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Doug Burgum’s Interior Department is slowly coming apart
Calls for help are coming from inside the department as external pressures and internal friction come to a head
Even the relatively staid-seeming Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum hasn’t escaped the mud-slinging that has dominated and defined Donald Trump’s two-term tenure as president. After a high-profile White House clash this month between the former North Dakota governor and U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro over the latter’s failure to prosecute bystanders accused of marring the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — a monument managed by the Interior Department — Burgum finds himself sweating under an uncomfortable national spotlight.
‘Confusion and concern’
“No one’s more involved” in Trump’s monumental “fix-it spree” than Burgum, said Axios. But the reflecting pool scandal has placed the secretary “in a weird spot” that is “overshadowing Burgum’s other projects.” Pirro has “lashed out at Burgum directly” and “blamed him for misleading” Trump about the reflecting pool, said ABC. Burgum not only “pushed the narrative about vandals damaging the blue lining publicly” but “also privately” to the president himself, said The New York Times.
“Just days after his Oval Office screaming match” with Pirro over the pool prosecutions, Interior Department staffers accused Burgum of “fostering a culture of secrecy and dysfunction,” said The Daily Beast. “Morale has tanked” under Burgum’s management, contributing to what officials describe as an “atmosphere of high turnover” with “leadership that ignores staff.” After trusting in Burgum’s “strong executive experience as governor of energy-rich North Dakota,” staffers have seen their hopes “replaced by confusion and concern,” said Politico. The department has now lost “thousands of the staff needed to manage the national park systems and millions of acres of public lands.”
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The secretary “appears to combine arrogance” with an “utter lack of curiosity or humility,” longtime Interior official Tony Irish, who left the department last year, told Politico. “I think it shows his disdain for the rank and file.”
Trump’s ‘personal project manager’
Through it all, Burgum “appears to still be in the president’s good graces,” said Axios. He is “settling into life as a central player in Trump’s efforts to remake D.C.” after having moved “to the city — not the suburbs — with his wife.”
The secretary has “held the president’s line” on the Reflecting Pool, said Rob Port at Inforum. “Inside Trump world,” where it’s the “bootlicking that matters,” Burgum, “to his shame, has kept his tongue planted firmly on President Trump’s Oxfords.”
When Burgum is “not saying foolish things about how solar power works,” the secretary’s “principal responsibilities have focused on serving as the president’s ‘personal project manager,’” said Steve Benen at MS NOW. Given the reflecting pool “fiasco,” however, “those efforts have not fared well.”
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In light of the difficulties facing the department, “it’s clear” that the Interior would “benefit from a strong and capable inspector general’s office” that can act independently, Benen said. To that end, last week Trump nominated Dennis Kirk to serve as the Interior’s inspector general. While the name “might not sound familiar,” you may heard of Kirk’s “earlier work,” as he “co-authored the far-right policy blueprint Project 2025.”
Rafi Schwartz has worked as a politics writer at The Week since 2022, where he covers elections, Congress and the White House. He was previously a contributing writer with Mic focusing largely on politics, a senior writer with Splinter News, a staff writer for Fusion's news lab, and the managing editor of Heeb Magazine, a Jewish life and culture publication. Rafi's work has appeared in Rolling Stone, GOOD and The Forward, among others.
