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 that's why we find things where, you know, the federal government ends up being the 9 to 430, where the rest of the economy is 7 by 24 by 365. And so bringing that tech sense in is something I'm super excited about, because once you do the cost cutting, then you have to bring on the backside. You know, Elon opens up his jacket. It says tech support technology.
We've got to come in and we have to arm the people that work for government at the state and federal level with the same tools that their private sector counterparts have. And we haven't done that. We've underinvested in technology. The business processes, the productivity tools aren't there. And we can have fewer jobs, but they can be more meaningful and more purposeful.
We can get rid of the mind-numbing, soul-sucking work of That's buried in a lot of these jobs. And the jobs that we do have allow people to really make a difference in people's lives. And so I get excited about the path that we're on and where we're going. And this is also a major, major right sizing of the federal government that's never happened before. And it's, in my mind, long overdue.
Well, I'm happy to, and I've actually got two roles because in addition to being the Secretary of Interior, President Trump has created the National Energy Dominance Council, asked me to be chair, asked Chris Wright, the Secretary of Energy, to be the vice chair. And about half the cabinet leaders in the cabinet meeting yesterday are also on the National Energy Dominance Council.
and the whole idea behind that is that we've got to have affordable reliable energy for all americans and we've got to produce more energy of all kinds we need more electricity we need more liquid fuels we need more biofuels we need all of the above that can be reliable and affordable and if we do that then we can sell energy to our friends and allies and have them stop buying from our adversaries i mean there's two proxy wars that president trump is trying to end right now one with russia ukraine
the other funded by Iranian oil sales in the Middle East, where they're funding 24 terrorist groups. But we have a chance to literally change the whole world when we change US energy policy, and that's gonna take the whole of government. And where does the Department of Interior come in? Well, it comes in, as you say, because 500 million acres of land
that the interior controls but 700 million acres of subsurface we used to be a great mining culture in america now we're completely dependent on our adversaries for the critical and rare earth minerals we need for technology and for defense a couple billion acres of offshore that we have that have an enormous resource that we can develop safely and securely and and be great for our environment.
So this is the balance sheet of America. If Interior was a separate company, it would be the largest balance sheet in the world. And when Theodore Roosevelt put away those hundreds of millions of acres, it was specifically stated, this is for the benefit and the use of the American people.
And he understood that the strength of that balance sheet, whether it was having an actual timber industry, a paper industry, as opposed to importing all of our timber from other countries, he understood that. And when we do things like that, like be smart about how we're doing timber harvesting from mature forest, we also reduce forest fires.
So there's many, many win-win opportunities across our land use, which is great for the environment, great for the public, and it gives us an opportunity. The Interior is a money-making department. Our efforts can help pay down the debt, and we can help fund better experiences in our national parks. We can use those money to help protect our last best places.
We can do all of that, but we've got to manage it smartly and manage it according to the law the way that it was intended.
Mid to long term, nuclear is essential for our country and both the Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and I agree on that. There's some big changes coming. We have to change our approach. We've basically choked this industry in our country for the last 30 years with red tape. It's been an incredibly safe industry. There's been zero deaths from the nuclear industry in our country.
Matter of fact, as I was checking, more people have died from being frustrated with vending machines and then shaking vending machines, then having the vending machine tip over on them. More people have died from that in America than from nuclear. Is that a real statistic? Yeah, go look it up. It's a real deal. But anyway, it's sad but true.
We have a big opportunity in what's coming with the innovation around small modular nuclear. These are smaller units. Think of these being manufactured in a factory and then being assembled on site so that the regulations could approve a design. And then as long as the design is inspected and it's gone in and they've got... less pressure, less temperature, less water, less waste.
It's just a whole new approach to how we would create electricity. And they're not as massive as the way we think about it right now. We have 93 operating nuclear sites in America today and just recently opened one, but I think it's the first new one that's opened in 30 years. We are in an electricity race against China. And we're in an electricity race because electricity is what powers
AI data centers. And an AI data center is not, it's not like, hey, we're doing Blue Cross Blue Shield medical claims, or we're processing somebody's online shopping request. I mean, those are essential data center activities. But in an AI plant, you're actually manufacturing intelligence. And that base intelligence that they're manufacturing
could be being used by every employee of every company in the country. I mean, it'll touch every job, every teacher, every student, every doctor, every patient. I mean, everybody is going to get lifted up by the productivity of artificial intelligence. And the demand for that is going to be very high, but it takes a lot of power. It can also be used for nefarious purposes.
And China, they're building 30 nuclear plants. They've added 100 gigawatts of coal in the last year. That's enough to power 100 Denvers. A gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts. So we're talking about 100,000 megawatts of coal they've added. They're building huge hydro plants.
We may be ahead of them in terms of our software for AI, but they're ahead of us in terms of applying just brute force against electricity. And so if we end up in this cyber war with China down the road between the great power wars, they're not going to land a ship and have people charge ashore.
You know, we're going to wake up and find out that our power grid has been shut down and therefore no one can fly on a commercial flight. Our AI data centers don't work. Our missile defense doesn't work. People can't go to school and they can't order anything from Amazon.
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