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--:-- Host: John Bickley: It's Saturday, May 3rd, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. All right, we're now joined by Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior. Mr. Secretary, thanks for being here.
--:-- Doug Burgum: Cabot, wonderful to be with you. Thanks.
--:-- Host: Cabot Phillips: So fun to be in studio here with you as well. This is awesome. We were up in Mammoth Cave earlier, spelunking, doing some cave diving. Yeah, literally. I couldn't really recognize you. It was the first time I've seen you outside of a cave. Yeah, that's why we look so pale, because we weren't getting any natural light.
--:-- Doug Burgum: For our audience who might not be aware, what does the Interior Department encompass? Walk us through your role there.
--:-- Doug Burgum: 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, 2.5 billion of offshore, and it covers from the U.S. 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 U.S. National Parks, think Bureau of Indian Affairs, where we hold land in trust for over 500 tribes. Think about U.S. Fish and Wildlife. All of these resources combined plus the offshore represent really an enormous amount of wealth that belongs to the American people.
--:-- Doug Burgum: Now, I want to talk about some of your efforts on mining. You've described the war on mining that's been taking place in this country under the last administration. China recently halted the export of a number of rare earth minerals. You're now pushing to make America less dependent on China and to open up America's mining of those minerals. Talk to us about those efforts.
--:-- Doug Burgum: The war on mining goes along with all of the climate extremism that the left has embraced going back, you know, Obama, Biden, you know, their whole approach was we're going to shut down mining, we're going to shut down oil and gas development, we're going to shut down the use of coal, either for thermal uses like electricity or metallurgical for making steel, 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, I'm going to say from a PSYOP 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.
--:-- Doug Burgum: 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. There's a capability called fast tracking where you can speed up. There have only been two mining operations in the U.S. 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. But again, the Obama-Biden and that whole approach 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.
--:-- Doug Burgum: I think when a lot of people hear about deregulation, their eyes can kind of gloss over. But tangibly you a former businessman, what does deregulating something like the mining industry what does that do for efficiency and for speed now that more and more Americans are concerned about the idea of being tied to a Chinese supply chain?
--:-- Doug Burgum: Well, and you see, 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 industries in America has been permitting. I mean, permitting has been just drag on, drag on years, decades. Then finally a permit's issued. 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 going to do mining, I better do it overseas. And if you really cared about the environment, 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 US, processed in the US. 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 US.
--:-- Doug Burgum: Because when we attack these resource-based industries, we don't reduce the demand. We just shift the supply to overseas. And then you 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. 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. It's 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 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.
--:-- Doug Burgum: One of the moves you made recently on illegal immigration has been getting a lot of attention, understandably so. Talk to us about your decision to transfer federal lands in New Mexico along the border over to the U.S. military and what that will do to improve border security.
--:-- Doug Burgum: 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, 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. We've had fentanyl flowing in, sort of mass invasion, mass casualties. 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.
--:-- Doug Burgum: 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. They said they've never felt more supported in their job and and doing law enforcement than they have right now under President Trump.
--:-- Doug Burgum: Now, your administration, or your department has recently been partnering with Doge to find and root out inefficiencies. As a businessman, were there any particularly egregious examples of waste or inefficiency that, when you took over, you said, hey, if this is one of my businesses, we would've cut this years ago? Were there any specific examples, and what are you looking towards to find cuts?
--:-- Doug Burgum: 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 if you come in with the basic questions that any business could ask, you can't get answers. 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 alone was managing 36,000 contracts and grants. And this was almost doubled just during the last four years during the Biden administration. 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
--:-- Doug Burgum: But then you say well then how many people are managing that If you have grants management in the private sector or contract management but the ratios sometimes are off by a factor of five or more, 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, you know, we could be off by five or six in terms of what I'd call the bureaucratic overhead.
--:-- Doug Burgum: 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. 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 it in the yard. And then we're deciding what's gonna go back in. And the only thing that goes back in is stuff that actually adds value to the citizens. And then 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.
--:-- Doug Burgum: Those folks, you know, there's 10 million jobs open in America. And if we can reduce the number of people working for the federal government, which the Biden, Biden 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've been government jobs. And so even if we just get back to where we were when President Trump left office, would be a huge boost for the economy. And it would take a big burden off of the federal government, reduce the costs. 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.
--:-- Doug Burgum: You mentioned earlier the amount of land owned by the federal government. And I grew up on the East Coast. And I think a lot of people on the East Coast are unaware of how much land out west in states like Nevada is controlled by the federal government. Do you have any interest in opening up some of those federal land tracts for housing or commercial use, things of that nature?
--:-- Doug Burgum: Well, it's great that you bring up the east or west because we do have states in the east that have between 0% 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. I mean, we have so much land, these 500 million acres. But out west, we've got fast-growing metro areas like 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.
--:-- Doug Burgum: We did one, President Trump believes in using these resources widely. 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. 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.
--:-- Doug Burgum: Part of the chair of the National Energy Dominance Council, formerly National Energy Council. Now it's Energy Dominance Council. It shows the Trump priorities. It's like NEDC, it's kind of like ACDC. 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 couldn't have two acronyms within the White House with the same council initials. Just throw dominance in there. I like it.
--:-- Doug Burgum: So President Trump came to office on a promise to make America energy dominant on the global stage. As we approach the 100-day mark, do you think that he has done that?
--:-- Doug Burgum: 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. You know Biden administration the sanctions completely failed During the Biden administration they sold estimated between to 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 existential threat as opposed to the existential threat, you know, might have been like Iran getting a nuclear weapon or Russia with the conflict going on in Ukraine.
--:-- Doug Burgum: 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. Well, when they sanctioned them, Iran and Russian oil went down in price. Who was 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. He turned the strategic petroleum reserve of the United States' strategic petroleum reserve into a political petroleum reserve back in 2022.
--:-- Doug Burgum: So the mess that was handed to President Trump, he's got to turn all of this again, as they say, 180 degrees in the other direction. But when he's talking about drill, baby, drill, he's talking about we're going to permit and we're going to develop the resources. And we're going to map, baby, map to figure out where all these resources are. And then we're going to mine, baby, mine so we can build, baby, build because we've got to build AI data centers. If we don't have electricity to power the AI right now, China is winning. We're winning on the technology. China is 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. I think that's why you're seeing all the tech leaders supporting this administration and why you're seeing things.
--:-- Doug Burgum: 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. 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 played right into our adversary's hands. and for a safer world and for a stronger America, we need to get back in the game.
--:-- Doug Burgum: Final question. You were the man that officially changed the name Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. Do you have any more name changes coming? Oh, I'm sure. 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. 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. And then the, 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.
--:-- Doug Burgum: The press was crammed into his little office on Air Force One, and that was a very fun day. 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. If you're taking suggestions, maybe we could rename one of the Great Lakes the Leftist Tears Reservoir in honor of our mugs here, but I won't put you on the spot for that one.
--:-- Doug Burgum: Mr. Secretary, thank you so much for your time.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Thank you, Cabot. Great to be with you. And thanks to this organization. Thanks to all of your listeners that listen in. And 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.
