s been an incredibly safe industry. There have been zero deaths from the nuclear industry in our country. As a matter of fact, as I was checking, more people have died from being frustrated with vending machines — shaking vending machines, and then having the vending machine tip over on them. More people in America have died from that than from nuclear…

JOHN: Is that a real statistic?

DOUG: Yes, go look it up. It’s sad, but true. We have a big opportunity in what’s coming with the innovation around small modular nuclear (SMR). These are smaller units. Think of these being manufactured in a factory and then being assembled on-site so that the regulations could approve a design. Then, as long as the design is inspected, they’ve got less pressure, less temperature, less water, less waste. It’s just a whole new approach to how we would create electricity. They’re not as massive as the way we think about them right now. We have 93 operating nuclear sites in America today, and just recently opened one, but I think it’s the first new one that’s opened in 30 years. We are in an electricity race against China because electricity is what powers A.I. data centers. An AI data center is not similar to, “Hey, we’re doing Blue Cross, Blue Shield medical claims or processing somebody’s online shopping request.” Those are essential data center activities, but in an AI plant, you’re actually manufacturing intelligence. That base of intelligence could be used by every employee of every company in the country. It will touch every job, every teacher, every student, every doctor, every patient. Everybody is going to get lifted up by the productivity of artificial intelligence. And the demand for it is going to be very high. But it takes a lot of power. It can also be used for nefarious purposes.

China is building 30 nuclear plants. They’ve added 100 gigawatts of coal in the last year. That’s enough to power 100 Denver’s. That’s a gigawatt — 1,000 megawatts. So we’re talking about 100,000 megawatts of coal. They’re building huge hydro plants. We may be ahead of them in terms of our software for AI, but they’re ahead of us in terms of applying brute force against electricity. So, if we end up in this cyber war with China down the road, between the great powers, they’re not going to land a ship and have people charge ashore, we’re going to wake up and find out that our power grid has been shut down. Therefore, no one can fly on a commercial flight, our AI data centers don’t work, our missile defense doesn’t work, people can’t go to school, and they can’t order anything from Amazon. If the whole power grid goes down, these are the kinds of threats and future risks we have to look at. One of the ways we defend ourselves in that world is we’ve got to generate more electricity. Nuclear doesn’t help us in the next three to four years — it could be five years or further out before some of the small modular nuclear power plants start arriving, and then it’ll take a while for them to arrive at scale. But think of it. Think of it for a military base in the middle of Alaska, you can generate the power close to where the demand load is and you don’t have to build a transmission line. We save all kinds of money. It’s clean, it’s safe and it can be discreet in terms of where we place these in a distributed way as opposed to a big plant with lots of transmission lines. Smaller plants close to the band load is a great solution for the future. And it’s also great because in some ways it’s deregulated. I talked about that earlier, but there are a dozen or more companies working on these designs. There’s competition. that competition is going to lower cost and improve the designs and improve the safety. I think people have every right to be very bullish on long-term nuclear. It’s not energy transition. Everyone talks about energy transition. No, it’s energy addition. We need more energy, and particularly we need more electricity in the short term. That’s going to take us really getting to work on bringing more generation online and stop shutting down the base load that we have right now, regardless of source, we’ve got to keep every plant we have going right now otherwise we’re going to be facing brownouts and blackouts in this country.

JOHN: Speaking of the short-term, inflationary forces were clearly at work during the Biden administration. Energy has so much to do with inflationary prices. How fast do you see the new administration being able to turn some of those things around? I know it’s not an easy fix or a quick fix. Do you see inflationary forces easing soon, and how so?

DOUG: Well, energy, like many commodities, has a futures price. The markets are already reflecting in future price that people think energy prices are going to come down. Why is that? Because they understand that this administration is going to accelerate the supply, whether it’s oil and gas, whether it’s ethanol, or whether it’s electricity. We’re racing to try to get more available energy on the market for Americans. We’re trying to get more energy to sell to our allies so they can stop buying from our adversaries. And with more supply, your prices come down. The prior administration, the Biden administration through regulation, red tape, through policy, and through public land use — where they were illegally not holding the required lease sales for private companies to develop energy on public lands — they were doing everything they could to restrict U.S. supply. But when they were restricting U.S. supply, they were just shifting the demand overseas. And when the demand is being filled overseas by places like China — and if China is building all of our batteries and building all of our solar panels, they’re doing that without an EPA, without any regard to the environment, tearing up countries in Africa and using child labor to produce a battery that we were subsidizing with taxpayer dollars — makes no sense for us, and it doesn’t make any sense for the environment. With  American energy, if people care about the environment, you should want to have every electron, every ounce of liquid fuels produced in the U.S. We do it cleaner, smarter, safer and better for the environment. The U.S. is the leader in lowering emissions in the world. China is on the opposite end of the scale. They’re the world’s largest polluter and they continue to grow in that way.  The America First approach is also the best for our environment and for the global environment.

Francis Chung/Politico/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Make America Beautiful Again

JOHN: Trump has launched a flood of initiatives. It’s hard to keep up, actually. He has established a Sovereign Wealth Fund and promised to “Make America Beautiful Again.” You have a role in some of this. Can you speak to that? Particularly Make America Beautiful Again. What’s that agenda? How does your department play into that?

DOUG: Well, we play into it in a big way because the 64 National Parks, the hundreds of National Historic Sites, the National Mall here in D. C., are all under the Park Service. U.S. Fish and Wildlife are fantastic fish and wildlife refuges around the country. All of these things are public lands. These are special places. We have the last best places. We’re doing a fantastic job. We have to continue to preserve those and we can do energy development and preserve these spaces. The last best places that we have, the parks, are only a tiny fraction of the landmass of this giant number— the 500 million acres of surface. The National Parks only represent a smaller portion of that. So we can do both. We can do energy development, cleanly, sustainably and smartly, and we can do everything to actually not only protect, but actually invest in the Great American Outdoors Act is up for renewal. That’s fully supported by this administration. There are a number of initiatives and one coming right around the corner is the USA 250 celebration. One of the executive orders asks every agency, including every department within the Department of Interior, every bureau: What are we doing to get ready in our parks around the country and in all of our beautiful places to help America celebrate USA 250? So that’s a big part of what we do. And of course, people may not also realize that the territories are part of the interior. So American Samoa, Guam, Marianas Island, U.S. Virgin Islands, these are all territories that participate. We met  with all the governors from those territories last week here in DC, along with the governor of Puerto Rico. We  span across 14 time zones and that celebration of USA 250 is going to be touching all of those.

JOHN: We have had a lot of cost cutting measures being implemented and some requests from each of the departments to figure out ways that they can more efficiently handle their missions. How are you handling that with everyone under your charge?

DOUG: First of all, I know that there’s a way that we can deliver a more efficient government. I know that we have to do that because right now in this last year, the Biden administration, a $2 trillion deficit in one year. Trillions are hard for Americans to think about, but a trillion is 1,000 billion. So we spent $2,000 billion more than what we brought in. There are a lot of things we can do to drive revenue up, whether that’s more productive use of our public lands, whether that’s for energy or timber or critical mineral development. We can drive revenue up and the public participates in that. Those revenues can go to pay down debt. They could go to pay into the Sovereign Wealth Fund for our future. But we also have to reduce expenses. And the idea is to get revenue up by a trillion, get expenses down by a trillion. So we have to cut $1,000 billion. And how do we do that? In North Dakota, I came from the private sector, and in my first four months in office we worked together with the legislature and others — we cut 27% out of the general fund in the first four months and all the trains ran on time. And in the process we focused on trying to make sure we gave everybody who was working for us the tools they needed so they could have more meaningful and more purposeful jobs.  So, we can make government better and less expensive at the same time. Those two things can happen. I’m excited about the work that DOGE is doing because they’re setting a fast pace And that’s what it’s going to take to turn something that is at this scale. The scale of the federal government is enormous. And it’s the actions going on right now that gives me hope that we’re actually going to be able to make a historic change in right-sizing the government. And that’s a win for DOGE. That’s a win for everyone — for their kids and their grandkids, because if we balance the budget, that’s going to lower interest rates for sure, then everybody’s mortgage is going to cost less, your car payments will cost less, your taxes should cost less.  The biggest item right now in the federal government is interest on the debt. That’s the number one expense. So, if we don’t tackle some of these core fundamental issues that are a real threat to the future of this country, we’re not going to have a future to debate about. So, I’m excited that there’s real focus and attention on getting the fiscal house in order here. And it makes me very optimistic about our future.

JOHN: That’s a perfect button on this interview, so we’ll leave it there. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us

DOUG: Well, likewise, John. Thanks for having me on the show today and grateful for all you do. And grateful for your audience you’ve got such a loyal, great audience and they’re always learning from you.

JOHN: Thank you so much. We can’t thank our audience enough. That was Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior – and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.

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