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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 6.
Appearances
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, you could have 20% less people and then the people would have a more meaningful, more purposeful job.
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.
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.
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.
Cabot, wonderful to be with you. Thanks, and so fun to be in studio here with you as well.
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 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.
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