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
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. But then you say, well, then how many people are managing that? 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 we could be off by five or six in terms of what I'd call the bureaucratic overhead.
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 in the yard. And then we're deciding what's going to go back in. And the only thing that goes back in
is stuff that actually adds value to the citizens. And that 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. 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 administration 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 have been government jobs.
And so even if we just get back to where we were when President Trump left office, it would be a huge boost for the economy, and it would take a big burden off of the federal government, reduce the cost. 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.
Well, it's great that you bring up the east or west, because we do have states in the east that have between zero 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 got fast-growing metro areas like in 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. 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.
Like NEDC, it's kind of like ACDC. You 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 didn't have two acronyms within the White House with the same council initials.
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.
Biden administration, the sanctions completely failed. During the Biden administration, they sold estimated between $200 to $300 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 might have been like Iran getting a nuclear weapon or Russia with the conflict going on in Ukraine. 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 is 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 patrolling reserve back in 2022. So the mess that was handed to President Trump, he's gotta 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 gonna permit and we're gonna develop the resources, and we're gonna map, baby, map to figure out where all these resources are, and then we're gonna mine, baby, mine, so we can build, baby, build, because we 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's 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. 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.
Showing 921–940 of 1,008 · page 47 of 51
← Previous
Next →