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

Sabine Pass captures the scale of America’s shale reversal: a terminal built to import LNG became the country’s largest LNG export facility. Burgum said the project turned around after the shale boom; EIA now lists Sabine Pass as the largest U.S. LNG terminal at 3.6 Bcf/d nominal capacity. (U.S. Energy Information Administration)

Burgum said the administration’s immediate power plan is to keep existing baseload plants open, accelerate permits, and use natural gas as a bridge to a larger nuclear fleet. He described the Energy Dominance Council as a small “tiger team” that intervenes when major energy and data-center projects hit regulatory roadblocks. (U.S. Department of the Interior)

AI, not traditional household demand, is the force Burgum thinks has broken America’s old electricity assumptions. He said the five largest tech companies arrived at CERAWeek with roughly $300 billion of planned capital spending, turning power producers from background utilities into critical suppliers for data centers and advanced manufacturing.

Burgum wants Washington to treat federal land and mineral rights as an underused national balance sheet, not merely protected acreage. He said Interior is trying to value those assets and argued leases and royalties could generate far more non-tax revenue; BLM manages roughly 700 million acres of subsurface mineral estate. (U.S. Department of the Interior)

The most concrete critical-minerals proposal was to pair faster domestic mining with strategic stockpiles and insurance against future regulatory reversals. Burgum cited Resolution Copper’s decades-long permitting saga and a thin mining workforce; DOE reports only 162 U.S. mining-engineering bachelor’s degrees were awarded in 2023. (The Department of Energy's Energy.gov)

Burgum’s diagnosis of government inefficiency is unusually specific: Interior is technologically further behind than North Dakota’s state government was when he became governor. He said outdated systems force employees into repetitive work and estimated basic private-sector tools could eliminate about 20% of that workload, potentially allowing a smaller staff.

Burgum’s route into Trump’s Cabinet followed a quick political consolidation after ending his own presidential campaign. He said he endorsed Trump and spent 2024 campaigning for him; after eight years governing North Dakota, he is now Interior secretary and chairman of the National Energy Dominance Council. (U.S. Department of the Interior)