Trump Picks Burgum for Interior Secretary

Trump Picks Burgum for Interior Secretary

The North Dakota governor helped strengthen ties between the oil industry and President-elect Donald J. Trump.

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By Lisa Friedman and Michael Gold

President-elect Donald J. Trump has tapped Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota to run the Interior Department, leading the new administration’s plans to open federal lands and waters to oil and gas drilling.

Governor Burgum, 68, has longstanding ties to fossil fuel companies and acted as a liaison between the Trump campaign and the oil executives who have donated heavily to it. The governor is particularly close to Harold G. Hamm, the billionaire founder and chairman of Continental Resources, one of the country’s largest independent oil companies, who has donated nearly $5 million to Mr. Trump since 2023.

The governor and Mr. Hamm have been working on Mr. Trump’s transition, according to several people close to the process who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to discuss the details.

Mr. Trump made the announcement during a gala for the America First Policy Institute that was held Thursday evening at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Mr. Burgum was in attendance.

“I won’t tell you his name — it might be something like Burgum,” Mr. Trump teased. He told the crowd he would make the formal announcement on Friday before saying, “Actually, he’s going to head the Department of Interior, and he’s going to be fantastic.”

The Interior Department manages about 500 million acres of public lands and vast coastal waters. Its agencies lease many of those acres for oil and gas drilling as well as wind and solar farms. It oversees the country’s national parks and wildlife refuges, protects threatened and endangered species, reclaims abandoned mine sites, oversees the government’s relationship with the nation’s 574 federally recognized tribes, and provides scientific data about the effects of climate change.

Mr. Trump is counting on using that land to “drill, drill, drill,” something he said would cut energy bills in half. “We’re going to do things with energy and with land that’s going to be incredible,” he said.

Mr. Burgum briefly sought the Republican presidential nomination before ending his bid in late 2023 and becoming a loyal Trump supporter.

The governor has been a cheerleader for drilling, a posture that fits in well with Mr. Trump’s promises of unfettered access for energy companies to the oil he calls “liquid gold.”

Scientists have said that the United States and other major economies must stop developing new oil and gas projects to avert the most catastrophic effects of global warming. The burning of oil, gas and coal is the main driver of climate change.

The current year is shaping up to be the hottest in recorded history, and researchers say the world is on track for dangerous levels of warming this century.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, about 22 percent of all carbon emissions in the United States comes from burning fossil fuels extracted from federal land.

The Biden administration has tried to limit drilling on some public lands and in federal waters, particularly in fragile wilderness like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Mr. Trump has promised to end those protections and relax regulations against pollution and harming wildlife.

Mr. Trump has heaped praise on Mr. Burgum, telling a campaign rally in May that the governor “probably knows more about energy than anybody I know,” hinting that Mr. Burgum would have a prominent role in his administration. He was on the shortlist when Mr. Trump was considering a running mate.

Environmental groups slammed the choice. “Burgum will be a disastrous secretary of the interior who’ll sacrifice our public lands and endangered wildlife on the altar of the fossil fuel industry’s profits,” said Kierán Suckling, executive director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group.

Mr. Suckling called Mr. Burgum “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.”

A former executive who built a fortune through software, real estate and venture capital, Mr. Burgum was not always a champion for the oil industry. When he ran for governor in 2016, he criticized his rival for accepting donations from oil and gas companies and over the industry’s political influence.

After winning the Republican primary, however, Mr. Burgum accepted the financial and political support of oil and gas companies in a state where the economy is heavily tied to those fuels.

As governor, Mr. Burgum almost never uses the phrase “climate change” and has declined opportunities to explain how he views the issue or how the country should respond to the problem. But in 2021, he set an ambitious goal for North Dakota to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030, and he signed legislation in 2017 to create the state’s first Department of Environmental Quality.

Once Mr. Burgum entered the national stage last year, he became more vocally supportive of the oil industry and started to attack President Biden’s energy policies.

In April, Governor Burgum helped gather oil and gas executives at Mar-a-Lago for a now-infamous dinner, during which Mr. Trump suggested that they raise $1 billion for his campaign. Mr. Trump told the executives they would save far more than that in tax breaks and legal fees after he repealed Mr. Biden’s climate agenda, according to several people who were present and who requested anonymity to discuss a private event.

Mr. Hamm, one of the organizers of the Mar-a-Lago event, had contributed to Mr. Burgum’s two campaigns for governor, as well as his presidential bid.

Mr. Hamm’s company has invested $250 million in a proposed $8 billion pipeline project in North Dakota that Mr. Burgum is supporting in the face of significant opposition from some of his rural constituents.

The project is a 2,000-mile network of several pipelines that would collect carbon emissions from 57 ethanol plants scattered across Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota and store them in an underground facility in a deep rock formation in central North Dakota.

Opponents say the pipeline could cause environmental damage, and some landowners along the route object to the idea of carbon dioxide running under their property.

The governor has said he views the pipeline as a tool to help North Dakota achieve his goal of carbon neutrality, which relies almost entirely on expensive and nascent technology to capture carbon emissions.

The pipeline project could remove up to 18 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year and store it underground, according to Summit Carbon Solutions, the developer. That’s the equivalent of removing nearly four million cars from the road, according to the company’s website.

It would also mean about $1.5 billion annually in federal tax credits for Summit Carbon Solutions and the project’s investors, including Mr. Hamm, thanks to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which includes tax credits of $85 per ton for carbon dioxide captured from industrial facilities and stored underground.

As governor, Mr. Burgum sits on the three-member North Dakota Public Service Commission, which is scheduled to meet Friday to vote on the pipeline project.

Trump Builds His Administration

As his team ramps up the transition process, President-elect Donald Trump says his administration will radically reshape the federal government.

• Immigration: Trump’s plans to expel noncitizens on a mass scale are likely to raise prices on goods and services and lower employment rates for U.S. workers, many economists say.
• Middle East: Trump’s emerging team in the Middle East appears poised to push U.S. foreign policy into even tighter accord with Israel’s far-right government.
• Skirting the Senate: Trump’s demand that Senate Republicans surrender their role in vetting his nominees poses an early test of whether his second term will be more radical than his first.
• Department of Education: The president-elect said he would use the department to further his priorities. He also said he would close it. Both options would face difficulties.
• Slashing Government: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been tapped to lead what Trump called the Department of Government Efficiency, which he said would seek “drastic change.”