Doug Burgum, the Regime Toady of Our Time
The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
According to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Donald Trump is the “king of PEACE”—an odd position for a Lutheran like Burgum, as it would rank Trump above the “Prince of Peace,” Jesus Christ—and Europeans should be “cheering” for him to annex Greenland. It’s also odd for the interior secretary, whose duties principally concern federal lands, to be commenting on European opinion.
Burgum’s full-throated defense of American imperialism was a disappointment to many commentators. Heatmap News’s Robinson Meyer, for instance, had hoped that the bespectacled former tech executive who used to praise “liberty” would represent a reasonable voice within the Trump administration. Matt Yglesias called Burgum a “huge disappointment” for parroting Trump’s anti–wind energy talking points, even as his own state of North Dakota benefits hugely from abundant and cheap wind power. Many congressional Democrats were similarly mistaken; Burgum was confirmed with 80 yeas in the Senate to only 17 nays, securing a majority from both caucuses.
In the year since his confirmation, Burgum has given those Democratic senators ample reason to regret their votes, along with anyone who ever trusted his prior statements. This is what holding power in Washington, D.C., requires today: complete submission to the whims of Dear Leader, and enthusiastic participation in the Trump regime’s campaign of gratuitous cruelty and madness.
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Take Minnesota, which has been enduring a campaign of occupation, kidnapping, and terrorism at the hands of ICE and CBP centered around Minneapolis. Both of Minnesota’s Democratic senators, Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, voted to confirm Burgum, who recently went on television to blame Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for the occupiers’ murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, claiming that the “real tragedy” was that “Biden and Harris kept our borders open.”
Burgum was confirmed by both Democratic senators from Arizona, Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, but when the largest wildfire ever recorded in the Grand Canyon inflicted massive damage, including incinerating the historic Grand Canyon Lodge, Burgum didn’t even bother to show up, despite the fact that most of the area is federal property. The Interior Department’s inadequate response prompted multiple calls for investigation. Burgum was confirmed by both Democratic senators from Virginia, Sen. Whitehouse from Rhode Island, and Sen. Gillibrand from New York, and later halted all large-scale wind projects under construction in Virginia, Rhode Island, New York, and Massachusetts.
Burgum’s record shows that his bizarre enthusiasm for Trump’s aggressive rhetoric on Greenland is no anomaly. He has consistently toed the Trump line, whether defending Trump’s proposed National Park budget cuts, mobilizing the U.S. Park Police in D.C. for Trump’s “crime” crackdown, or adopting Trump’s personal vendetta against wind turbines. Looking back on the first year of his tenure as interior secretary and chair of the so-called National Energy Dominance Council, it’s clear that he is more than a willing participant in Trump’s agenda; he is an engine powering the turn toward greater violence against land and people.
And he hasn’t always been like this. Just 13 years ago, he was delivering a cogent TEDxFargo presentation. Now, he is regularly posting sycophantic AI slop on Elon Musk’s child porn–ridden app. In Trump’s first term, code-switching elites could butter up Trumpworld while retaining some veneer of normative morality. (Think Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson, Mark Milley.) In Trump 2.0, the appointees stay loyal at whatever moral and reputational cost.
Burgum’s aspirations for power clearly exceed the duties of the interior secretary, though he comforts himself with the idea that if the Interior Department were a company, it would have “the largest balance sheet in the world.” It is true that he oversees about 640 million acres of public land, but describing that as a “balance sheet” seems to indicate he views it as a private resource to exploit, not a public resource he stewards on behalf of the American people. Indeed, if his tweeted map of “the new interior” stretching from Alaska to Greenland is any indication, he’s interested in adding as much property as possible to his portfolio, by force if necessary.
Naturally, Burgum has also been a fervent champion of Trump’s agenda of forced regime change and reopening of Venezuelan oil fields to U.S. companies (“brilliant strategy and breathtaking execution”). Burgum participated in Trump’s White House meeting with fossil fuel executives about increasing Venezuelan oil extraction (“not enough seats in the room” for everyone interested), where his ally Harold Hamm said that U.S. oil companies would need “guarantees” to operate in Venezuela again.
Under pressure from Trump’s Washington, Venezuela’s government is proposing to revise their hydrocarbon law to offer foreign oil companies more profit and autonomy. Burgum has claimed it’s unlikely that the U.S. will fund oil companies operating in Venezuela, but as Whitney Curry Wimbish recently covered for the Prospect, the oil majors want the Trump administration to make operating in Venezuela a “can’t-lose situation,” and there are signs the administration may be moving to do so.
If the government ends up going back on its feeble assurances that American taxpayers won’t be on the hook for ensuring the oil companies a new extractive frontier, it won’t be the only instance of Burgum looking to rewrite history. Back at home, Burgum’s Interior has been scrubbing mentions of the United States’ long history of oppression—and the full spectrum of its resistance—from national parks and monuments.
Last month, the National Park Service (NPS) removed exhibits dedicated to nine people who were enslaved by George Washington at the Washingtons’ historic mansion in Philadelphia. The removal of the exhibit, and the undisputed facts it contained, is an outrageous example of the literal whitewashing of history that has long defined the Trump regime. The city of Philadelphia has already filed suit against Burgum and acting NPS Director Jessica Bowron in the exhibit’s defense.
Just days later, The Washington Post reported that Trump officials ordered the review and potential removal of signage relating “to climate change, environmental protection and settlers’ mistreatment of Native Americans” within at least 17 parks across the country. This latest censorship campaign includes park signs acknowledging the horrific history of U.S.-run boarding schools for Indigenous children, the climate change–fueled shrinkage of glaciers at Glacier National Park, the forced removal of Indigenous communities that preceded the creation of Grand Canyon National Park, and more.
Of course, the Trump administration’s attack on basic facts in our parks didn’t begin this month. Over the summer, Burgum’s Interior required park staff to post signs asking visitors to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features,” a surveillance campaign that paved the way for the censorship we’re seeing now. Earlier still, in February 2025, the National Park Service removed the word “transgender” from the Stonewall National Monument in a clear attempt to erase the leadership of trans people (and specifically Black and Latina trans women) within the Queer Liberation Movement and to attempt to marginalize them today.
Though Burgum is often portrayed as one of the lesser evils within the Trump administration, in truth he has fully acculturated himself to the racist, AI-addicted, Christian nationalist culture of Trump’s cabinet. While enabling and justifying the devastation that DOGE cuts have wreaked on our parks and public lands, Burgum has spent his first year in office demanding freshly baked cookies from government staff, posting AI-generated agitprop on the website formerly known as Twitter, prostrating himself in subservience to Donald Trump for Fox News, auditioning to be Trump’s neo-imperialist czar, and militarizing the Park Police to terrorize the residents of Washington, D.C.
Finally, there is arguably Burgum’s most important responsibility: climate change. Many centrist commentators, including some of the leading “abundance” advocates, insisted at the time of his nomination that Burgum would be “a totally solid pick who’ll do good things,” and expressed optimism that Burgum would advance an “all of the above” energy policy as secretary, renewables included. One year on, we can declare Burgum’s performance a catastrophe.
In March, Burgum told oil and gas executives that he sees them as “the customer.” In August, his Interior Department claimed that renewable projects are “environmentally damaging,” and repeatedly insisted that coal—a highly polluting fuel that is far, far more expensive to use to generate electricity than renewables—is the miracle solution to the country’s affordability crisis.
Again borrowing Trump’s favored communication style of strangely capitalized tweets accompanying AI-generated images, Burgum introduced a lump of coal named Coalie as the new “spokesperson” of “Beautiful, Clean Coal” for the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. He has played a central role in opening new public lands to coal mining and preventing coal plants from closing, passing on the costs to communities in the form of more expensive electricity bills and increased air pollution. While the administration pushes coal, it has also made it easier for miners to be sickened and killed by black lung disease, and harder for afflicted miners to access health care.
Perhaps worst of all, Burgum has led Interior in a historic sabotage of renewable-energy development, including by requiring that all solar and wind projects be personally approved by Burgum himself, and rescinding the designated study areas for offshore wind. These orders were followed by cancellations or stop-work orders on a slate of wind energy projects. He has also propagated baseless claims and conspiracies about wind farms, including that they inexplicably present a profound national-security risk. In doing so, Burgum has threatened thousands of jobs nationwide, undermined the long-term stability of the nation’s power grid, wasted billions of dollars in delays and red tape, and contributed to skyrocketing electric bills nationwide.
Burgum and Trump share a crude vision of American dominance rooted in the impulse to extract and control. The mineral deposits and oil reserves of other countries as much as our own are viewed as opportunities for profit and plunder. Environmental laws that protect the health of communities and ecosystems become obstacles to corporate profit. What novelist Wallace Stegner called America’s “best idea”—our national parks—becomes a mere “balance sheet” to be pillaged for private profit. Coal is “beautiful,” even if miners die in their forties; the AI arms race must be won by American companies, even if expanding fossil fuel use means we lose rainforests and coral reefs and glaciers.
We’re one year into Doug Burgum’s tenure as interior secretary, and it’s not too early to say that history should remember him as an obedient sycophant of a would-be dictator, and by far the worst secretary of the interior in American history.
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