With all the uproar around President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks, it’s easy to miss that the Department of the Interior, of all places, could be led by an unassuming, overnight rock star in the tech and energy worlds. “Burgum bros we have never been more Burg,” wrote Manhattan Institute fellow Charles Fain Lehman on X last Friday. That’s when Trump announced Doug Burgum, the Republican governor of North Dakota and former GOP primary contender, as his nominee to lead Interior. And it wasn’t just dedicated supply-siders and Republicans who were thrilled: “Doug Burgum seems quite thoughtful on housing and mobility,” wrote California YIMBY director M. Nolan Gray, and a liberal opinion writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer proclaimed him “Easily the cabinet pick who comes closest to being a net positive.” What is it about Burgum — the genial, heavy-eyebrowed Upper Midwesterner and former software magnate who never fit easily into madcap Trumpian politics — that has everyone from Trump himself to urbanists from the most liberal state in America on his side? Burgum enjoys a reputation as a pro-business pragmatist willing to break (under certain favorable circumstances) with conservative orthodoxy on issues like climate change and zoning. That makes him maybe the best hope for policymakers who favor an “abundance agenda,” the phrase coined by Atlantic journalist Derek Thompson in 2022 to describe a maximalist, anything-goes approach to marshaling state power in order to revamp America’s badly outdated housing, transportation and energy infrastructure. “When it comes to energy policy I don't think of him as somebody who's overly ideological,” Thomas Hochman, a policy manager at the Foundation for American Innovation, told DFD. “I think he really will just favor more energy production, period.”
“I think it was a really good pick,” Aidan MacKenzie, infrastructure fellow at the nonpartisan Institute for Progress, told DFD. “Both Burgum and [Trump Department of Energy nominee] Chris Wright seem committed to an all-of-the-above approach to energy; they're very pro-oil and gas, but they're also excited about forms of clean energy, especially nuclear and geothermal.” Some of the tech industry’s biggest players are on board too: Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s vice president of global policy, told DFD he’s optimistic the “all-of-the-above” approach will allow states to scale up for AI more rapidly while preserving their own policy preferences.
“Energy, broadly defined, does generate bipartisan support,” Lehane said. “The challenge in this country is not necessarily the energy sources themselves, it’s how we deal with permitting stuff around it … the American people want to see this country get back to doing what it does best, which is building, and I think energy is a natural place to do this.”
Suddenly, one of the most low-key figures in the impending second Trump administration looks like he could be among its most impactful when it comes to how things are built, and how they actually work in America. One reason: After years of partisan retrenchment, devotees of the abundance agenda feel that progress in America has been stymied both by Democratic red tape and reflexive Republican opposition to clean energy. In a May 2022 op-ed, the New York Times’ Ezra Klein (who is co-authoring a book on the subject with Thompson) wrote that “We need to build more homes, trains, clean energy, research centers, disease surveillance … much can be blamed on Republican obstruction and the filibuster. But that’s not always true in New York or California or Oregon. It is too slow and too costly to build even where Republicans are weak — perhaps especially where they are weak.”
With a decidedly strong Republican back in the White House come January, the coterie of wonks who want to get America building again are betting that a day-zero, try-anything approach from the second Trump administration will allow it to happen. This is especially salient for the AI boom: Trump’s announcement on Truth Social noted that Burgum would also lead a “National Energy Council” that will “oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE” by “cutting red tape” and “focusing on INNOVATION.” He also said this would help America “win the AI race with China” —
echoing industry calls for increased U.S. energy production to power electricity-thirsty data centers. OpenAI’s Lehane nodded to one of the abundance agenda’s key fixations, or bogeymen: permitting reform, or revising federal regulations to make it easier to build new (often renewable) energy infrastructure. (FAI’s Hochman is the author of a more than 200-page “state permitting playbook” opportunities to streamline the process.) Some of the groundwork for this was laid by President Joe Biden. After lengthy deliberation, his Bureau of Land Management expedited the review process for new geothermal energy projects in April, work that IFP’s MacKenzie said he hopes a deregulation-minded, Burgum-led BLM will build on starting on Jan. 20. “It took this administration quite a long time to get this done,” MacKenzie said. “I think [the new administration] will be willing to work more quickly.”
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