North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, pictured at a campaign rally early this month in Michigan, would play a key role in pushing President Donald Trump’s agenda to increase oil, gas and coal production on public lands if he is confirmed as Secretary to the Government. Department of the Interior.

Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP/Getty Images

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Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP/Getty Images

President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday evening that he will nominate North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as secretary of the Department of the Interior.

“He’s going to run the Department of the Interior, and it’s going to be fantastic,” Trump said in a speech at an America First Policy Institute dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort. He said there will be a formal announcement on Friday.

“We’re going to do things with energy and domestically that will be incredible,” Trump said.

As secretary, Burgum will play a key role in pushing Trump’s agenda to increase oil, gas and coal production on public lands.

Interior is a sprawling department responsible for administering 20% ​​of the U.S. surface area, as well as federally owned mineral rights. This gives the Interior Department control over nearly a quarter of all energy development in America, on and offshore.

Burgum is known as a big booster of oil and gas drilling, although his state’s boom has mostly occurred on private lands such as the Bakken oil field. Historically, Interior Secretaries have generally come from Western states with large tracts of federal public lands, while North Dakota is only about 4% federally owned.

The Trump administration is expected to reverse President Biden’s focus on conservation and renewable energy policies established by current Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the country’s first indigenous Cabinet member.

Haaland has also implemented a controversial and first-of-its-kind rule that allows public land to be leased for conservation, not just drilling.

“In this era of this really terrible climate crisis, those are considerations that need to be made as we manage our public lands,” Haaland told NPR last month.

The Interior Department is also responsible for America’s national parks, monuments, and wildlife refuges. It also oversees relations with 566 federally recognized Native American tribes, including Alaska Natives, Hawaii Natives and affiliated island communities.

Burgum was elected governor in 2016 on a campaign focused on anti-establishment politics. Before that, he led a software company that he sold to Microsoft for $1.1 billion in stock in the early 2000s.

Burgum leveraged his other entrepreneurial successes in his real estate development company and software venture capital group to run a largely self-financed campaign in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, focusing on energy and taxes. drop out of the race last December. He subsequently became an outspoken supporter of Trump and organized fundraising events for him during his stay shortlisted for the Republican vice presidential nomination.

Restoring and expanding fossil fuel energy development should be Interior’s first priority in the coming Trump era, former Interior Secretary William Perry Pendley wrote in Project 2025, a blueprint for the new administration, published by the Heritage Foundation.

According to the US Geological Survey, emissions from burning and extracting fossil fuels from public lands and waters are responsible for about a quarter of US CO2 emissions.

Trump’s former interior secretaries became embroiled in ethics scandals. He fired Ryan Zinke, a Republican congressman from Montana, after 21 months as Zinke faced multiple ethics investigations. An investigation by the Interior Inspector General found that Zinke had abused his position to promote a development project in his hometown in Montana.

Trump then elevated former oil industry lobbyist and Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt to the top of the agency. Nine months after his appointment, the Government Accountability Office found that Bernhardt twice violated Interior law when he directed the National Park Service to use park entrance fees for maintenance to keep parks open during the 2019 government shutdown.