Doug Burgum
Appearances
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
From an electricity standpoint, thermal coal is fantastic base load. It has all the characteristics to allow you to maintain amperage and voltage to keep a system going. And I think we just saw in Spain, they were celebrating on April 12th of this past month that they'd shut down their last coal plant.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And then a week after that, they were celebrating the fact that they had their first day of 100% renewables on their system. And then the next week, they were a global news story because people were trapped in subways. All airline flights canceled. Hospitals were panicking with a lack of power because they had a rolling blackout and grid failure because it justifies physics.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
You can't run an electrical grid with just intermittent power. You cannot run with something that is based in intermittent is the definition of solar or wind because the sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't blow every day and you can have it. And so in America, we became dangerously close to that right now. We've got parts of our country that are at risk for those same kind of
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
of what I'll call the Biden brownouts and blackouts to happen because we oversubsidized the intermittent and we overregulated all of the baseload in an idea to, quote, save the planet. And all we're doing is potentially putting our own country at risk.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Well, the regulatory attack was a whole of government. So it did attack the formation of capital. I mean, you came up with regulatory rules that made it impossible for baseload power from fossil fuels even get a permit. Well, if you can't get a permit, then you can't get access to capital. You can't get access to insurance.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And then you had protests and social media and everybody going online saying, oh, we've got to exit from all this. And this same phenomena happened in Germany. I think it's very clear right now that a lot of that A lot of what I call the social media driven concerns were part of, you know, psyops operations from places like Russia.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
I mean, it was Russia's great advantage to get Germany to shut down nuclear, to shut down all their coal production. And hey, we have a solution, just buy all your natural gas from us. So Germany spent a half a trillion dollars, $500 billion on the quote, air quotes, transition to green energy. They were transitioning to wind and solar. half a trillion, $500 billion.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
They today produce 20% less electricity and that electricity costs three times as much as it did before they began the transition. And now we have the war with Russia and Ukraine. What are they doing? They were scrambling to try to reopened coal plants. They were scrambling to try to get back in the nuclear game. They were saying, wow, we overshot the mark. We went too far.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Again, highly subsidizing intermittent sources. And so it's like, I think part of the awakening that is occurring right now is that if the greatest existential threat to the planet and to America is not one degree of climate change in the year 2100, because guess what? Innovation
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
We'll solve any challenges that we have with climate change, with innovation, and we won't have innovation without electricity. And actually losing the AI arms race to China is the real threat.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Yeah, and some of that could be coming in the next decade. It doesn't help us today because today we've got to shore it up. And I think one thing that, you know, having spent 30 years in tech, we never used more than 1% of the nation's electrical production. And it was because computers were getting more... You mean tech? Yeah, tech.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
The tech industry. We used 1% and no one paid any attention. And the tech industry didn't pay any attention to power generation because they didn't have to because PCs got more efficient, software got more efficient. And then America was rich. Everyone was buying appliances that were more efficient. So there wasn't ever really a demand curve on electricity.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
But then today with AI, the demand curve is just flying in the face. And when I was at Sarah Week, which is the biggest – energy conclave. When I was speaking to the group, I said, there's something different here this year. And what's different is the five biggest tech companies in America showed up at that conference with $300 billion of CapEx.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
You know, the big ones have got 75 billion a piece, you know, for the top ones on that chart. And I'll reflect back to not that long ago, a couple decades ago, I was a corporate officer at Microsoft for seven years. I never went to a CapEx meeting. Somebody said, well, weren't you invited? I said, no, there were no CapEx meetings. You know, we hired salespeople and software developers.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And if we needed an office in Singapore or Munich, we rented it, leased it. And so there was no CapEx. And now they showed up at that conference and I had to speak to all the executives and said, look, these guys aren't here trying to sell you software. They're your biggest customers. They need power and they will do anything.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And the regulated power providers and some in the industry just have never seen a demand curve. So it's like a collision between high tech and the power generation in America. And coming from that, we've got to figure out a way to break through this.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Well, I'd say that the good news is that we have a president of the United States that understands this. And that's why on day one in office, he declared an energy emergency. Some folks that aren't. familiar with what you've just described, this awareness that we're facing a crisis.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
We're questioning whether we had an energy emergency, but as you've just described, we have a huge one relative to our grid, grid stability. We don't have enough power to win the AI arms race. And the AI arms race means without that, we lose the defense battle. Because it's not just robotics in manufacturing,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
you know, if we're going to have a golden dome, if we're going to have any ability to defend ourselves from hypersonics or, you know, protect our fleet around the ocean, not to have them all wiped out in the first hour of a conflict, we have to have AI both targeting and a defense standpoint. So you can't separate defense from AI anymore either. So this is, it's a mission critical. So with that,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
with that energy emergency then we have to pull out all stops so back to any dc uh which by the way for those that are easy to remember it's like acdc it's any dc and then we could even have a little lightning bolt and the logo i don't know if you're gonna get there dog but you know t-shirt have t-shirts i actually might make that t-shirt for you i mean i think it's you guys sell swag on this podcast i think that's going to be the new one uh new bestseller anyway with with the you
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
David, it's great to be with you. Thank you for coming down and seeing this amazing facility.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
could sell that swag you know we could fund a new energy program yeah we go yeah with the but what are we're not a organization we're like a small tiger team and think of it more like a governor's economic development super super team president trump is asking us to find things that are critical to the infrastructure where they're running into roadblocks and then help them i want to say white glove concierge service help them get the permit help them get started the capital is there
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
It's often a regulatory thing that's stopping, you know, like natural gas getting into New England. We've got, I mean, we're never gonna build an AI data center in New York or in New England if the price of natural gas is three times higher than it is in Pennsylvania. And yet they're still campaigning on, hey, we blocked this natural gas pipeline.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Everybody in Pennsylvania loves that because they'll get all the data centers. They'll get all the advanced manufacturing. In Arizona, you've got the TSMC plant coming there. That's going to require enormous amounts of power. People want to put data centers there. And yet their utility is just shutting down a coal plant. And it's like, OK, how are you going to power this stuff?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And so one of the goals we have is don't shut down any more baseload, preserve what we have and help, you know, get other get new sources of power permitted.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Well, I think President Trump, one of his core goals, if we talk about energy dominance, which is beyond energy independence, it's not just a slogan. It's really about how do we have the power to power AI in America? How do we power the remanufacturing in America? And then how do we sell energy to our friends and allies so that they don't have to buy it from our adversaries?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Yeah, we got to keep everything going. We got to go fast on the small modular nuclear. But again, that's really kind of in the 2030s. So that's in our next, it's in the important, but it's a little less urgent. We need to fast track all that stuff long term. That's where the solutions will likely lie.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
But in between now 2025 and 2030, a lot of it's going to come back to LNG because the fastest thing we can get online for more electricity generation is LNG power plants.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
A big difference is, again, back to the regulatory environment. I mean, the regulatory environment on nuclear has been so burdensome in terms of adding to the cost and the timeframe of bringing it on.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And then when that cost was put onto a utility and then utility felt they had to put that back on the rate, on the rate payers, their consumer customers, there was in some ways a revolt that it wasn't safety related. It was like, oh, you want nuclear, but now my electricity is going to cost twice as much. I'm not for that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
So we have to be able to get that regulatory regime down and allow them to go faster. And of course, on the SMRs, once that design gets approved, we should be able to have essentially like a manufacturing where we regulate the design, the design is proven and proved out.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
As long as the manufacturing plant is producing that same design, then we don't have to do this stick built, show up, you know, you work for a week, the inspector shows up, oh, this is off by, you know, one millimeter, you got to redo it. I mean, some of that is where you end up with the doubling of costs.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
I mean, you can't, I mean, some of the projects that have just been completed, you know, that took, you know, close to two decades on nuclear and then had doubled the cost and doubled the time. You know, that's not economically sustainable. So part of it is we've got to streamline the process. But these smaller amounts, they can be daisy-chained. They could be great solutions.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And then the other piece, which you love about having the small market for nuclear is we can spend money on power generation as opposed to money on transmission. Because transmission...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
It's also it's really hard to build a transmission line in this country because whether it's a linear infrastructure, which includes natural gas pipelines, CO2 pipelines, oil and gas pipelines or transmission lines, those have become the focal point for protests. Because if they have any nexus, an 1100 mile long pipeline could have one mile that touches federal ground.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
That is where the protest is going to occur.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And what you and I had a chance to see today is the largest LNG export facility in America, the second largest in the world.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
I've got a great partner, Chris Wright, incredibly talented, arguably the most qualified secretary of energy we've ever had leading that effort because the Department of Energy has got most of the responsibility related to nuclear because they also are in charge of our nuclear stockpile. I mean, for the military, I mean, DOE has got direct defense responsibilities. And as part of that,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Uh, they, we've also got the 15 national labs and there's been great work that's happening in Los Alamos and Scandia. I mean, uh, you know, you go around the whole country and we've got an incredibly talented group of people and the research dollars have been flowing, but we've got to get some of that commercialized and out to the public.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
So, but again, think of it literally as a Manhattan project. These were the, these were the places where we did the Manhattan project when you think of Los Alamos and others. So we've got to mobilize these government agencies to help us on the current the current crisis we're facing, which is this energy emergency.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Yes, you should.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Well, the fun thing when we meet with all of these people in the nuclear industry, if you were doing this five years ago, you'd have been talking to regulated utilities. Today, you can talk to a venture-funded startup. And there's at least 10 that are out there today that are chasing new designs. There's people that are chasing not just fission, but fusion. And so all of that is exciting.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And if you think of us having an air base in Alaska, I mean, think of being able to daisy chain some SMRs there and not having to build transmission. I mean, the applications for the military purposes and for other. And then if you have distributed, it's harder for the enemy to knock out your power source because it's not all sitting in one spot.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Well, I don't know if we've lost it or it's just the innumeracy of being selective about what industry or what form of transportation. Because on the automobile side, again, we'll track this year between 38,000 and 40,000 deaths on highways in America. Half of those are because of impaired driving, either from people texting or impaired drug or alcohol use.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And apparently everybody's okay with that because we lose 100 people a day and there's never a story about it. I mean, more than 100 people a day. But, you know, if you lose 70, you lose 70 people in the first airline crash in 12 years in America. And we're still talking about it three months later because somehow that is news and people dying on highways is not.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And in a nuclear, it's the same thing. I actually checked on this because, of course, we've had no deaths from anything related to nuclear power in our country since inception. But the best I can find on the federal safety statistics is there's about 37 people that have died from getting angry at vending machines and then pounding on them. And then they tip over and fall on them, literally.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And they crush them. Where do you find that statistic? Yeah, you just go search online. But it's out there. But anyway, it's like if you're... if you're afraid of nuclear, you know, then I take a wide bird. If you see a vending machine, steer clear of it. And they're the same thing.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
I mean, I, when I was, uh, when I was, you know, campaigning for president Trump and I said I was pro nuclear and someone said, well, would you know, Oh really? But would you live near one? Would you raise your family near one? And I said, well, I would. And they said, well, how can you say that? I said, well, I raised them on a farm in North Dakota and our farm was near a road.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And they said, what do you mean a road? I said, well, there's It's more risky than a nuclear power plant. Yeah, it's way more. I said when the kids were out, if they were out going to a dance at high school on Friday night, I was worried about them not on the road, not about anything else.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Well, first of all, I love, David, the way you're framing it. And I would just add, you know, the two trillion dollar deficit. means that in the last year of the Biden administration, $2,000 billion more was spent than came in. And coming in, we have other ways to bring money in other than taxes. And how is that possible? Well, it's because of America's balance sheet.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Absolutely. And part of the amazing energy transformation that I think is not fully appreciated by most Americans is when this plant began in the early 2000s, it was meant to be an LNG import facility. America was running out of oil and gas. And they said, wait, we got to be ready to start importing it just to meet our needs.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Our balance sheet isn't just the financial assets. It includes the fact that just within Interior alone, there's 500 million acres of surface land. Throw in U.S. Forest Service, add another 200 million acres.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Yes. And then we have 700 million acres of subsurface, sometimes continuous and some discontinuous. But we own all these minerals that are underground. Then there's about between two and a half and three billion acres of offshore land. that contain critical minerals and oil and gas minerals. All of that is under the federal purview.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
If Interior was a standalone company, it would have the largest balance sheet in the world by so far. I mean, you know, Saudi Aramco wouldn't even come close. And then you'd say, okay, well, if you have this, we all know about the $38 trillion in debt. It gets, you know, hammered all the time. It's used in campaign things.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
But I was, you know, even at the Hill and Valley conference this week, I, without doubt,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
asking the audience okay how many you know how many know the 38 trillion everybody's how many of you know what our balance sheet on the asset side is well nobody knows because none of the senators know because we haven't calculated but we're working in the trump administration to try to come up with that number and in in one estimate this week is we think just on a
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Just on public land alone, there may be $8 trillion of coal resources. And I know coal is sometimes, you know. It's a dirty word. It is. But, you know, we need to also remember that if we're going to have steel in this country, and we all agree we need to have a steel industry. We need to have for defense. We need to have it for advanced manufacturing.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
We also need to have a shipping industry that comes back to our country. You need steel for that. Well, guess what you'd make steel out of? Well, part of it, you need coke, and coke comes from a certain kind of metallurgical coal. So if we kill the coal industry, you can't have a steel industry unless we're going to have somebody ship metallurgical coal to us.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
In the coal resources around our country, the coal is also filled up. with the critical and rare earth minerals that we need to go in this battle with China, particularly now with China just in weeks ago, putting on export controls on a number of minerals that we need for doing things like batteries that we need for electric motors, for whether it's cars or home drills or rockets, missiles.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
I mean, the magnets that are at risk now because we became so dependent on China. So when you take a look at the the this balance sheet, you know, we need it for defense. We need it for national security. But Theodore Roosevelt, who was instrumental in putting away these hundreds of millions of acres in the original intention that said this was there for the benefit and use of the American people.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And he also said very explicitly that that conservation.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
meant meant you know in sustainable use not just preservation because we saw what happened you know following the uh the the extremism that that landed around the spotted owl which is oh we've got to stop not just the harvesting of certain old growth timbers or it killed the timber industry in america and when we killed it back in the 1990s then And it's never come back.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Well, along comes the shale gas revolution, again, driven by technology, that technology of horizontal drilling, that ability to, you know, fractionate rock and get oil and gas out of places that people thought was just impossible that we would ever be retrieving. Those resources from those hard rock shale locations.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And now what's happening 30 years later, because those timber companies that would get a lease from the federal government, they would have the responsibility for going in and thinning and cleaning and responsibly managing that. And they would send a check to the federal government. We'd have revenue. Instead of revenue today, we have expense.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
We burn more board feet of lumber in this country every year right now than we are harvesting. Because of the wildfires. Because of uncontrolled wildfires. And then the uncontrolled wildfires are some of our biggest emitters, you know, in terms of CO2. You burn a tree, it releases the carbon. So again, the folks that wanted to... reduce emissions, save the planet, help the wildlife.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
We're actually doing the opposite of that. So we have to get back in the business of grazing our lands, managing our forests, developing our resources and our critical minerals. Getting back, we have to mine again in this country. Mining can't be, if we want to be a strong country, we've got to do that. And of course, oil and gas. You do all of those things that I just named, all of those involve
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Selling a lease to a private company, they send a check and then they develop the resource and then they send us a royalty. The little company that I just met with this morning out on the platform on the Gulf of America in its inception, this is a company with 450 people. They have sent $1.2 billion to the U.S. Treasury over the life of their company.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
You know, show me a tech company that's done that. I mean, impossible.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Well, the lease and they lease it up front. So they write a check up front to have the opportunity to take the risk. They take all the risk. They build the platform. They hire the people. They do the seismic. They figure it out. And if they hit a dry hole, it's all on them. Taxpayer, nothing. But if they score, then they pay us a royalty. And what do we use that for?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
We use it for, you know, we use it for paying down the deficit and the debt. We also use it for coastal restoration. along this beautiful Gulf Coast. You do coastal restoration with that. The dollars go back to the states. The largest funder of coastal restoration in this country is the oil and gas industry here in the Gulf.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
So again, like I said, if you've driven on an interstate highway in your life or if you've gone to a public school, you should send a thank you note to the natural resource industries because they were helping to pay for that. But what's happened? If there's $100 trillion on the balance sheet, just say that,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And now, and you're a finance tech venture guy, you can say, okay, we'll allow the federal government to be the worst. You guys can have a 1% return on your natural assets. That would be $1 trillion. Okay. Last year, Interior brought in $22 billion. So we're off by a factor of 50 from having bad performance on getting a return on investment for the American people.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Because we don't even know what the base unused resource is. I mean, we're trying to get our hands around, you know, what is our timber worth? What is our oil and gas? And that goes back to the core mission of the U.S. Geologic Survey. Its original core mission was to map.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
So when we say it's, you know, it's map, baby, map, because then that can tell you, you know, where you're supposed to mine, baby, mine, where you're supposed to drill, baby, drill. But getting back to the mapping and working with the private sector who's outstripped Who's outstripped?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And so then this thing, after the financial crisis, turned around and began its life as an export facility. And now, as you say, the only one larger in the world is in the Middle East.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
I mean, ground penetrating radar is, you know, a new advancement that's more accurate than seismic and less intrusive. And we need to really understand what America's balance sheet is. And some of that's going to take some work for us to get out there and really survey it. And then when we have that, that's public domain.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Publish that information and that'll help the private sector steer where they should put their resources to help develop this.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Well, I think there was some, you know, our country was a powerful and great miner. And it was when you think back to, you know, even the early 1900s, you think about where we were, you know, what we were doing in gold and silver. And then, you know, through World War II and even up into the 1980s, we were still very strong as a mining country and a mining industry.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And then there were some environmental issues, that environmental awareness. You had some Superfund sites. And it just became one of the focal points of the attack of of hay, then it sort of was all of a sudden all mining was bad as opposed to one operator in one location that maybe wasn't maintained right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And so then I think whether it was young people choosing careers or whether it was press, whatever, but then the regulatory environment piled on in a heavy way to the point that it's just amazing. One of the Resolution Copper, we're just in the process now of issuing them a permit. It's taken about three months here in the Trump administration. They started this process over 29 years ago.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
I mean, this has gone three decade long saga to open up a copper mine. And guess what? We need copper more than we've ever needed before. I mean, it's part of every electric motor. It's a part of all of the advanced stuff that we're building. And so, I mean, it's thrilling that we're gonna open a copper mine in America.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And then some of the mines that have barely hung on, but are still going, whether it's gold or silver or others, uranium in some cases, Along with that mining process, there are critical minerals that are adjacent. I mean, we can add a critical minerals refining because it's not just that we aren't mining those raw materials. China has got the corner on the refining, not just mine to refine.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
So when they're in the Congo in Africa, pulling out those research rich minerals, they're bringing those back to China. We've got examples of companies in America that were mining in America, but there was no process. They were sending that to China and China was doing the refining.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Well, now we're literally in a war around these critical minerals, which we need for defense, and we don't have a stockpile. So part of what we're concerned with right now and said, how do we get capital flowing back to mining? How do we start building stockpiles in America the way we have the Strategic Petroleum Reserve across the top 20 most important critical minerals?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And then how do we de-risk it if someone's going to get into mining? And do we need like a sovereign risk insurance but not because you're working overseas, because you're working here, because the next administration may use an EO to wipe out your mind.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And so, again, giving the capital providers the confidence that if somehow they're regulated out of business, they'll get compensated through an insurance program.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Well, Lee Zeldin, our EPA administrator, is also a key part of the Energy Dominance Council, as is about half of the cabinet. I mean, we've got Howard Lutnick, Scott Besant, Brooke Rollins, you know, from AG with U.S. Forest Service. There's literally about half the cabinet. Transportation, Sean Duffy's on there.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Everybody's, you know, part of this team of trying to solve this larger, complex thing. But I would say that the one thing we forget about when we often there's these national discussions, which is that every state also has a regulatory environment. And in my time as governor, one thing I learned was that there was I never met a bureaucrat from D.C.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
that cared more about the land, the water, the soil health or the air in our state than the people that live there and the people that work for our own D.E.Q. And so when people say, oh, you know, we're reducing headcount at the EPA, the world's going to fall apart. No, we have two issues with regulation. One is is the.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
overreach, which is, you know, people going beyond the law on their original charter and regulating things, you know, regulate when they're supposed to be regulating water. And I need a water permit should be about turbidity and temperature. And is the fish in this area going to be affected as opposed to
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Oh, we're not giving this permit because we're worried about climate change because the thing in your pipe is natural gas. I mean, that's a real example. That's how Cuomo knocked out a permit that was way beyond what the law said.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
I mean, if there was an issue with how the company was crossing a water course, like 38,000 other LNG crossings of water courses in America, if there's a real problem, then tell them that and they'll horizontally direct drill it 50 feet below the bottom of the river. It'll never touch the river and give them a permit.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Instead, they'd be like, no, you know, there's no permit because we're concerned about climate change. That's overreach. But the overlap that occurs every day is that the federal government infrastructure is overlapping with the states. And there isn't a need to do both of those things.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And you might, you know, go a path for, you know, two years, three years and get your federal permit and then find out, oh, that a state like New York is not going to provide it. Or you might get a permit in six months in a state that's
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
that can efficiently do permitting and get all the work done and take care of everything, and then find out that the federal government's going to sit on it for an entire presidential term because they're ideologically opposed. When we do that to ourselves, then we have no chance against a country like China that is focused on on an outcome, which is they're going to achieve prosperity.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
They're going to achieve all of their environmental goals by having the power to have all the solutions as opposed to the environment we have now, which restricts that innovation.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
are you glad you took the job what's been most surprising for you since you've been in the role well i'm i'm having a blast uh and i'm thrilled to be in this position where we can have an impact you know you get up every day and it's a little bit like the old uh you know world war ii You know, Marines in the Pacific would say, you know, we're in a foxhole. We're in a foxhole. We're on a beach.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
The bad news is, you know, we're surrounded. The good news is we can attack in any direction. And so every day you can get up and go make a difference in people's lives. And for anybody that's in tech or anybody that's listening, you know, that poo-poos public service, they ought to really think about the fact.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
I mean, we need people that are, as Teddy Roosevelt said, that are willing to get in the arena because in these jobs that are – really purposeful. You can make a difference for a lot of people.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
It's been quite a journey, you know, starting out in a town of 300 people in North Dakota with all gravel streets and no computers to end up having an opportunity to be part of a software startup, you know, grow that business, take it public, have a great run as a public company, get acquired in an all stock deal by Microsoft, stayed there for seven years, you know, helping grow Microsoft from 40,000 people to 90,000 people.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
But what's surprising about the job was I knew that from a tech standpoint, because I lived through it eight years in North Dakota, where state government wasn't up to speed on just basic technology and basic business systems and all the things that that, uh, that, that reduce productivity and create, uh, I'll say agony for state or federal employees.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
I mean, we, we asked them to do mind numbing and soul sucking work for like 20% of their time, uh, because we haven't given them the basic tools that everybody in the private sector has had. And so it's not like that anybody's bad, bad people, but you could get rid of 20% of this of the quote work by just bringing in the tools that are there.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
I mean, you could have 20% less people and then the people would have a more meaningful, more purposeful job.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Yeah, all of those things. And so what I thought was it can't be worse than it was in North Dakota. And then I got into the, at least in the Department of Interior and we are, we are further behind. I mean, we're going to, you know, this is a, the land of, you know, decommissioning mainframes and then we could just, you know, take them straight to the Smithsonian, to the 1980s exhibit.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And David, I want to return that. I want to thank you and all your compatriots at All In because you're really allowing an opportunity for America to have a dialogue that goes deeper than the soundbite. And I think that all of you may underestimate the impact that All In has had.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
I know that you're influencing policy, you're helping people understand the complexity and both the opportunities and the threats of big things that really matter to all Americans. And thank you for being so well informed. Thanks for coming all the way down here to Louisiana to share this beautiful day on the coast. Thanks, Doc. Thank you.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And there was 2,000 of us at Great Plains when we got acquired. There was 1,200 in Fargo, 400 rest of North America, 400 rest of the world. We become this improbable global software company coming from the Great Plains. And then when I left Microsoft to presumably spend more time with kids, retire, that was an epic fail. Ended up in two more startups within six months.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Was involved in three more software IPOs and dozens of other startups.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
uh businesses and i mean software businesses and then in 2016 at a time when we were having an energy collapse in prices uh there was an open seat for governor and i threw my hat in the ring and we were down 69 10 in the polls in january the primary was in june uh catherine was who became the first lady was like oh we've got a great life let's why would we why would we get into politics why would we get into that and i assured her that
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
We had no chance of winning. She didn't have to ever worry about being first lady. But this would be fun for six months to create some competition. But we ended up winning that primary and then went on. It was a good year for outsiders. So we took office about a... In North Dakota, you start middle of December. So about 36 days ahead of President Trump, we were sworn in.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Had four amazing years working with President Trump as a governor. There was a win behind our back. And then second term, we got reelected by the largest margin in the country of any race. But then I was serving as a governor under the Biden administration. And in a state where we're rapidly becoming a very resource-rich state, we had climbed to being the number two oil producer in the country.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
We had tremendous coal resources, incredible agriculture resources, and in ranching. And the Biden administration really was having a war on whether it was timber, grazing, oil and gas, coal, critical minerals. I mean, anything that had to do with extraction, there was a regulatory battle going on.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
would have to say that a part of me not just became frustrated, I became very concerned about the future of the country. And that led to, you know, jumping at the national level and saying, hey, we've got to have a policy because if we don't have energy security, we're not going to have national security. And that's what really drove sort of us sitting here right now today.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Well, we were in touch because, you know, we knew each other as a governor would know a president. Right. But I was never really running against President Trump. And I think the record shows that. I was really running against these horrifically dangerous and, you know, unsound, unsafe policies of the Biden administration, which are almost too numerous to enumerate.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
When I left office last December 15th, just December 15th of 2024, as governor, I was involved in 30 lawsuits against the Biden administration. Many of them, including against the agency, the bureaus that I'm now leading, because the regulatory regime was such that it wasn't about regulating oil and gas. It was about eliminating oil and gas from America.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And if there was some sort of false god around climate ideology that was being chased, it was like, oh, if we stop... The supply coming from the U.S. were going to somehow save the planet. But there was no reduction of demand. The demand was just being filled by, you know, Iran, Venezuela, Russia. And they were funding wars against us.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
So, I mean, I thought it was the closest thing to insanity that I'd ever seen. And so when we dropped out very quickly, I was the first of any of the other candidates to endorse President Trump and then spent last year campaigning for him.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Well, I love what I'm doing and I love the role because, of course, as a Western person,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
western governor uh we have all the things that interior has as governor of north dakota which is a jam-packed fun job uh you've got your chairman of the land board and just being governor well then you know dealing with land and minerals and all the leasing and all the issues with the energy industry you're also the head of the water commission uh interior has the bureau of reclamation which is the second largest hydroelectric producer in the country and manages
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
You know, the miracle of irrigation that Theodore Roosevelt came up with. We wouldn't have agriculture in Arizona or California without that. And then Bureau of Indian Affairs is part of Interior. And that's something I had a lot of experience with and all the challenges that we face in terms of health care and education on the tribal areas. So across the whole realm of Interior,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And everything that I had in North Dakota is part of my job today, except one thing. And that's offshore oil production because North Dakota, as you would know, is the center of North America. So if you're afraid of sharks, you should move to North Dakota because it literally is the furthest place in North America from any ocean. So we had no offshore.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
But today, earlier today, I had a chance to get on my first offshore platform and and see the innovation and entrepreneurship there that's, again, now providing about 16% of the oil for America.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And prior to that, when it was originally built, because this is before the amazing miracle of the whole shale revolution in our country, without that, this was being built as a LNG import facility. That was the original thing. We're going to have to import LNG to America. Now, LNG is the number two dollar export on the all-time list for the country.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Well, I think you're spot on. I mean, human flourishing depends on everyone. And I think if you're talking about access for everyone, you just take a look. I mean, we could have as many as 800 million people on the planet, shy of a billion, that don't have access to electricity. And they need more energy. Now with AI coming, the demand for power is going to go up.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
The demand for advanced manufacturing. So we're not in any kind of energy transition. We're in an area where we need energy addition. And if we want human flourishing, if we want to reach our planet's fullest potential, and if we want to take care of our environment, which we can do all these things at the same time. Even that requires energy.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
I mean, if you're worried about water sources, well, desalination, which we can do, requires a lot of energy. Transportation of goods requires energy. So whether it's the clothes on your back, the food on your table, the transportation drive, there's an energy component to all of that. And electrifying stuff doesn't change. It just changes the source of it. We still need to create the electricity.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
So I feel like that if anybody is concerned about the environment, they should want to have, It... every ounce of a liquid fuel and every electron produced in the United States. Because if you compare us to any other country, we produce it cleaner, safer, smarter, and healthier than anyone else.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
And I learned in North Dakota over those eight years as governor, where we were always on the top of the list of cleanest water, cleanest air, best soil health, all of these things that we were able to achieve. And we were going up the charts in terms of energy production. These things go hand in hand. It's not either or, it's a plus when you can do both.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
to produce it cleaner more safely and with a lower footprint and and build economic prosperity for us as exporters yes absolutely i mean so the the net formula that you've just described is the more energy that's produced in the united states the better it is for the globe and the better it is for american prosperity and i would say it's not just for the globe environmentally it's also for for peace it's not just prosperity at home but literally the two
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
The two proxy wars that we've been involved in with Russia after Russia invaded Ukraine and after, you know, Iran funding 24 different terror groups, they were funding those wars against us with their oil and gas sales. And so if we can replace their customers with U.S. sources, they have less revenue. They have less funding literally to fund terrorism. So it is prosperity at home, peace abroad.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
It's nothing short of that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
Well, if you were to ask me what's the thing that keeps me awake at night, this is the issue. And it's so thrilling and refreshing that you understand the scale, the magnitude, and the importance of the AI arms race, which is really driven by access to electricity. And China last year... brought on 94 and a half gigawatts of coal powered electricity. One gigawatt is Denver.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
So they brought on 94 Denver's just last year. That's more than all we have today for all of California and all of New York is less than 94. So they added a New York and a California worth of electricity last year, just from coal. They're still getting 60% of their baseload from coal and people, people may, they stop listening when they hear the word coal, but coal is,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC
It's the second most highest dollar value we export. We went from being like, oh, we're going to run out of oil and gas, to today, we're energy independent on a net basis, and we're on our path towards becoming energy dominant.
Morning Wire
Ceasefire Deal in Limbo & WaPo’s Mission Statement | Afternoon Update | 1.16.25
In a former life, I developed both baseload and intermittent resources. I don't want the word baseload to be code for no renewables. That's not what you're saying, is it?
Morning Wire
Investment Up, GDP Down & Drill, Baby, Drill | 5.1.25
Bowing to a bully is like drinking poison to quench thirst. It only deepens the crisis. Make no mistake, the U.S. will keep flip-flopping and playing hardball. But China will stand firm. No matter how hard the wind blows, no matter how clouds rain.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
So American Samoa, Guam, Marianas Island, U.S. Virgin Islands, these are all territories that participate. Met with all the governors from those territories last week here in D.C., along with the governor of Puerto Rico. We span across over 14 time zones and fabulous, beautiful things. And that celebration of USA is going to be touching all of those.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
Well, first of all, I know that there's a way that we can deliver 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 a thousand billion, a thousand billion. So we had $2,000 billion we spent more than what we brought in.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
And there's a lot of things we can do that I talked about to drive revenue up. And 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. 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.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
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, you know, clear direction, hire a great team. Number two, 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.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
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 got to cut $1,000 billion. And how do we do that? In North Dakota, my first four months, I came from the private sector. My first four months in office, we worked together with the legislature and others.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
We cut 27% out of the general fund in the first four months, and all the trains ran on time.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
and in the process we focused on trying to make sure that we gave everybody that was working for us the tools so that they could have more meaningful and more purposeful jobs and so you we can make government better and less expensive at the same time those two things can happen and 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 this scale the scale of federal government is enormous
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
And the action that's going on right now 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. 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. And then everybody's mortgage is going to cost less. Your car payment's costing less.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
Your taxes should cost less. I mean, the biggest item right now in the federal government is interest on the debt. I mean, that's the number one expense. So, you know, 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.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
So I'm excited that there's real focus and attention on getting the fiscal house in order here. And it gets me very optimistic about our future.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
Well, likewise, John, and 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 that's always learning from you. So thanks for letting me be a small part of it.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
And 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. And I think the amount of talent in the room is really, really high. And I'm very excited about what everybody's going to get done and get done working together and working together for the American people.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
Well, I think I can only speak for myself, but I think the excitement around the idea that you've got not just a entrepreneur, not a business leader, not a visionary, not someone who's obviously brilliant. But for me, the reason I get excited is Elon grew up in tech. And that's where I spent my career is in tech. And being a tech CEO is different than other categories in tech.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
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. And we do have parts of our... We don't pick airlines, railroads, public utilities.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
These are regulated businesses with limited amounts of competition. And the folks that have survived in tech really know about innovation. And 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.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
And that's why we find things where, you know, the federal government ends up being the 9 to 430, where the rest of the economy is 7 by 24 by 365. And 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. You know, Elon opens up his jacket. It says tech support technology.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
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 underinvested in technology. The business processes, the productivity tools aren't there. And we can have fewer jobs, but they can be more meaningful and more purposeful.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
We can get rid of the mind-numbing, soul-sucking work of That's buried in a lot of these jobs. And the jobs that we do have allow people to really make a difference in people's lives. And so I get excited about the path that we're on and where we're going. And this is also a major, major right sizing of the federal government that's never happened before. And it's, in my mind, long overdue.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
Well, I'm happy to, and I've actually got two roles because in addition to being the Secretary of Interior, President Trump has created the National Energy Dominance Council, asked me to be chair, asked Chris Wright, the Secretary of Energy, to be the vice chair. And about half the cabinet leaders in the cabinet meeting yesterday are also on the National Energy Dominance Council.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
and the whole idea behind that 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 of the above that can be reliable and affordable and if we do that then we can sell energy to our friends and allies and have them stop buying from our adversaries i mean there's two proxy wars that president trump is trying to end right now one with russia ukraine
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
the other funded by Iranian oil sales in the Middle East, where they're funding 24 terrorist groups. But we have a chance to literally change the whole world when we change US energy policy, and that's gonna take the whole of government. And where does the Department of Interior come in? Well, it comes in, as you say, because 500 million acres of land
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
that the interior controls but 700 million acres of subsurface we used to be 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 a couple billion acres of offshore that we have that have an enormous resource that we can develop safely and securely and and be great for our environment.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
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.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
And he understood that 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. And when we do things like that, like be smart about how we're doing timber harvesting from mature forest, we also reduce forest fires.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
Well, great to be with you, John. Thank you for having me on your show.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
So there's 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, and we can help fund better experiences in our national parks. We can use those money to help protect our last best places.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
We can do all of that, but we've got to manage it smartly and manage it according to the law the way that it was intended.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
Mid to long term, nuclear is essential for our country and both the Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and I agree on that. There's 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. It's been an incredibly safe industry. There's been zero deaths from the nuclear industry in our country.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
Matter of fact, as I was checking, more people have died from being frustrated with vending machines and then shaking vending machines, then having the vending machine tip over on them. More people have died from that in America than from nuclear. Is that a real statistic? Yeah, go look it up. It's a real deal. But anyway, it's sad but true.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
We have a big opportunity in what's coming with the innovation around small modular nuclear. 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. And then as long as the design is inspected and it's gone in and they've got... less pressure, less temperature, less water, less waste.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
It's just a whole new approach to how we would create electricity. And they're not as massive as the way we think about it 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. And we're in an electricity race because electricity is what powers
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
Well, I think two things. One is, you know, having been a CEO for most of my life and then a governor for eight years, it's leadership. I mean, President Trump is exhibiting all the great qualities of leadership, starting with, you know, are you giving your team clear direction?
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
AI data centers. And an AI data center is not, it's not like, hey, we're doing Blue Cross Blue Shield medical claims, or we're processing somebody's online shopping request. I mean, those are essential data center activities. But in an AI plant, you're actually manufacturing intelligence. And that base intelligence that they're manufacturing
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
could be being used by every employee of every company in the country. I mean, it'll touch every job, every teacher, every student, every doctor, every patient. I mean, everybody is going to get lifted up by the productivity of artificial intelligence. And the demand for that is going to be very high, but it takes a lot of power. It can also be used for nefarious purposes.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
And China, they're building 30 nuclear plants. They've added 100 gigawatts of coal in the last year. That's enough to power 100 Denvers. A gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts. So we're talking about 100,000 megawatts of coal they've added. They're building huge hydro plants.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
We may be ahead of them in terms of our software for AI, but they're ahead of us in terms of applying just brute force against electricity. And so if we end up in this cyber war with China down the road between the great power wars, they're not going to land a ship and have people charge ashore.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
You know, we're going to wake up and find out that our power grid has been shut down and 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.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
I mean, if the whole power grid goes down, I mean, these are the kinds of threats for the future that risks that we have to look at. And so one of the ways that we defend ourselves in that world is we've got to generate more electricity. And that's one of the things we're doing. And nuclear doesn't help us in the next. Three to four years.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
It could be five years or further out before some of the small modular nuclear start arriving and then it'll take a while for them to arrive at scale. But think of it. Think of it for, you know, 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. I mean, we save all kinds of money. It's clean.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
It's safe. And it can be discrete 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. It's 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's a dozen or more companies working on these designs. There's competition.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
And the executive orders that he's put out provide very specific actions for the cabinet leaders to go execute on the promises that he made to the American people. So that's clear direction. So that's great. And then the second thing is you got to You got to hire a great team.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
That competition is going to lower cost and improve the designs and improve the safety. And I think people have every right to be very bullish on a long term nuclear. But in the next two or three years, 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.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
And 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.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
Well, energy, like many commodities, has a futures price. And the markets are already reflecting in future price that people think energy prices are going to come down. And 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, whether it's electricity.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
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.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
The prior administration, the Biden administration, through regulation, red tape, through policy, 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.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
And when the demand is being filled overseas by places like, you know, if China is building all of our batteries and building all 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 doesn't make any sense for the environment.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
So this approach of having American energy, if people care that are listening, 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.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
And I look around that room and a number of those folks are friends of mine, people that I've known, people that have had great success in the private sector, people that 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.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
They're the world's largest polluter and they continue to grow in that way. So it's like us doing it here in America. First approach is also the best for our environment and for the global environment.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
Well, we play it in a big way because the 64 national parks, the hundreds of national historic sites, the National Mall here in DC, that's all under the Park Service. US Fish and Wildlife, our fantastic fish and wildlife refuges around the country. All of these things are public lands and the special places that we have, the last best places, we're doing a fantastic job.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
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 land mass 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.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
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 America 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, the USA 250 celebration.
Morning Wire
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum | 3.2.25
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 and 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 Interior.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
And for a safer world and for a stronger America, we need to get back in the game.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
Any ideas out there? I'm sure there'll be some. And that was a thrill for Catherine and I to be invited to be on Air Force One flying over the Gulf while the proclamation was being signed. And it did fall, the official naming committee for geographic names falls under the Department of Interior. And it's more layered and complex than you might imagine.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
All of these resources combined plus the offshore represent really an enormous amount of wealth that belongs to the American people.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
But then today with all of the technology and the mapping companies, the Google Maps, Apple Maps, all the other folks, we were in coordination with them as we were flying to say, don't hit the button to restart populating the new name of Gulf of America until it's official.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
But right on schedule at 1.30 p.m., the pilot came on board from the 747 Air Force One and tipped the wing down and said, ladies and gentlemen, look out the right side of the plane. You're looking at the Gulf of America. President Trump had just signed it. The press was crammed into his little office on Air Force One, and that was a very fun day.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
But I don't know, someone was joking today that we were just at Mammoth Cave National Park, that maybe that ought to be like huge. The Y. Huge cave. Yeah.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
Thank you, Cabot. Great to be with you. And thanks to this organization. Thanks to all your listeners. They're an important part of helping move this country forward. And we're grateful for all their support. Amen to that. Thank you, sir. Thank you.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
The war on mining goes along with all of the climate extremism that the left has embraced going back, Obama, Biden, their whole approach was we're gonna shut down mining, we're gonna shut down oil and gas development, we're gonna shut down the use of coal, either for thermal uses like electricity or metallurgical for making steel.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
We're going to shut down grazing on public lands because they were essentially, they were also anti-livestock as part of this thing. But they were most successful on mining. They really, I'm going to say, crushed the mining industry, both the extraction of these resources, but also the processing of that. China, in parallel, I'm sure were part of that from a...
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
I don't want to say from a SIOP standpoint, but just in the same way that Russia wanted to have all of Western Europe go green so they could become dependent on their natural gas, China was happy to have the rest of the Western world stop mining so that they could take control of the markets around these critical minerals, which we need for defense, for technology, for electronics, really for everything today in modern life depends on it.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
So now in the United States, we've got to get back in the game, and under President Trump, we are. Just this last week, announcing that the resolution copper mine, this is a 30-year saga to get a mine permitted for copper in the US. It was not getting done. President Trump took it on. Three months later, we're announcing that project is beginning.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
There's a capability called fast tracking where you can speed up. There have only been two mining operations in the US history that had ever been put on that list to accelerate their permitting. President Trump added 10 more mining projects last week. There's going to be dozens more in the weeks ahead that will be announced that are being added to that list. So we're getting back in the game.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
But again, the Obama-Biden and that whole approach of of anti-mining has put us in a precarious situation of dependence on an adversary who is now using that as a tool in the Cold War we're in.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
Well, and as a former, yes, I spent my career both in technology as a business person, but really that's what I did as governor, was continue to be a businessman. And here in government, same thing, because we've got to drive efficiency. And one of the ways that the tool that's been used to kill all of these natural resource problems industries in America has been permitting.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
I mean, permitting has been just drag on, drag on years, decades, then finally a permits issue, then a lawsuit is filed, then it drags on in court. And that uncertainty has driven the capital formation out of these industries. And it's caused actually even American companies to say, well, if I'm gonna do mining, I better do it overseas. And if you really cared about the environment,
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
you know, the folks that are pushing these lawsuits and funding these lawsuits, if you cared about it, you'd want to have it all done here. You'd want to have everything mined in the U.S., processed in the U.S. You'd want to have every electron, every barrel of oil and gas produced here. We do it cleaner, better, safer, smarter, and healthier here in the U.S.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
because when we attack these resource-based industries, we don't reduce the we just shift the supply to overseas, and then shift it to China, who might be extracting this from the DRC in the middle of Africa, and they're doing it without reclamation. They're doing it with sometimes slave labor, prisoner labor. I mean, they're doing it with no emissions control on what they're doing.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
So it's worse for the global environment. It helps our adversaries. It hurts our economy. And it's horrible for national security. So it's literally 180 degrees. They're taking down a path. The Obama-Biden was taking us down a path 180 degrees in the wrong direction. President Trump is changing that because he understands that both...
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
Peace abroad and prosperity at home is that we have to be competitive in these natural resource industries, including the production of energy and producing critical minerals.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
Well, this is a wonderful connection between two powerful presidents. Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 had the foresight and the wisdom to set aside what became known as the Roosevelt Reservation. Right, yeah.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
Cabot, wonderful to be with you. Thanks, and so fun to be in studio here with you as well.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
a 60-foot strip across New Mexico, Arizona, and California, which could, at the authority of the Secretary of Interior, be transferred to the Department of Defense, in his words of the day, to stop smuggling. Well, what have we had? We've had human trafficking, smuggling. fentanyl flowing in, sort of mass invasion, mass casualties.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
Well, now we have a 60-foot strip that's been transferred to the U.S. DOD. If someone sets foot on that, they're trespassing on a military installation. Now the troops that President Trump, through the border emergency, has deployed down there, they can detain someone for that trespassing until the border patrol, who's got arrest authority, can arrest them.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
So this is going to help with the collaboration between the Border Patrol and the NRDOD. And I was just down there last week as part in signing the order down there on the New Mexico border. But I'm telling you, the Border Patrol, I talked to multiple people, 20 plus years, 25 years in the service.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
They said they've never felt more supported in their job in doing law enforcement than they have right now under President Trump.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
Well, the systems, the IT systems are so bad at the federal level that it is, It's really some days absurd. And having spent my life selling business solutions in the tech business, software solutions, then this is an area that I'm particularly interested in. But we come in with the basic questions that any business could ask. You can't get answers.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
I mean, you come in and say, well, how many contracts and grants do we have and how many people are administering them? Hard to find out those numbers, but then you find out that just Interior Loan was managing 36,000 contracts and grants, and this was almost double just during the last four years during the Biden administration.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
The amount of money that was flying out of the federal government between November 6th of last fall and January 20th of this year on a chart, on a graph is just, again, ridiculous. But then you say, well, then how many people are managing that? You have grants management in the private sector or contract management, but the ratios sometimes are off by a factor of five or more.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
The number of HR people that may exist in some of these departments relative to the total number of folks. We might have one HR person for every 30 team members at the federal government. In the private sector, it'd be one for 200. So it's like we could be off by five or six in terms of what I'd call the bureaucratic overhead.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
And when we take a look like today, when we're out at this national park and you meet these hardworking, dedicated people that are interfacing every day with our citizens doing their job, they also are dealing with the bureaucracy. We had good people trying to do the job, but they're dealing with the overhead that exists. And I think we can strip out a lot of that overhead.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
And it's never been cleaned out. State governments have to balance their budget. The federal government never has. So this is like a barn that's been filled up for 100 years and nothing has been thrown away. And we're going in that barn and we're taking everything out and put in the yard. And then we're deciding what's going to go back in. And the only thing that goes back in
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
is stuff that actually adds value to the citizens. And that it also is stuff that is purposeful work for the people that are doing it. Because we don't need to be paying federal employees to be doing mind-numbing, soul-sucking, repetitive paperwork, literally paperwork, because we don't have the systems. Those folks, you know, there's 10 million jobs open in America.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
Well, it's an incredible department because of the scope and the breadth that it has. It covers 14 time zones. One way to think about the Department of Interior is the Department of Everything. Or another way to think about it is really the heart of America's balance sheet. There's 500 million acres of land, 700 million acres of subsurface.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
And if we can reduce the number of people working for the federal government, which the Biden administration increased that a lot. I mean, you saw the jobs report during this time, and, oh, jobs are up 200,000. Well, 150,000 of them might have been government jobs.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
And so even if we just get back to where we were when President Trump left office, it would be a huge boost for the economy, and it would take a big burden off of the federal government, reduce the cost. I mean, we can save billions and billions of dollars, certainly in the interior, but I know in every department, every agency, we can do that just through common business sense decisions.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
Well, it's great that you bring up the east or west, because we do have states in the east that have between zero and 2% that are public lands, but you get out west, Wyoming is over 40%, Utah over 60%, Nevada over 80% of federal land, Alaska, which is the size of California, plus Texas, plus Montana, plus New Mexico, over half of Alaska, public lands.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
I mean, we have so much land, these 500 million acres, but out west, we got fast-growing metro areas like in Las Vegas and Clark County. You've got the whole population area in Utah that's booming between Ogden and Salt Lake. They're constrained by federal lands, and there's an opportunity with land swaps. We did one, President Trump believes in using these, resources widely.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
We did a land swap, a couple hundred thousand acres of federal for about the same amount of land with the state of Utah. And then we filled in the checkerboard of some wilderness areas that we want to protect. They got 200,000 acres of land that they can use for housing or for resource development.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
And there is a special law for Southern Nevada, the Southern Nevada Lands Act, which then gives us special authorities to help sell those lands to Nevada to help take off the strain, because that's driving up the cost of housing and the American dream. Part of the reason why the American dream is out of reach is because of land costs out in some of these Western cities.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
Like NEDC, it's kind of like ACDC. You put a little lightning bolt in between there. I think we'll have T-shirts for the NEDC. But we already had a National Economic Council, so we didn't have two acronyms within the White House with the same council initials.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
Well, we're definitely on track. And when we talk about dominance, this is about that we sell energy to our friends and allies so they don't have to buy it from our adversaries. I mean, the two wars that we're in right now that are going on that are essentially proxy wars, one with Iran who is funding 24 terror groups, they were funding it and still are with the sale of oil.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
Biden administration, the sanctions completely failed. During the Biden administration, they sold estimated between $200 to $300 billion worth of oil and gas. Under Trump, one, he had Iran financially on their knees because the sanctions actually worked. Russia, as I said earlier, they spent 10 years co-opting everybody in Western Europe to believe that climate extremism was the
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
2.5 billion of offshore and it covers from the US Virgin Islands to American Samoa. It's got in some states more than 50% of the lands in those states are public lands. So think Bureau of Land Management, think US National Parks, think Bureau of Indian Affairs where we hold land and trust for over 500 tribes. Think about US Fish and Wildlife.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
existential threat as opposed to the existential threat might have been like Iran getting a nuclear weapon or Russia with the conflict going on in Ukraine. Those are some things that were, Russia then invaded and the price of oil went up and Russia made more money than they've ever made. And then of course we said, oh now, and then Biden said, we're gonna sanction these guys.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
Well, when they sanctioned them, Iran and Russian oil went down in price. Who is buying it all? China. I mean, we turned our adversaries into China's discount gas station and China was laughing all the way to the bank. China's filling their strategic petroleum reserve to record levels. Biden drained ours in half ahead of the midterms to try to manage price.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
He turned the strategic petroleum reserve of the United States strategic petroleum reserve into a political patrolling reserve back in 2022. So the mess that was handed to President Trump, he's gotta turn all of this again, as they say, 180 degrees in the other direction.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
But when he's talking about drill, baby, drill, he's talking about we're gonna permit and we're gonna develop the resources, and we're gonna map, baby, map to figure out where all these resources are, and then we're gonna mine, baby, mine, so we can build, baby, build, because we got to build AI data centers. If we don't have electricity to power the AI right now, China is winning.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
We're winning on the technology. China's winning on electricity. And you can turn a kilowatt of electricity in an AI data center. You manufacture intelligence. The country that produces the most intelligent first wins this race. And this is not a race we can come in second place. And he understands that. I think Silicon Valley does.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
I think that's why you're seeing all the tech leaders supporting this administration and why you're seeing things. But we've got to be able to clear the path so that we can take advantage of the huge energy resources we have. China imports 11.5 million barrels of oil a day. They're the most energy-dependent country in the world. They also have to import food every day.
Morning Wire
Drill, Mine, Build: Inside Trump’s Energy Revolution
So here we are, a country that has food security and energy security, but we were constraining ourselves. We were tying both hands behind our back with all kinds of regulations, lawsuits, and an ideology that said, no, we're not going to develop these resources here. But as I said, that just That played right into our adversary's hands.
Morning Wire
The Trump Shift & Cabinet Confirmation Questioning | 1.17.25
We've got to realize that if you shut down U.S. energy production here, it doesn't help the global environment. That's a false tradeoff. It doesn't help because somebody else produces it someplace else, less cleaner than we do.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2189 - The Secret SUCCESS of DOGE
Do you know of any trade agreements that they are close to actually closing it out? And not just top lines, a memorandum of understanding.
The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2189 - The Secret SUCCESS of DOGE
I mean, he's arguing that he's made 200 trade deals so far.
Up First from NPR
Trump At The Superbowl, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Turmoil, Air Aid To Gaza
Right now, we're flying over a thing called the Gulf of America.