Interior Secretary Burgum defends Trump Administration’s approach to energy

WASHINGTON, D.C. (KVRR/NORTH DAKOTA MONITOR) — Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is defending the Trump administration’s approach to energy production.

He appeared before a U.S. House Appropriations panel on the administration’s $16 billion budget request for the Interior Department for the next fiscal year.

Democrats accused the department of being submissive to oil and gas interests at the expense of renewable energy.

Burgum indicated at several points that what Democrats called a pro-oil-and-gas bias was a correction to Biden’s “over-rotation” toward wind and solar.

“The last administration said ‘all of the above’ and then there were a set of rules that were completely punitive against the stuff that we needed to actually, you know, have baseload power in this country,” he said about Biden’s oil and gas policy. “It was just too early. It was too premature to say we’re going to shut all that down and we’re going to transition,” said Burgum.

Members of both parties raised questions about proposed cuts to the Bureau of Indian Education budget after Department of Education offloaded part of its responsibility in that area to Interior.

The BIE would receive about $437 million less under the proposed budget, a roughly 32% cut.