President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement Friday afternoon that his pick for Interior secretary, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, would also coordinate a new council on energy policy is a sign the incoming administration will make energy production a core part of its domestic policy.
Few details of the new National Energy Council were available Friday, as activists and lawmakers processed the surprise 4 p.m. Eastern announcement. But the move likely reflects a focus by Trump and his next administration on energy production, including fossil fuels.
“They’re signaling ahead of time that this is one of their priority areas,” Frank Maisano, a senior principal at the energy-focused law and lobbyist firm Bracewell LLP, said in an interview.
Burgum “will be joining my Administration as both Secretary of the Interior and, as Chairman of the newly formed, and very important, National Energy Council, which will consist of all Departments and Agencies involved in the permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, transportation, of ALL forms of American Energy,” a written statement from Trump said.
“This Council will oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE by cutting red tape, enhancing private sector investments across all sectors of the Economy, and by focusing on INNOVATION over longstanding, but totally unnecessary, regulation.”
Trump said the council’s objective to increase U.S. energy supply would benefit the domestic economy and allies overseas and help power “A.I. superiority.”
“The National Energy Council will foster an unprecedented level of coordination among federal agencies to advance American energy,” Burgum said in a written statement. “By establishing U.S. energy dominance, we can jumpstart our economy, drive down costs for consumers and generate billions in revenue to help reduce our deficit.”
It was unclear what the role of the Department of Energy would be in such an arrangement. The current secretary in the Biden administration is Jennifer Granholm, a former governor of Michigan.
‘Drill, drill, drill’
Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump frequently pledged to expand oil and gas production. The issue was one of two he told Fox News host Sean Hannity he would seek to address as a “dictator” on the first day of his administration.
Trump told Hannity during an Iowa appearance in December that he would not be a dictator, “except for day one. I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”
Comments like that foreshadowed something like a new council to oversee energy policy, said Lisa Frank, executive director of the advocacy group Environment America.
“President Trump has been very clear that one of his top priorities is to ‘drill, baby, drill,’” Frank said. “I’m not surprised. It was such an important part of his campaign, and it is the case that energy decisions are made by all sorts of different agencies in different ways, and that can be kind of a difficult thing to manage if you’re trying to drive an agenda.”
Under outgoing President Joe Biden, the administration promoted an “all-of-government approach” to climate change, with several departments and agencies across the federal bureaucracy tasked with addressing the issue. White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi was tasked with coordinating a consistent climate approach across the executive branch.
Burgum’s role could be similar, though the aim likely will be much different.
“This is similar to what the previous administration did, but the previous administration focused on climate,” Maisano said. “It’s just energy instead of climate.”
Another key difference is that Burgum will also be tasked with running an entire, separate Cabinet-level department with a nearly $18 billion annual budget.
Balancing the priorities of the Interior Department — which includes public lands management, protecting endangered species, maintaining national parks and overseeing tribal relations — with an initiative to vastly expand fossil-fuel production could be difficult, Frank said.
“The really tough decisions about balancing those two agendas will lie, to some extent, with Secretary Burgum, if he’s confirmed,” she said. “Do we want more drilling at our national parks? Do we want it on our families’ ranches? Do we want it where you want your kids to hunt? Do we want fracking near the best trout streams? Those are going to be very difficult questions for both him and the American public.”
All of the above
Burgum is seen across the political spectrum as favoring an all-of-the-above approach to energy, meaning he wants to expand both fossil-fuel and sustainable-energy sources. Environmental groups see his record on climate as mixed.
His state ranks ninth in wind-energy production, Frank said, but also last in reducing carbon emissions over the last two decades.
“He’s familiar with all aspects of energy, because as governor of an all-of-the-above energy state, he has to be,” Maisano said.
Some Democrats and left-leaning groups voiced immediate opposition to the selection of Burgum. The U.S. House Natural Resources Committee Democrats sent a series of tweets Friday dubbing the governor “Big Oil Burgum” over ties to the oil and gas industry.
But others were more tempered in their reaction to Burgum’s selection as Interior chief than some of Trump’s other picks for Cabinet positions.
Patrick Donnelly, the Great Basin director for the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity, tweeted Thursday evening that it did not seem likely the Trump administration would roll back expansion of renewable energy.
Trump’s first term saw an expansion of clean-energy projects, Donnelly wrote. Burgum is “not a climate denier” who doesn’t have a record of stifling renewable energy, he added.
“Burgum sucks but he’s not a complete lunatic that I’m aware of,” Donnelly said in an earlier tweet. “Could have been worse.”
