Interior Secretary Doug Burgum Emphasizes The Importance Of Energy Dominance To Grow US Manufacturing

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During Thursday’s House Natural Resources Committee hearing, Interior Secretary Doug Bergam delivered his testimony.

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00:00As time has expired, I'll now introduce our witness, the Honorable Doug Burgum,

00:05Secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior. I'll remind you, Secretary, that under committee

00:10rules, you have to limit your oral statement to five minutes, but your full statement

00:14will appear in the hearing record. And to begin your testimony, just press the on button on your

00:20microphone. The light will turn green, and when it turns red at the end of five minutes,

00:26I'll ask you to please complete your statement if you haven't already done that. I now recognize

00:31Secretary Burgum. Thank you, Chairman. Since my statement will be submitted for the record,

00:37I'll just make a few responses to Ranking Member Hoffman. Thank you, Ranking Member Hoffman,

00:42for those remarks. I just want to say that I'm new in this position and new in a, well, I've served

00:52as governor. When I was governor, I didn't have to go before appropriators or legislatures, so

00:57relatively new in this process. But I do want to say that one thing that I have found consistent

01:03across that is that there's always a focus on inputs. Whatever number might have been in the

01:09budget before, if that number has gone down, even a penny, people somehow think that that's going to

01:15be damaging to citizens, to land, to services, and to the work and the mission and the fulfilling of

01:23the laws. But one thing that I've understood over my lifetime, that it's not about the inputs,

01:28it's about the outcomes. And certainly under my leadership at the Department of Interior,

01:33we're going to be focused on outcomes, and whether that's improving student outcomes at Bureau of Indian

01:38Education, getting to a spot where we're going to be harvesting more timber than we're burning,

01:44making sure that when we talk about the balance sheet of America, a balance sheet from business

01:52is not about liquid. The only people liquidate balance sheets are people are going out of business.

01:56The United States is not going out of business. We have the strongest balance sheet in the world.

02:00But that balance sheet needs to help get us returned. We all collectively, regardless of party,

02:06were part of a country last year that spent $2,000 billion, $2,000 billion, that's a $2 trillion

02:14deficit. We spent $2,000 billion more than we brought in. That is one of the biggest dangers

02:20to our children and our children's children. And so as we look for ways to deliver and deliver on the

02:27mission of Interior more efficiently, I would look for bipartisan support for that. To just attack

02:33an agency at any point in our lifetimes, or maybe I will, because now an AI data center,

02:40we're not processing a healthcare claim, we're not processing a shopping order. You're actually

02:45taking electricity and converting it into an intelligence. And that intelligence is essential

02:50to everything we do. It's that there's no golden dome, there's no defense network, there's no

02:56cybersecurity, there's no ability to cure multiple diseases, all these things, unless we've got AI.

03:04AI is going to accelerate innovation. Innovation's been the core of American greatness since our beginning.

03:09And now we have this tool that's going to allow us to do that. But we're in an AI arms race with

03:15China. And what's holding us back right now is electricity. I spent 30 years in tech, we never

03:21used more than 1% of the nation's electricity. And as the chairman just said, the demands for

03:25electricity are going through the roof right now. And what we've been doing as a country, particularly

03:29under the previous administration, was shutting down base load, and dramatically over subsidizing

03:36intermittent. This creates imbalance in our grid. It's not about politics. It's not about ideology. It's not

03:42about climate change. It's about physics. And we've got our grid is in great danger right now

03:47of being able to sustain. I mean, we've been, you know, literally at points this winter, minutes away

03:54from us having an incident like Spain had a few weeks ago, where we're in one of the places that was

03:59at risk was right here in the PGM grid, which think Pentagon to Wall Street, where we had the day

04:06that President Trump was inaugurated, January 20, it was very cold. At 5am, across that grid area,

04:1270% of the power is coming from fossil fuels, 22% from nuclear, and only zero from solar, 2% from wind.

04:20And we were, and we've spent $100 billion just in this part of the country, subsidizing and trying to get to

04:28all solar and all wind. We can't, we, if you have solar and wind, and it's intermittent, you also still need all

04:34that base load. We can't run our country where we need seven by 24 on intermittent power. And we've got lots of clean

04:42energy, nuclear, geothermal, that hydroelectric, those all represent base load approaches to green energy. So anyway,

04:50we've got, we've got some challenges ahead of us. And what we're doing is trying to speed up permitting the

04:54president has created the National Energy Dominance Council, which is a cross agency effort, like a SWAT

05:00team to try to figure out a way to get stuff permitted faster. Because we've got it, we've got to get back, we have

05:05to get back in the game, we were reshoring manufacturing to our country. Even something as simple as

05:11warehousing, a current warehouse today might use five kilowatts, like the kind I worked in growing up as a kid, a

05:17moderate one today is 25 kilowatts a square foot. When you throw in robotics, it's 40 kilowatts a square foot. We need

05:23demand for just simple things like warehousing, but much advanced manufacturing, all this is going to require more power.

05:30And we need a whole government approach. So it's a big issue. Sorry for my long answer. But this is a critical thing that we're

05:37facing as a country.

05:38No apologies for a long answer. It's a question that deserves a long answer and it deserves

05:43much investigation by Congress and it deserves action. I know the administration's taking action

05:50as much as you can through the executive order process, but I think it's incumbent on Congress to

05:57work with the administration on both sides of the aisle to enact real permitting reform so that we can

06:04not only build energy infrastructure in our country, but all infrastructure, whether it's roads, bridges,

06:10ports, or navigable waterways. Pipelines.

06:13Or managing our forest or transmission, all of that. It's on us to give the administration

06:24the laws that you need to be able to meet those demands. My time has expired.

06:28I think they're

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