Burgum’s Bad Weeks Keep Piling Up: MIA on Gas Prices, Front & Center for Extractive Industries, Insulting Public Land Users
Memorandum: Burgum’s Bad Weeks Keep Piling Up: MIA on Gas Prices, Front & Center for Extractive Industries, Insulting Public Land Users
To: Interested Parties
From: Save Our Parks
Date: Friday, March 13, 2026
Contact: Jayson O’Neill, Save Our Parks Spokesperson
Trump’s top cheerleading cabinet member Doug Burgum’s bad weeks keep piling up. This week exposed his failures as Interior Secretary, as gas and energy prices soar. Not only were both Burgum and the Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright caught completely unprepared and off guard, Burgum’s been missing in action on skyrocketing energy prices hammering consumers. Yet, when it came to extractive interests, Burgum’s been the front and center salesman, pushing insulting rhetoric and reassuring Wall Street that America’s public lands are open for exploitation.
As oil prices jumped to $100 per barrel and gas prices spiked up nearly 70 cents per gallon in two weeks due to Donald Trump’s war with Iran, Burgum conducted interview after interview, twisting himself into a pretzel to defend Trump’s losing agenda and his lack of preparedness. After saying that Trump’s soaring gas prices were a “temporary issue,” Burgum later said that the U.S. is “insulated” against those rising prices. And amid reports that the administration was caught completely off guard by the economic fallout from the war, Burgum went on TV to do damage control, ludicrously claiming “we’ve never been in a more dominant or secure position in the history of the country that we are right now.”
Industry insiders even tagged Burgum with the nickname “Where’s Waldo,” for being AWOL during a major crisis, and it’s no wonder: instead of working to relieve Americans’ financial pain, Burgum was partying with Rupert Murdoch and playing with IndyCars.
Our “dominant and secure position” comes as Trump and Burgum’s energy crisis spirals out of control, with prices not expected to return to normal until mid-2027. The administration has called upon Burgum to defend their handling of global oil prices, and he’s offered nothing beyond contradictory and combative interviews on television. This crisis is largely one of Trump and Burgum’s own making, given that Trump’s broader energy agenda, which Burgum has championed, slashed clean energy projects across the country, increasing our reliance on fossil fuels and driving up utility costs for American families even before the war. Burgum promised energy dominance and lower prices; instead, Americans got higher costs, fewer options, and a Secretary who can’t be bothered to do his job.
Elsewhere this week, at a BlackRock event, Burgum didn’t let the administration’s self-inflicted energy crisis distract from his ultimate goal as Interior Secretary: the privatization and selloff of our national parks and public lands. He dismissed Americans who are rightfully concerned about drilling and mining in parks and on public lands as financially illiterate, saying that people who want to protect that land “don’t understand the financial impact.” The condescending remarks, delivered a week after Burgum was in Venezuela pressuring the country to allow U.S. extractive interests in, revealed again that he thinks conservation is for the ignorant, and that our great outdoors should be handed over to the highest bidder.
Burgum’s first and only priority will always be the extractive industries that view our natural heritage as just numbers on a balance sheet.
See below for more on another week of failures for Doug Burgum:
Burgum tells BlackRock audience that public lands advocates are financially illiterate – Center for Western Priorities, March 13, 2026
How Doug Burgum became the “Where’s Waldo?” of Trump’s cabinet– Center for Western Priorities, March 12, 2026
Trump official rips Americans who care about public land: ‘Financially illiterate’– RawStory, March 11, 2026
Trump’s energy ‘tiger team’ struggles to find its roar with Iran – Politico, March 11, 2026
Burgum: Report Trump administration caught flat-footed on oil prices ‘completely fake news’ – The Hill, March 11, 2026
Interior Secretary Burgum Touts New “Strategic Ally” in Venezuela – C-SPAN, March 11, 2026
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