President-elect Donald Trump has named North Dakota Republican Gov. Doug Burgum as his Interior secretary nominee during a Thursday gala held at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. He’s been shortlisted to head the Interior or Energy departments.
If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, he’ll oversee some 70,000 employees, tasked with managing more than 500 million acres of public lands, including national parks and monuments as well as its natural resources.
Burgum would also be responsible for enacting Trump’s mining and drilling agenda to ramp up energy production. But he’s been seen as a more moderate Republican pick for the Cabinet role, credited with creating his state’s Department of Environmental Quality in 2017 and planning for North Dakota to become carbon neutral by 2030.
Burgum would succeed Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, who made history by becoming the nation’s first Native American Cabinet member under the Biden administration.
In a statement, the Republican Governors Association congratulated North Dakota’s 33rd governor on the appointment, adding Burgum is “a strong leader who has a long track record of both preserving our natural heritage while advocating for reforms that would put our natural resources to use here at home.”
Trump announced the next day that his Interior secretary pick will also chair the newly formed National Energy Council, adding this position will also grant him a seat on the White House’s National Security Council.
The National Energy Council will be made up of federal agencies that deal with permitting and regulating energy nationwide.
“This Council will oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE,” Trump said in a statement, “by cutting red tape, enhancing private sector investments across all sectors of the Economy, and by focusing on INNOVATION over longstanding, but totally unnecessary, regulation.”
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