Climate and Environment

This is the second installment in a four-part series critiquing Matt Yglesias’ support for deregulating the permitting process.

“Abundance agenda” apostle Matt Yglesias’ affinity for Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s deregulatory plans makes clear that this agenda is, at its heart, a neoliberal-approved version of Trumpian plunder.

This is the first installment in a four-part series critiquing Matt Yglesias’ support for deregulating the permitting process.

This is the third installment in a four-part series critiquing Matt Yglesias’ support for deregulating the permitting process.

This is the fourth installment in a four-part series critiquing Matt Yglesias’ support for deregulating the permitting process.

When Donald Trump nominated North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum to be his interior secretary, centrist to right-of-center “abundance agenda” advocates were jubilant. Politico reported, with typically amoral zeal, that Interior would be led by an “overnight rock star in the tech and energy worlds.” Burgum has a foot in both camps, as a former governor from fracking country with deep ties to fossil fuel executives like fracking magnate Harold Hamm, and a venture capitalist invested in software companies who sold his own software company to Microsoft for $1.1 billion in 2001.

Trump’s call to review FEMA’s efficiency is straight out of Project 2025, and doesn’t bode well for an agency he’s threatened to “terminate.”

We urged a more aggressive and justifiably confrontational approach in our recommended questions for Doug Burgum, Chris Wright, Russell Vought, Pam Bondi, and Scott Bessent, which you can read here and here. Today we’ll get into questions for Lee Zeldin, nominee for the Environmental Protection Agency, and Scott Turner, nominee for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Trump’s nominees need to be asked hard questions about their records of harming the public. So we did the work ourselves and wrote some!

The U.S. Forest Service is already underfunded and understaffed. Slashing its resources further is likely to unleash more severe wildfires.

Trump has spent the month since the election firing off a rapid torrent of Cabinet picks. His nominees generally fall into two types: obviously whacko (see Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, RFK Jr.) and superficially normal (think Marco Rubio, Doug Burgum, Pam Bondi). While the headline-grabbing scandals and general trumpery of the first group easily draw scorn, it’s important that we not grade the second group on a credulous curve, overlooking the economic interests behind their soothingly conventional manner.

The new centrist push to regain control of the Democratic Party, with corporate money

The right’s climate denial means higher prices.