Doug Burgum is the perfect conduit for Big Tech and Big Oil’s joint agenda.
This piece was originally published in The American Prospect. Read it on the original site.
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.
Burgum isn’t an alleged rapist like Pete Hegseth or “raging misogynist” like Andrew Kloster or dog killer like Kristi Noem. He hasn’t promised to traumatize civil servants like Russell Vought. If anything, his interest in helming the bureaucracy that manages the nation’s natural resources is what raises eyebrows, given his presidential and vice-presidential aspirations. But the “grab-bag of consolation prizes” that Trump has offered Burgum certainly sweetens the pot.
Confirmed on January 30 in a 79-18 vote, Burgum will not only head up the Interior Department, but will lead Trump’s so-called National Energy Dominance Council, and in a much more unusual development, sit on the National Security Council (NSC), the first interior secretary to do so. The National Energy Dominance Council is a new committee tasked with coordinating the president’s deregulatory energy agenda across agencies, but the National Security Council advises presidents on broad national-security and foreign-policy issues. It’s been one of the core instruments of American foreign policy since 1947. (Trump is already subjecting career staff experts at the NSC to loyalty tests.) Together, the roles will allow Burgum to exert significant influence on a wide range of geopolitical issues, grounded in but extending beyond his authority over resource extraction from federal lands and waters.
It’s odd, to say the least, to have the person running the Department of the Interior on a foreign-policy committee. Elevating Burgum to the NSC is among many indicators of Trump’s fixation on using the powers of the executive, including wartime powers, to further unleash extractive industry. At the center of this agenda is a shared priority of the fossil fuel and tech CEOs cozying up to Trump: abundant energy for artificial intelligence. The NSC is already at work on AI issues. On January 28, Trump’s press secretary announced that the National Security Council was looking into the national-security implications of Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s recent breakthrough.
On day one, Trump declared a national energy emergency, dubiously citing “high demand for energy and natural resources to power the next generation of technology” as its justification. The executive order called on agency heads to circumvent environmental laws in order to expedite approvals for all types of energy infrastructure except solar, wind, and battery storage. Burgum has already gotten to work on this, implementing Trump’s orders to expedite fossil fuel projects and restrict renewables.
Trump said that Burgum’s work would be key to winning “the battle for A.I. superiority, which is key to National Security and our Nation’s Prosperity,” talking points that Burgum echoed in his confirmation hearing. Burgum claimed that without more fossil fuels, “we’re going to lose the AI arms race to China,” and called for investing in the debunked fantasy of clean coal in order to power AI data centers.
Projections of supposed skyrocketing demand for electricity to feed the growing juggernaut of data centers underpin the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” rhetoric. AI is the futuristic savior that the atavistic fossil fuel industry desperately needs, not to mention the domestic mining industry. The coal industry is being obliterated by spectacular advances in renewable energy, while oil is starting to feel the pinch of weakening demand thanks to EV uptake. Even methane gas is facing stiff competition from solar and wind.
Trump’s energy emergency narrative won’t be easily shaken even by the news of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s apparently massive gains in energy efficiency, for the simple reason that it benefits the fossil fuel industry to invest in energy for data centers regardless of whether it serves anyone else’s interests. Trump has pledged loosened reins and diminished oversight, with Burgum as gatekeeper of what he dubbed the “balance sheet” of America: “500 million acres of surface, 700 million acres of subsurface, and over 2 billion acres of offshore.”
Though rapid, unregulated growth in artificial intelligence is an obvious priority of Trump and Burgum, Burgum was not required to divest his financial interests in several Arthur Ventures funds through which he has invested millions in firms with stakes in AI. His ethics agreement acknowledges that while he “has been advised that the duties of the position of Secretary of the Interior may involve particular matters affecting the financial interests of [these] entities,” the “agency has determined that it is not necessary at this time for me to divest my interests in these entities.” Burgum’s ethics agreement only considered the conflicts of interests that could arise in his position as interior secretary, and did not address his positions on the energy and security councils. (For the foreseeable future, it is also worth asking whether any ethics official providing a clean bill of health to a Trump official did so while fearing for their professional future.)
Burgum is required under federal ethics rules to divest millions from certain Big Tech companies like Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and Apple with massive stakes in the buildout of AI within 90 days of his confirmation, so by April 29. He will also be required to divest from energy and mining interests including Enterprise Products Partners, Kinder Morgan, Duke Energy, Xcel Energy, and VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF. Whether he will actually do that, given Trump’s total disregard for the law, is yet to be seen. But even if he does, Burgum will continue to receive passive investment income from funds that have invested millions in software companies deploying AI, including:
- Jane Software, which offers an experimental “AI powered Voice to Chart feature” for health care clinics ($5,100,002–$25,250,000)
- PureSpectrum, a market research platform with its own AI model “PureScore” ($1,500,003–$6,000,000)
- Protenus, a health care compliance platform that “harnesses the power of AI to provide healthcare organizations with scalable risk-reduction solutions” ($515,002–$1,050,000)
- DataCamp, an online training community that teaches its students how to “unlock the power of data and AI” ($500,001–$1,000,000)
- Recast Software, a software company that offers AI-driven security tools ($350,002–$750,000)
- Candor Technology, which offers AI-powered underwriting for the mortgage industry ($251,002– $515,000)
- Paper Interactive’s Athennian, which offers a “powerful AI-driven software” for entity management ($250,001–$500,000)
- Stream.io, which offers user integration tools for generative AI models ($250,001–$500,000)
- CrushBank Technology, an AI platform for IT support ($15,001–$50,000)
- Decimal Technologies, an “AI-Accelerated Mobile First Platform” ($15,001–$50,000)
It is difficult to hyperbolize the degree to which AI’s most destructive enablers and beneficiaries have the president’s ear. Silicon Valley’s technofascists and their rank and file are stepping into positions across the government. Trump anointed Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and one of AI’s most powerful pushers, to mold federal spending and staffing to his liking. (Trump created a job for his second-favorite inflammatory South African tech bro too: AI and crypto czar David Sacks.)
Musk allies are reportedly planning how to hollow out the government and replace employees with AI. Musk has installed his current and former employees and allies to run the federal government’s human resources department, while reportedly locking career federal employees out of computer systems and sowing mass confusion. A recent employee of Musk’s xAI, Amanda Scales, is overseeing the mass firing of federal employees. And Musk has illegally installed 25-year-old Marko Elez, who previously worked on search AI at X, to read and rewrite top secret code underlying the multitrillion-dollar federal payment system.
The day after Trump rolled back Biden-era requirements on safety and transparency in AI development, he announced a project to build out $500 billion in AI infrastructure backed by up to 20 data centers in the U.S., flanked by the CEOs of three of the four corporations spearheading the initiative: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. Trump’s multibillionaire tech donors spent the next day bickering online about its financing.
“In the end, AI reflects the principles of the people who build it, the people who use it, and the data upon which it is built,” reads President Biden’s executive order on the “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence,” which Trump immediately revoked. Today, that reads like a warning.
Image: This image of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is in the public domain.
