Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior | All-In DC

We're here on the Celsius Galway in Sabine Pass, just outside Beaumont, Texas, with the Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum. The crew is giving us a tour. This is an amazing export facility, the largest in the United States and 2nd-largest in the world. We're going to talk with the secretary in a minute about American energy independence and the role that this company, this facility, and this process play. I'm excited to have the conversation with the secretary.

What do you think?

Well, I thought it was fantastic. To be on a brand-new ship like this is pretty special. Brand-spanking new—this is the first cargo it's taking. This is not even out of the showroom. Brand new.

Yeah, I mean, look at that. Those are spotless. This was definitely coordinated for you. I have a suspicion.

But it's beautiful.

I think they coordinated for you. They heard you were coming, Doug. They were saying that in 2008, this facility was basically bankrupt.

Yes. This has been a development project since about 2012, and it went from practically nothing to the largest LNG exporter in the world in 13 years.

In 13 years.

Prior to that, when it was originally built—because this was before the amazing miracle of the whole shale revolution in our country—this was being built as an LNG import facility. That was the original plan: We were going to have to import LNG to America.

Now LNG is the No. 2 dollar export on the all-time list for the country. It's the 2nd-highest dollar-value export. We went from being told, "We're going to run out of oil and gas," to today, when we're energy independent on a net basis and on our path toward becoming energy dominant.

I'm going all in.

All right, besties. I think that was another epic discussion. People love the interviews. I could hear him talk for hours. Absolutely. We crushed your questions in a minute. We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What do you guys think? That was fun. That was great.

Welcome to the all-in interview here today with Secretary Doug Burgum, the 55th Secretary of the Interior of the United States of America.

We are here in beautiful Sabine Pass, Louisiana, today, at the Cheniere LNG facility. It's been an amazing tour this afternoon. It's a little bit windy, but it's still a beautiful afternoon. Thanks for joining me today, Doug.

David, it's great to be with you. Thank you for coming down and seeing this amazing facility.

We just took a great tour here. Why were you here today, and what are we checking out?

I think President Trump's core goal, when we talk about energy dominance—which is beyond energy independence—is not just a slogan. It's really about how we have the power to power AI in America, how we power the remanufacturing in America, and then how we sell energy to our friends and allies so that they don't have to buy it from our adversaries.

What you and I had a chance to see today is the largest LNG export facility in America and the 2nd-largest in the world.

I was struck by how quickly this facility grew up. Just about a dozen years ago, there was nothing really going on here, and now it's the 2nd-largest export facility of methane in the world. Methane is seeing a massive resurgence around the world because it has a lower carbon footprint. There's demand, and it's transportable, so there are a lot of reasons why there's a massive, growing market for liquefied natural gas, or methane.

Absolutely. Part of the amazing energy transformation that I think is not fully appreciated by most Americans is that 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've got to be ready to start importing it just to meet our needs."

Along comes the shale gas revolution, again driven by technology: the technology of horizontal drilling, the ability to fracture rock and get oil and gas out of places where people thought it was impossible that we would ever retrieve those resources from those hard-rock shale locations.

After the financial crisis, this thing turned around and began its life as an export facility. Now, as you say, the only one larger in the world is in the Middle East.

I want to go back a little bit and ask how you ended up in the seat—how you ended up not just being the Secretary of the Interior, but also the chair of the National Energy Dominance Council. I talk a lot on the podcast about the importance of growing energy production in this country.

You're a tech entrepreneur from North Dakota who became governor of the state. I'd love for you to give us the highlights: how you ended up there, what you did with respect to energy, and also how that translated into a surplus of jobs and economic prosperity for the state.

It's been quite a journey. Starting out in a town of 300 people in North Dakota, with all gravel streets and no computers, I ended up having an opportunity to be part of a software startup, grow that business, take it public, have a great run as a public company, and get acquired in an all-stock deal by Microsoft.

I stayed there for 7 years, helping grow Microsoft from 40,000 people to 90,000 people. There were 2,000 of us at Great Plains Software when we got acquired: 1,200 in Fargo, 400 in the rest of North America, and 400 in the rest of the world. We became this improbable global software company coming from the Great Plains.

When I left Microsoft to presumably spend more time with the kids and retire, that was an epic fail. I ended up in 2 more startups within 6 months. I was involved in 3 more software IPOs and dozens of other businesses—I mean, software businesses.

Then, in 2016, at a time when we were having an energy-price collapse, there was an open seat for governor, and I threw my hat in the ring. We were down at 6, 9, and 10 in the polls in January, and the primary was in June.

Kathryn, who became the first lady, was like, "Oh, we've got a great life. Why would we get into politics? Why would we get into that?" I assured her that we had no chance of winning and that she never had to worry about being first lady, but that it would be fun for 6 months to create some competition.

We ended up winning that primary and then went on—it was a good year for outsiders. We took office in North Dakota in the middle of December, about 36 days ahead of President Trump. We were sworn in and had 4 amazing years working with President Trump as a governor. There was a wind at our back.

In our 2nd term, we got reelected by the largest margin in the country of any race. But then I was serving as governor under the Biden administration, in a state where we were rapidly becoming a very resource-rich state.

We had climbed to being the No. 2 oil producer in the country. We had tremendous coal resources and incredible agricultural and ranching resources. The Biden administration really was having a war on—whether it was timber, grazing, oil and gas, coal, or critical minerals. Anything that had to do with extraction had a regulatory battle going on.

I would have to say that part of me not only became frustrated; I became very concerned about the future of the country. That led to jumping in at the national level and saying, "We've got to have a policy, because if we don't have energy security, we're not going to have national security."

That's what really drove me to us sitting here right now today.

You ran for president. You ran for the Republican nomination against President Trump and others. Did you keep in touch with him after that, and how did you work with his staff and his office as he was moving his campaign forward?

We were in touch because we knew each other as a governor would know a president, but I was never really running against President Trump. I think the record shows that I was really running against the horrifically dangerous, unsound, and unsafe policies of the Biden administration, which are almost too numerous to enumerate.

When I left office last December 15—December 15, 2024—as governor, I was involved in 30 lawsuits against the Biden administration. Many of them included lawsuits against the agencies and 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.

If there was some sort of false god around climate ideology that they were chasing, it was like, "If we stop the supply coming from the U.S., we're going to somehow save the planet." But there was no reduction in demand. The demand was just being filled by Iran, Venezuela, and Russia, and they were funding wars against us.

I thought it was the closest thing to insanity that I'd ever seen. When we dropped out, very quickly, I was the first of the other candidates to endorse President Trump, and then spent last year campaigning for him.

There were—can I say this?—some rumors that you might have been in the running for vice president, but you obviously stayed close with the president and his staff and found your way into this role. How did that process go for you? How did you end up in this role?

Well, I love what I'm doing, and I love the role. Of course, as a Western governor, I had all the things that Interior has. Being governor of North Dakota is a jam-packed, fun job.

You’re chairman of the Land Board, and being governor meant dealing with land and minerals, all the leasing, and all the issues with the energy industry. You’re also the head of the Water Commission. Interior has the Bureau of Reclamation, which is the second-largest hydroelectric producer in the country and manages the miracle of irrigation that Roosevelt came up with. We wouldn’t have agriculture in Arizona or California without that.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs is part of Interior, and that’s something I had a lot of experience with, including all the challenges we face in terms of health care and education in tribal areas. Across the whole realm of Interior, everything that I had in North Dakota is part of my job today except one thing, and that’s offshore oil production. 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.

We had no offshore production, but earlier today I had a chance to get on my first offshore platform and see the innovation and entrepreneurship there that’s now providing about 16% of the oil for America.

Let’s talk about the energy problem and the energy opportunity. Before we do, I think 50% of the potential audience of this conversation tune out and say, “This is evil. There’s good and there’s bad. This is bad. Exploitation of natural resources, extraction of natural resources damages the planet, ruins the environment, puts carbon in the atmosphere, and drives climate change.” They won’t listen to any conversation about the pragmatism of energy security and the importance energy plays in prosperity—taking people out of poverty, raising them up, raising living standards, and giving access to things around the world that every individual wants, which is more prosperity.

One statistic I always quote is that if you go back 500-plus years, you can see—and there are all these studies that have tried to understand energy production versus GDP, which translates to prosperity per capita—that there’s a linear relationship. The more energy that’s produced, the higher the GDP per capita. That’s what we see around the world in developing markets today.

Maybe you could take a moment to talk to those folks. Share a little bit about your perspective on the relationship between taking care of the environment and the planet and the importance of energy demand and energy security before we get into the things that are going on.

I think you’re spot-on. Human flourishing depends on everyone having access to energy. If you’re talking about access for everyone, we could have as many as 800 million people on the planet—shy of a billion—who don’t have access to electricity, and they need more energy. With AI coming, the demand for power is going to go up. The demand for advanced manufacturing is going to go up.

We’re not in any kind of energy transition. We’re in an era where we need energy addition. 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—that even requires energy.

If you’re worried about water sources, desalination, which we can do, requires a lot of energy. Transportation of goods requires energy. Whether it’s the clothes on your back, the food on your table, or the transportation you use, there’s an energy component to all of that. Electrifying things doesn’t change that; it just changes the source. We still need to create the electricity.

If anybody is concerned about the environment, they should want to have every ounce of 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. I learned that in North Dakota over those 8 years as governor, where we were always at the top of the list for cleanest water, cleanest air, best soil health, and all of these things that we were able to achieve. 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.

We were just talking to this crew on board the ship we just visited. They’re on their way to Taiwan, and they go to Japan. If we can produce liquefied natural gas in this country with a lower carbon footprint than that methane might be produced elsewhere—which is the case, because we have cleaner methods for production—that demand exists regardless of whether the United States produces it. It’s important that the United States take advantage of the opportunity to produce it more cleanly, more safely, and with a lower footprint, and build economic prosperity for us as exporters.

Yes, absolutely. 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. I would say it’s not just better for the globe environmentally; it’s also better for peace.

It’s not just prosperity at home, but literally the 2 proxy wars that we’ve been involved in—with Russia after Russia invaded Ukraine, and with Iran funding 24 different terror groups—they were funding those wars against us with their oil and gas sales. If we can replace their customers with U.S. sources, they have less revenue and less funding to fund terrorism. So it is prosperity at home and peace abroad. It’s nothing short of that.

Let’s talk about the energy demand equation. The U.S. is forecast to increase its electricity production capacity from 1 to 2 terawatts by 2040, 15 years from now. During that same period, China is going to go from 3 to 8 terawatts. That China forecast, by the way, excludes any of the Gen 4 nuclear reactors, the new hydroelectric facilities, and the new thorium reactors, if that ever scales, that they’re considering rolling out in addition to what they’ve already planned to roll out.

In the next 15 years, China is adding 5 Americas in electricity production capacity. If everything gets automated, factories are automated, and AI becomes the great accelerant of the global economy, China is hugely advantaged relative to where we sit today. What do we need to do about it?

If you were to ask me what’s the thing that keeps me awake at night, this is the issue. It’s thrilling and refreshing that you understand the scale, the magnitude, and the importance of this. The AI arms race is really driven by access to electricity.

China last year brought on 94.5 gigawatts of coal-powered electricity. 1 gigawatt is Denver, so they brought on 94 Denvers just last year. That’s more than all we have today for all of California and all of New York; combined, they have less than 94 gigawatts. 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.

People stop listening when they hear the word coal, but from an electricity standpoint, thermal coal is fantastic baseload. It has all the characteristics to allow you to maintain amperage and voltage to keep a system going.

I think we just saw this in Spain. They were celebrating on April 12 of this past month that they’d shut down their last coal plant. A week after that, they were celebrating the fact that they had their first day of 100% renewables on their system. The next week, they were a global news story because people were trapped in subways, all airline flights were canceled, and hospitals were panicking with a lack of power. They had a rolling blackout and grid failure because it just defies physics.

You can’t run an electrical grid with just intermittent power. You cannot run it with something that is based on intermittency. Intermittency is the definition of solar or wind, because the sun doesn’t shine at night and the wind doesn’t blow every day.

We in America became dangerously close to that. Right now, we’ve got parts of our country that are at risk for those same kinds of what I’ll call the Biden brownouts and blackouts to happen, because we oversubsidized the intermittent and overregulated all of the baseload in an idea to “save the planet.” All we’re doing is potentially putting our own country at risk.

It was regulatory action that was taken, and I’ve got to imagine it’s not just the Biden administration. This has to go back, because in 35 years in this country, we only added 0.6 terawatts of electricity production capacity to the grid. What’s gone on in this country that’s made it so hard for us to operate more efficiently in terms of adding new energy capacity to the grid? Is it regulatory only, or are there capital, social, and other reasons that this has become a challenge for us?

The regulatory attack was whole-of-government, so it did attack the formation of capital. You came up with regulatory rules that made it impossible for baseload power from fossil fuels to even get a permit. If you can’t get a permit, then you can’t get access to capital or insurance.

Then you had protests and social media, with everybody going online saying, “We’ve got to exit from all this.” The same phenomenon happened in Germany. I think it’s very clear right now that a lot of what I call the social-media-driven concerns were part of psyops operations from places like Russia.

It was Russia’s great advantage to get Germany to shut down nuclear, shut down all its coal production, and say, “Hey, we have a solution: just buy all your natural gas from us.” So Germany spent half a trillion dollars—$500 billion—on the “transition” to green energy. They were transitioning to wind and solar. Half a trillion, $500 billion. Today, they produce 20% less electricity, and that electricity costs 3 times as much as it did before they began the transition.

And now we have the war, with Russia invading Ukraine. What are they doing? They were scrambling to try to reopen 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.” Again, they were highly subsidizing intermittent sources.

I think part of the awakening that is occurring right now is that the greatest existential threat to the planet and to America is not 1 degree of climate change in the year 2100. Guess what? Innovation will solve any challenges that we have with climate change. We won’t have innovation without electricity, and actually losing the AI arms race to China is the real threat.

I do agree with you. I’ll be declarative on this because a lot of people ask me: I started a company called the Climate Corporation. We talked a lot about climate change. I believe deeply in a lot of this climate science, but I also believe more deeply that innovation will solve a lot of the challenges that may arise.

There’s a whole series of solutions that are developing, and we can talk a little bit about some of those longer-term solutions that ultimately yield to unlimited, free, scalable energy production. When that happens, all bets are off.

No, some of that could be coming in the next decade, and we have line of sight to that. It doesn’t help us today, because today we’ve got to shore it up.

I think one thing is that, having spent 30 years in tech, we never used more than 1% of the nation’s electrical production. It was because computers were getting more efficient. We used 1%, and no one paid any attention. The tech industry didn’t pay any attention to power generation because it didn’t have to: PCs got more efficient, software got more efficient, and America was rich. Everyone was buying appliances that were more efficient, so there wasn’t ever really a demand curve on electricity.

But today, with AI, the demand curve is just flying in the face. When I was at CERAWeek, which is the biggest energy conclave, I said to the group, “There’s something different here this year.” What’s different is that the 5 biggest tech companies in America showed up at that conference with $300 billion in capex. The big ones have got $75 billion apiece, for the top ones on that chart.

I’ll reflect back to not that long ago—a couple of decades ago—when I was a corporate officer at Microsoft for 7 years. I never went to a capex meeting. Somebody said, “Weren’t you invited?” I said, “No, there were no capex meetings.” We hired salespeople and software developers, and if we needed an office in Singapore or Munich, we rented it, leased it, and so there was no capex.

Now they showed up at that conference, and I had to speak to all the executives and say, “Look, these guys aren’t here trying to sell you software. They’re your biggest customers. They need power, and they will do anything.” The regulated power providers and some in the industry have just never seen a demand curve. It’s a collision between high tech and power generation in America. Coming from that, we’ve got to figure out a way to break through this.

We just got back from D.C. There was this Hill and Valley Forum this week. Every single speech, every single talk, every conversation in the hallways was all about the energy demand coming from AI. I don’t think the public realizes, and I don’t think the broad business community realizes, how energy-hungry AI is and how this is going to ramp up like no one has ever seen in history.

By the way, we haven’t yet seen the ramp-up of robotics and automation. There’s going to be a breakthrough in the next year or 2 that’s going to unleash this additional demand curve. We’re going to have 100 million robots in the United States that are all electrified. They all have to get charged up. That power has got to come from somewhere.

This feels like a massive challenge for America, like going to the moon, fighting World War II in Europe, or the Manhattan Project. A set of solutions on that scale is needed to address this. What is this council that you’re leading, the National Energy Dominance Council, doing? What are the top 3 things that you think unlock the energy potential in the United States and meet the demand curve that’s tidal-waving its way across this country right now?

Well, I’d say the good news is that we have a president of the United States who understands this.

Yeah.

That’s why, on day 1 in office, he declared an energy emergency. Some folks who aren’t familiar with what you’ve just described—this awareness that we’re facing a crisis—were questioning whether we had an energy emergency. But as you’ve just described, we have a huge one relative to our grid and grid stability. We don’t have enough power to win the AI arms race.

The AI arms race means that, without that, we lose the defense battle, because it’s not just robotics in manufacturing. If we’re going to have a Golden Dome, if we’re going to have any ability to defend ourselves from hypersonics, or protect our fleet around the ocean and not have them all wiped out in the first hour of a conflict, we have to have AI from both a targeting and a defense standpoint. You can’t separate defense from AI anymore, either. This is mission-critical.

With that energy emergency, we have to pull out all stops. So, back to NEDC.

Which, by the way, for those who are trying to remember it, it’s like AC/DC: it’s NEDC. We could even have a little lightning bolt in the logo. I don’t know if you’re going to get there, Doug, but—

Have T-shirts with it. 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, the new bestseller.

You could sell that swag.

We could fund a new energy program. But with ours, we’re not an organization. We’re like a small tiger team. Think of it more like a governor’s economic-development 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, a white-glove concierge service: help them get the permit, help them get started. The capital is there.

It’s often a regulatory thing that’s stopping natural gas from getting into New England. We’re never going to build an AI data center in New York or in New England if the price of natural gas is 3 times higher than it is in Pennsylvania. And yet they’re still campaigning on, “Hey, we blocked this natural-gas pipeline.” Everybody in Pennsylvania loves that because they’ll get all the data centers and 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 shutting down a coal plant. It’s like, “Okay, how are you going to power this stuff?” One of the goals we have is: don’t shut down any more baseload. Preserve what we have, and help get new sources of power permitted.

Does that include nuclear? Some of the reactor shutdowns that are planned?

Yeah, we’ve got to keep everything going, and we’ve got to go fast on small modular nuclear. But again, that’s really in the 2030s, so it’s in our next phase. It’s 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.

But between now—2025—and 2030, a lot of it is going to come back to LNG, because the fastest thing we can get online for more electricity generation is LNG power plants. So that’s number 1.

Just to frame things up for folks, you mentioned the city of Denver utilizes about 1 gigawatt of electricity. A standard Gen II-scale nuclear reactor facility produces about a gigawatt. These small modular reactors, or SMRs, as they’re called, that China has now demonstrated—5 megawatts—they can be small. They can be located in an office complex or in the downtown area of a city. They’re designed to have redundant systems for safety and to prevent meltdowns and so on.

Talk a little bit about the opportunity for nuclear. You’re seeing the 2030s. Meanwhile, China has several hundred that are under construction. There’s clearly technology available today. Uranium is not hard to get—we have a lot of it. Thorium is not hard to get—we have an incredible amount of thorium. Those are the 2 fuel sources.

Why can’t we move faster with nuclear? What’s the holdup, and why is the U.S. so different from China in being able to scale up nuclear?

A big difference is, again, the regulatory environment. The regulatory environment on nuclear has been so burdensome in terms of adding to the cost and the time frame and bringing it online. When that cost was put onto a utility, and then the utility felt it had to put that back on the ratepayers, its consumer customers, there was, in some ways, a revolt. 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.” 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 a manufacturing process where we regulate the design, the design is proven and proved out. As long as the manufacturing plant is producing that same design, then we don’t have to do this stick-built process where you show up, work for a week, and the inspector shows up and says, “Oh, this is off by 1 millimeter. You’ve got to redo it.” I mean, some of that is where you end up with doubling of cost.

Some of the projects that have just been completed took close to 2 decades on nuclear and had double the cost and double the time. That’s not economically sustainable. So part of it is we’ve got to streamline the process, but these smaller reactors can be daisy-chained. They could be great solutions.

And the other piece, which you love about having the small modular reactors, is we can spend money on power generation as opposed to money on transmission. Transmission is also really hard to build in this country because whether it’s linear infrastructure—which includes natural gas pipelines, CO2 pipelines, oil and gas pipelines, or transmission lines—those become the focal point for protests. If they have any nexus, an 1,100-mile-long pipeline could have 1 mile that touches federal ground. That is where the protest is going to occur.

So, going back to your deregulatory action, can you do that in the seat that you’re in? Who can take that deregulatory action? Do you need Congress to get involved?

I’ve got a great partner, Chris Wright—incredibly talented, arguably the most qualified Secretary of Energy we’ve ever had—leading that effort. The Department of Energy has most of the responsibility related to nuclear because it also is in charge of our nuclear stockpile. I mean, for the military, DOE has direct defense responsibilities.

As part of that, we’ve also got the 15 national labs, and there’s been great work happening in Los Alamos and Sandia. You go around the whole country, and we’ve got an incredibly talented group of people. Research dollars have been flowing, but we’ve got to get some of that commercialized and out to the public.

Again, you think of it literally as a Manhattan Project. 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 with the current crisis we’re facing, which is this energy emergency.

We should talk to Chris Wright.

Yes, you should.

And then what’s your point of view on the timeline for the SMRs? Do you think it’s 2035 or 2030, when you have that approved design and stamp them out? Is it 2040, or is it still—

Well, the fun thing is, when we meet with all of these people in the nuclear industry, if you were doing this 5 years ago, you’d have been talking to regulated utilities. Today, you can talk to venture-funded startups, and there are at least 10 that are out there today chasing new designs. There are people chasing not just fission but fusion, so all of that is exciting.

Think of us having an air base in Alaska. Think of being able to daisy-chain some SMRs there and not having to build transmission. The applications for military purposes and for other uses are significant. If you have distributed power, it’s harder for the enemy to knock out your power source because it’s not all sitting in 1 spot.

Do you think America has a risk-tolerance problem? My view is we’ve gotten so wealthy and comfortable, and we have such prosperity in this nation, just like what happened in Europe. You eventually say, “I don’t want to take any risk anymore,” and everything gets regulated to the point that you don’t want to have any damage, hurt, or downside.

This is the whole thing with self-driving cars. Elon just put out a tweet saying he’s seeing 1 car crash every 5 million miles or something with self-driving, versus 1 million miles when self-driving isn’t on. So it’s a safer technology, but the focal point is that if it’s new technology and it causes any harm or any loss, it’s worse, versus looking at the calculus of the whole.

Have we lost that ability as a country? And how do we grade leadership to rethink a risk-taking America again?

Well, I don’t know if we’ve lost it, or if it’s just the irony of being selective about what industry or what form of transportation. On the automobile side, we’ll track between 38,000 and 40,000 deaths on highways in America this year. Half of those are because of impaired driving, either from people texting or from impaired drug or alcohol use.

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 if you lose 70 people in the first airline crash in 12 years in America, we’re still talking about it 3 months later because that somehow is news, whereas people dying on highways are not.

And in 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. The best I can find in the federal safety statistics is that there are about 37 people who have died from getting angry at vending machines, pounding on them, and then having them tip over and crush them.

Where do you find that?

You just go search online, but it’s out there. It’s like, if you’re afraid of nuclear, then take a wide berth. If you see a vending machine, steer clear of it.

The same thing happened when I was campaigning for President Trump and I said I was pro-nuclear. Someone said, “Oh, really? But would you live near one? Would you raise your family near one?” And I said, “Well, I would.” They said, “How can you say that?”

I said, “Well, I raised them on a farm in North Dakota, and our farm was near a road.” They said, “What do you mean, a road?” I said, “Well, it’s more risky than a nuclear power plant.” It’s way more risky. 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 on the road, not about anything else.”

The crisis that we’re in from energy is not the only crisis America faces. We’re facing a debt and deficit crisis that’s going to challenge this nation in ways we’ve never been challenged before. $38 trillion of debt, a $6.75 trillion budget, and a $2 trillion deficit. The numbers are staggering. It’s frightening.

There are a lot of economic studies that show you can’t tax more than 18% of GDP, or else you lose GDP. We’re at that point. You’ve talked a lot about America’s balance sheet as a way to unlock opportunity, grow GDP, and grow our way out of this deficit and debt problem. Talk a little bit about what you mean when you say “America’s balance sheet,” and what does that entail?

First of all, David, I love the way you’re framing it. I would just add that a $2 trillion 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 besides taxes. How is that possible? It’s because of America’s balance sheet.

Our balance sheet isn’t just the financial assets. It includes the fact that, within Interior alone, there are 500 million acres of surface land. Throw in the U.S. Forest Service, and add another 200 million. That’s nearly a third of U.S. land.

Then we have 700 million acres of subsurface—some contiguous and some discontinuous—but we own all these minerals that are underground. Then there are between 2.5 billion and 3 billion acres offshore that contain critical minerals, oil, and gas. All of that is under federal purview.

If Interior were a standalone company, it would have the largest balance sheet in the world by far. Saudi Aramco wouldn’t even come close.

You say, “Okay, if you have this balance sheet”—we all know about the $38 trillion in debt. It gets hammered all the time. It’s used in campaign ads. But even at the Hill & Valley Forum this week, without asking the audience, “How many of you know the $38 trillion?” Everybody did. “How many of you know what our balance sheet on the asset side is?” Nobody knows, because none of the senators know. We haven’t calculated it, but we’re working in the Trump administration to try to come up with that number.

One estimate this week is that, just on public land alone, there may be $8 trillion of coal resources. I know coal is sometimes a dirty word. It is. But we also need to 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 it for defense and advanced manufacturing. We also need to have a shipping industry that comes back to our country. You need steel for that.

Well, guess what you make steel out of? Part of it is 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.

The coal resources around our country are also filled with the critical and rare-earth minerals that we need in this battle with China, particularly now that China, just weeks ago, put export controls on a number of minerals that we need for things like batteries, electric motors, cars, home drills, rockets, and missiles. The magnets are at risk now because we became so dependent on China. When you look at this balance sheet, we need these resources for defense and national security.

Theodore Roosevelt was instrumental in setting aside these hundreds of millions of acres, with the original intention that they were there for the benefit and use of the American people. He also said very explicitly that conservation meant sustainable use, not just preservation. We saw what happened following the extremism around the spotted owl: “We’ve got to stop the harvesting of certain old-growth timber.” It killed the timber industry in America, and when we killed it back in the 1990s, it never came back.

Now, 30 years later, those timber companies that would get a lease from the federal government—and would have the responsibility for thinning, cleaning, and responsibly managing the forests—are gone. They would send a check to the federal government, so we’d have revenue. Instead of revenue, today we have expense. We burn more board feet of lumber in this country every year than we are harvesting because of uncontrolled wildfires.

The uncontrolled wildfires are also some of our biggest emitters in terms of CO₂. You burn a tree, and it releases the carbon. Again, the folks who wanted to reduce emissions, save the planet, and help the wildlife are actually doing the opposite of that. We have to get back in the business of grazing our lands, managing our forests, developing our resources and critical minerals, and mining again in this country. Mining can’t be abandoned if we want to be a strong country.

And, of course, oil and gas. All of those things involve selling a lease to a private company. They send a check, develop the resource, and then send us a royalty. The little company that I just met with this morning out on a platform in the Gulf of America was, at its inception, a company with 450 people. They have sent $1.2 billion to the U.S. Treasury over the life of their company. Show me a tech company that’s done that. I mean, it’s impossible to access that resource without a lease.

They lease it upfront, so they write a check upfront to have the opportunity to take the risk. They take all the risk. They build the platform, hire the people, do the seismic work, and figure it out. If they hit a dry hole, it’s all on them; the taxpayer gets nothing. But if they score, then they pay us a royalty.

What do we use that for? We use it to pay down the deficit and the debt. We also use it for coastal restoration. Along this beautiful Gulf Coast, we do coastal restoration, and 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.

If you’ve driven on an interstate highway in your life or gone to a public school, you should send a thank-you note to the natural-resource industries, because they helped pay for that. But what’s happened is, if there’s $100 trillion on the balance sheet—just say that—and you’re a finance, tech, or venture guy, you could 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.” Last year, the Interior Department brought in $22 billion. So we’re off by a factor of 50 from having bad performance in getting a return on investment for the American people.

I guess the assets only count if you can access them, utilize them, and monetize them. We all know from a finance perspective that there’s goodwill that could sit on an asset line and doesn’t mean anything at the end of the day. If you can’t monetize it, it’s not worth much.

How do you think about the target you’re going after? Is it $1 trillion? When do you develop and deliver a plan to the American people that says, “Here’s our target. Here’s when we’re going to get there”? Do you think about it that way?

We don’t have a target yet because we don’t even know what our base of unused resources is. We’re trying to get our hands around what our timber is worth, what our oil and gas is worth, and so on. That goes back to the core mission of the U.S. Geological Survey. Its original core mission was to map.

When we say, “Map, baby, map,” that can tell you where you’re supposed to “mine, baby, mine” and where you’re supposed to “drill, baby, drill.” But getting back to mapping and working with the private sector, which has outstripped us, ground-penetrating radar is a new advancement that’s more accurate than seismic and less intrusive. We need to really understand what America’s balance sheet is, and some of that is going to take work for us to get out there and really survey it.

When we have that, it’s public domain. We’ll publish that information, and that will help the private sector determine where it should put its resources to help develop this.

Let’s talk about mining. You and I had dinner a couple of weeks ago. You gave me a statistic that I hadn’t heard before: We only graduate 200 people with degrees in mining today. Why did we stop mining? Why did we stop developing our own natural resources and shift to a model where we’re dependent on buying from others, and now have critical supply-chain dependencies? What happened in the United States?

I think there was a period when our country was a powerful and great mining country. When you think back to even the early 1900s, you think about where we were and what we were doing in gold and silver. Through World War II, and even up into the 1980s, we were still very strong as a mining country and mining industry.

Then there were some environmental issues and growing environmental awareness. You had some Superfund sites, and mining became one of the focal points of the attack. Suddenly, all mining was bad, as opposed to one operator in one location that maybe wasn’t maintained properly. I think whether it was young people choosing careers or the press, the regulatory environment piled on in a heavy way.

One example is Resolution Copper. We’re in the process now of issuing them a permit. It has taken about 3 months here in the Trump administration. They started this process 29 years ago. This has been a 3-decade-long saga to open a copper mine.

And guess what? We need copper more than we’ve ever needed it before. It’s part of every electric motor and all of the advanced equipment that we’re building. It’s thrilling that we’re going to open a copper mine in America. Some of the mines that have barely hung on but are still going—whether it’s gold, silver, or, in some cases, uranium—also have critical minerals adjacent to them.

We can add critical-minerals refining because it’s not just that we aren’t mining those raw materials. China has the corner on refining—not just mining, but refining. When they’re in the Congo in Africa pulling out those resource-rich minerals, they’re bringing them back to China.

We have examples of companies in America that were mining in America, but there was no processing. They were sending the materials to China, and China was doing the refining. Now we’re literally in a war over these critical minerals, which we need for defense, and we don’t have a stockpile.

Part of what we’re concerned with right now is: 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? How do we de-risk it if someone’s going to get into mining?

Do we need something like sovereign-risk insurance—not because you’re working overseas, but because you’re working here, and the next administration may use an executive order to wipe out your mine? Again, we need to give capital providers the confidence that if they’re somehow regulated out of business, they’ll get compensated through an insurance program.

What about in your role administering the EPA, looking out for environmental standards and protecting our environment and our communities? There were toxic Superfund sites. What’s the thinking from your point of view on making sure we’re doing this in a clean way, and how important is that in this calculus?

Lee Zeldin, our EPA administrator, is also a key part of the Energy Dominance Council, as is about half of the Cabinet. We’ve got Howard Lutnick, Scott Bessent, and Brooke Rollins from USDA, with the U.S. Forest Service and everything.

There’s literally about half the Cabinet. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is on there. Everybody is part of this team trying to solve this larger, complex thing.

But I would say that the one thing we forget about when we have these national discussions is that every state also has a regulatory environment. In my time as governor, one thing I learned was that I had never met a bureaucrat from D.C. who cared more about the land, the water, the soil health, or the air in our state than the people who lived there and the people who worked for our own DEQ.

So when people say, “We’re reducing headcount at the EPA. The world’s going to fall apart,” no. We have 2 issues with regulation. One is overreach, which is when you have people going beyond the law and their original charter, regulating things beyond what they’re supposed to be regulating.

A water permit should be about turbidity and temperature, and whether the fish in this area are going to be affected, as opposed to, “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.

If there was an issue with how the company was crossing a watercourse, like 38,000 other pipeline crossings of watercourses in America, if there’s a real problem, then tell them that, and they’ll horizontally directionally drill it 50 feet below the bottom of the river. It’ll never touch the river, and give them a permit. Instead, they’d be like, “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. You might go through the path for 2 or 3 years and get your federal permit, and then find out that a state like New York is not going to provide it. Or you might get a permit in 6 months in a state that can efficiently do permitting, get all the work done, and take care of everything, and then find out that the federal government is 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 an outcome, which is that they’re going to achieve prosperity. 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.

President Trump just finished his 100th day in office. Are you glad you took the job? What’s been most surprising for you since you’ve been in the role?

I’m having a blast, and I’m thrilled to be in this position where we can have an impact. You get up every day, and it’s a little bit like the old World War II Marines in the Pacific would say: “The bad news is we’re in a foxhole. The bad news is we’re on a beach. The bad news is we’re surrounded. The good news is we can attack in any direction.”

Every day you can get up and go make a difference in people’s lives. For anybody in tech, or anybody that’s listening, who pooh-poohs public service, they ought to really think about the fact that we need people who are, as Teddy Roosevelt said, willing to get in the arena. In these jobs that are really purposeful, you can make a difference for a lot of people.

What was surprising about the job was that I knew, from a tech standpoint, because I lived through it for 8 years in North Dakota, that state government wasn’t up to speed on basic technology, basic business systems, and all the things that reduce productivity and create agony for state or federal employees.

We ask them to do mind-numbing and soul-sucking work for about 20% of their time because we haven’t given them the basic tools that everybody in the private sector has. It’s not that anybody’s bad or that they’re bad people, but you could get rid of 20% of the work by just bringing in the tools that are already there. You could have 20% fewer people, and then the people would have a more meaningful, more purposeful, more productive job.

I thought it couldn’t be worse than it was in North Dakota. Then I got into the Department of the Interior, and we are further behind. This is the land of decommissioning mainframes, and we could just take them straight to the Smithsonian for the 1980s exhibit.

I had dinner with a couple of CIOs and CTOs who have now been put in the government, and the stories are incredible. They totally echo what you’re saying.

Secretary Burgum, thank you for this opportunity to join you here on this beautiful day. I really appreciate the work you’re doing. It’s fantastic to hear that there’s someone in the administration with your perspective and your experience doing this work. I just want to say thank you.

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 sound bite.

I think that all of you may underestimate the impact that All-In has had. 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.

Thank you for being so well-informed, and thanks for coming all the way down here to Louisiana to share this beautiful day on the coast.

Thanks.

Thank you.