Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum On The Accomplishments of 2025
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum on the Accomplishments at DOI in 2925:
Audio:
Transcript:
HH: I’m pleased and honored to begin with Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum. Secretary Burgum, Happy New Year to you in advance. I’m so glad you could join us. I have been talking to various people, Senator Thune, Chris Wright, others about the year in review. You’ve got one of the biggest agencies, and you’ve had a year now. What do you count as the accomplishments at Interior in 2025?
DB: Well, Hugh, great to be with you, but accomplishments for 2025 is really implementing President Trump’s common sense agenda about unleashing American energy. And that, broadly speaking, I mean, we’re talking about oil and gas. A year ago, U.S. was, had LNG export restrictions on under the Biden administration. Now, the world’s largest exporter of LNG, bigger than number two and number three in the world. And of course, when we’re exporting LNG, that’s good for Americans here, because when we’ve got foreign purchases, or when our allies are buying from us versus our enemies, we are stopping the funding of wars abroad. And then those purchases here help pay for the infrastructure – the pipelines and all the facilities here that help make our nation richer. So that part is key, but when you take a look at this broad swath of all these amazing, incredible, abundant, resource-filled federal lands, 500 million acres of surface, 700 million acres of subsurface, and 3.2 billion of offshore, the world’s largest balance sheet of any company in the Interior, it wasn’t just the energy industries that the Biden administration was trying to shut down. They effectively killed mining. They were killing timber. They were attacking our ranchers with grazing on Bureau Land Management. So bringing back the balance sheet of America, restoring these assets to being productive assets which produce for the American people, whether it’s food, whether it’s energy, whether it’s timber, all of these things, 180 degree reversal here following the Trump administration policies, President Trump’s lead. And so an exciting first year. Off to a great start, and I think it’s showing up in the economic data as well.
HH: I think you and Secretary Wright are going to win or lose the 2026 elections, because energy drives down prices. Energy is freedom. Without it, we don’t get anything done. We need nuclear reactors. We need all this different stuff. Beyond exports of LNG, are we increasing production or the leasing of land on which production can occur in the next three years within the United States, including the coastal zone?
DB: Yeah, absolutely. Permits, the numbers, there’s never been a line on a curve like this, but I think permitting, drilling permits on Bureau of Land Management is like up 55% over any other time period. So really getting back into delivering on the ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ side of this, and of course, doing it responsibly and smarter. We do it cleaner, smarter, safer than anywhere else in the world. People should be celebrating the fact that we’re producing more here. We did hit record oil production numbers this year, and it shows up at the pump with gas prices. But it doesn’t, maybe, show up in California, because you know, it’s $2.44 in Houston, and it’s over $5 bucks in California. And part of that is because we’ve got a set of policies at the state level which are disrupting the energy in our United States. And we’ve got parts of our, the Northeast part of our country, in New England, led by New York, looks more like the EU. California’s in a league by its own. 63% of the oil in California now imported from foreign countries. California, as you know, Hugh, used to be an energy powerhouse. I mean, back 100 years ago, they were, California was producing 25% of the world’s oil production. And now, it’s down to, it’s barely on the list of states in America. They’re down to 100,000 barrels of oil a day, even though California is sitting on this resource. California used to have 40 refineries. Now, it’s got 8 refineries, and two of the biggest ones, Valero and Chevron, have announced they’re closing their plants. So under the current leadership of California, not only are we importing oil into the state of California through San Francisco Bay and through Long Beach for refining, when those refineries shut down, we’re going to be importing refined products by ship, often from foreign countries, just to keep the largest fleet of internal combustion engine vehicles of any state in America going in California. So again, it’s common sense versus climate elitism. And those two things are colliding, and affordability is going to win that, because the green new scam, as it’s been called, because it was a scam, it made promises it couldn’t deliver on, has done one thing. It’s delivered higher prices. So whether it’s electricity or gas prices, higher in blue states than they are in red states. Don’t look at the averages. Look at it state by state, and that’s where you can see specifically where President Trump’s policies are working. And that’s where all the capital is going to flow. It’s going to flow, the new wave of investment, record investment in our country for capital expenditures in the next generation of AI, it’s going to flow toward states with low energy prices. And you’re going to see states like California and New York missing out on this next wave of capital investment.
HH: Now Mr. Secretary, I don’t think it’s possible to permit a mine in a year, but are you working on critical minerals, rare earths mines? We just had this big discovery in Utah I noted so that by the end of the term, America will become more self-reliant on our own resources in the critical categories of rare earths?
DB: Well, fabulous question, and great that you’re so astute about this, Hugh. But it turns out you can permit a mine in less than a year.
HH: Wow.
DB: We’ve permitted the Resolution Mine, and they’ve been working to get a permit for Resolution Mine in Arizona for 29 years. And we got that mine permitted through, because we got, again, off of surface mining, if it’s on federal land, those permits come from the Department of Interior, of Bureau of Land Management, or the Office of Surface Mining. Four months. We got them a permit in four months. We permitted Uranium mine in America, got that restarted again. They were waiting for an EIS. An EIS normally takes two years. We did it in 24 days. We’ve done some EA’s, some environmental assessments which take over a year. We’ve done those in 12 days. And all of this by just focusing on business process improvement. It wasn’t, there was no shortcuts. If a process took two years to deliver a permit, it wasn’t two years’ worth of work. It might have been 24 days of work interspersed by sitting for 29 or 30 days in somebody’s inbox as they did the whisper chain of sending the permitting paperwork around. Having come from a background in tech with business process, that’s before we’ve even applied AI to this. This was just strike forces of people saying you come to work, all you do is focus on getting this permit out. And let’s see what the actual amount of work content is. I think the product that they’ve put out on these shorter time frames is actually better than the ones that take one to two years, because you have a focused team that’s really, literally drilling into it and getting the work done. And then yesterday, the House of Representatives passed the Speed Act, which is about improving permitting in this country and providing certainty for economic development. That’s a great piece of legislation. We’ll see what if the Senate can make it even better and stronger. But you know, we have to get back as a nation to being able to build great things and build them quickly, and we have to be able to get back to actually using our resources versus having an entire armada of NGO’s and legal teams who make their living building stuff in America by weaponizing laws supposedly designed to protect the environment. But when you kill a mining project in the U.S., you move it overseas. Again, they do it over there without the EPA, without child labor laws, without whatever. I mean, again, if you’re concerned about the global environment, if you’re concerned about the environment, you should want to have all of this, all the critical minerals here. That’s before you even get to national security. But for national security, we’ve got to bring mining back alive in this country.
HH: Have you been able to get your arms, I’m throwing a lot at you, but I just want people to know. Have you been able to get your arms around the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs and all these different agencies? The Service is the worst, that have a thousand, thousand, thousand rules, none of which often make sense, and the employees of which are not exactly the most motivated people I ever worked with?
DB: Well, I’ll tell you, we’ve got some great progress there as well, and let me start with U.S. Fish and Wildlife. We’re going through a complete remapping and redo of the Endangered Species Act. That was, again, a classic thing that was highly weaponized. They would have training classes, Hugh. If you wanted to stop a pipeline or a transmission line…
HH: Yup.
DB: …or some energy project, you’d use the NEPA, use the EPA stuff to slow a project down. But if you wanted to kill it, then you used the Environmental Species Act. The ESA became the Hotel California. I asked the question when I got here. Well, shouldn’t we be celebrating when things come off the list as opposed to going on the list? And because we became a nation where people celebrated when things went on the Endangered Species List. And when they went on there, we should be working to make those things better. 97% of the species that have ever entered that list have never come off. You know, that’s, if you were grading that on a scale of A-F, that’s like an F-. We’ve got, if we’re actually in the recovery business, we’ve got to be able to get things coming off. That means we’re succeeding. And we should be able to get things to come off without moving goalposts. So big progress is going to be made on ESA. On the tribal front, it’s been one tribe after another in my office saying that during the Biden administration, including the Alaskan North Slope, Alaska natives up there saying we need energy development for our economic bases, schools, healthcare. So we have some big wins going on in tribal country as well.
HH: That is a great, quick summary, Secretary Burgum. Good luck in 2026, and we’ll check in again. That’s quite a start. Thank you for joining me.
End of interview.
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