Doug Burgum
speaker
1,008 appearances
32 recordings
11 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 5 Jun
Doug Burgum’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 6.
Appearances
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But I was, you know, even at the Hill and Valley conference this week, I, without doubt,
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
And he also said very explicitly that that conservation.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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