North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum was confirmed on Thursday to be President Donald Trump's Secretary of the Interior by a 79-18 vote, sailing easily through the nomination process.
Burgum was advanced out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee with only two votes against him: Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI).
Wyden feared that Burgum would roll back former President Joe Biden's energy policies like the renewable energy tax credits he wrote and helped place in the Inflation Reduction Act.
“I cannot support these nominees who will carry out Trump’s policies that throw out America’s greatest advantages,” Wyden said last week.
For Burgum's part, he at least claims he believes climate change is real, but he's obviously willing to toe Trump's line for the position or he wouldn't have been nominated.
The Secretary of the Interior leads the Department of the Interior, which manages federal land and conservation efforts as well as the natural resources that land contains (think fossil fuels).
Burgum has said he understands that fossil fuels are necessary to power today's power grid and the coming AI-related needs.
“We are in an energy crisis in our country, and the first place is actually related to electricity,” Burgum said. “Electricity is at the brink; our grid is at a point where it could go completely unstable. We could be just months away from having skyrocketing prices for Americans.”
Artificial intelligence relies strongly on large databases of information to power it, and that takes up significant resources.
“And, of course, as we talked about in the AI arms race, we need electricity for manufacturing,” Burgum said. “And AI is manufacturing intelligence. And if we don’t manufacture more intelligence than our adversaries, it affects every job, every company, in every industry.”
Burgum was one of the easier votes on Trump nominees so far.
DOD Secretary Pete Hegseth was only confirmed after Vice President J.D. Vance cast the tiebreaking vote when the Senate deadlocked on his nomination.
Kristi Noem was confirmed as DHS Secretary in a healthy 59-34 vote that was still much closer than Burgum's.
Still, his nominees have not faced a great deal of opposition so far, with some controversial picks like RFK Jr. sure to face a much tougher fight.
