Burgum’s Escalating Campaign to Dodge Oversight — and What The Midterms Mean For Trump’s Troubled Interior Secretary
Memorandum: Burgum’s Escalating Campaign to Dodge Oversight — and What The Midterms Mean For Trump’s Troubled Interior Secretary
Date: Tuesday, August 25, 2026
To: Interested Parties
From: Save Our Parks
Shredded records, a compromised watchdog, ethics violations, unanswered questions, repeated fabrications, destroyed records and disappearing messages, and a Secretary who keeps getting caught. Congress hasn't used its full authority yet. That could change in January.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is running out of ways to avoid answering for how he is mismanaging the nation's public lands, parks, and wildlife. In the last few weeks alone, reporting has revealed a department allegedly shredding records and using disappearing messages to dodge federal retention law, a politically connected operative parachuting into the one office meant to police Interior's own conduct, and a Secretary who kept publicly repeating a false claim even after his own department's evidence forced federal prosecutors to drop the underlying charge. It’s all part of a pattern of secrecy that’s been embedded into the core of Burgum’s Interior Department since the beginning.
Burgum’s failures have resulted in negative headline after negative headline for the administration and created a political dynamic that could be costly for congressional Republicans heading into the midterms. Republicans currently hold the House by the barest of margins, and Democrats need a net gain of only three seats to take control. If Democrats flip the House in November, the gavel on the House Natural Resources Committee, and subpoena power over the Interior Department, flips with it.
For Burgum, that would mark the end of the letters-and-hearings phase and the start of the subpoena phase. A Democratic-controlled Natural Resources Committee would have the authority to compel the sworn testimony, personal email records, and Signal-retention policies that Interior has so far only been asked, not required, to produce. Every document Burgum and his cronies’ scrub, shred, or slow-walk today is a document a new committee majority could demand next year. The Secretary who is betting he can outlast the current Congress by running out the clock should not assume the clock resets favorably for him.
A reckoning is on the horizon for Burgum regardless of the outcome of the midterms given the scope and breath of the major pending ethical and investigative inquiries before Trump’s troubled Interior Secretary. Burgum was tasked with maintaining and managing Americans’ beloved parks, public lands, and wildlife and was anointed as the chair of Trump’s National Energy Dominance Taskforce. By any objective measure, Burgum’s failed miserably on all fronts, and the polling confirms it.
“Doug Burgum runs the Interior Department like a kid who has their hand in the cookie jar and knows they are about to be caught. Burgum’s shredded records, got caught violating ethics requirements, repeated debunked claims his own department's evidence proved it false, and buried a Project 2025 loyalist in the inspector general's office to avoid accountability. Every one of these moves is what you do when you're trying to survive when you're about to be held accountable. The Congress that shows up next session will look very different no matter which party is in control. If the House flips, the committees with jurisdiction over the Interior Department get subpoena power, and 'no comment' stops being an acceptable answer. Burgum should think about getting his resume ready.”
— Jayson O'Neill, Save Our Parks
Mounting Investigations And Midterm Math Should Worry Burgum
1. Interior allegedly destroyed records and used disappearing messages to evade the law
Three Interior staffers told POLITICO they personally watched officials shred official documents and rely on disappearing Signal messages, even for routine scheduling, specifically to keep communications from being preserved as required under the Federal Records Act. One former official put it bluntly: "They're terrified of written records."
Two other former officials say Burgum used a private email account for department business early in his tenure. Staff describe a "culture of secrecy" so pronounced that Burgum sought to build a second secure conference room (SCIF) near his own office, despite the department already having one three floors below.
Burgum’s veil of secrecy will be much harder, if not impossible, to maintain after the Midterm elections.
2. Burgum's watchdog was gutted, then handed to a Project 2025 architect
Interior's Office of Inspector General has had no Senate-confirmed leader since January 2025, when the administration fired 17 inspectors general government-wide without the 30 days' legally required notice to Congress. Now that vacant office has a new addition: Dennis Kirk, a co-author of the Project 2025 chapter on remaking the federal workforce and a former senior Trump personnel official. The former Interior inspector general Trump fired, Mark Lee Greenblatt, warned this week that placing a political operative inside an independent watchdog's office erodes the very independence that office exists to protect.
Installing Kirk into the IG’s office appears to be an admission of wrongdoing by Burgum and his cronies. At least five congressional referrals for investigation are sitting inside that compromised office right now, covering three senior Interior officials accused of using their positions for personal financial benefit. With the IG's independence in question, Congress is the only oversight body left standing.
3. Three unresolved ethics referrals, sitting inside Burgum's own department
Karen Budd-Falen, associate deputy secretary: Burgum’s top lieutenant's family ranch secured a $3.5 million water rights deal with a lithium mining company that had approvals pending before Interior, which she never disclosed. She continues to work on grazing and land management policy that appear to benefit her ranching empire and her former clients, including working on these issues for over a year before receiving a partial, and apparently retroactive ethics waiver in March 2026 — all while still holding BLM grazing permits herself.
Jenifer Chatfield, deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks: Chatfield reportedly advanced a permit application for her own family's captive wildlife business, moving it through the agency's process within a single day.
Matthew Giacona, acting BOEM director: Giacona appears to be working on the same offshore energy issues he previously lobbied on for an oil and gas trade association.
All three referrals sit inside the same inspector general's office that just hired a Project 2025 personnel architect with no confirmed IG to answer for it. And, there are a raft full of other ethical issues within Burgum’s department, including himself.
4. The Reflecting Pool cover-up: caught, then repeated the claim anyway
At the end of July, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia moved to dismiss felony vandalism charges against a former Olympic canoeist after admitting Interior had withheld evidence from prosecutors. The evidence showed, contrary to Burgum’s repeated false claims, the "vandalism" was actually a botched, rushed installation job under a no-bid contract that ballooned from an initial $1.5 million estimate to more than $16 million. A National Park Service employee had flagged the failing liner eight days before the arrest. Senators Whitehouse and Heinrich have since told the inspector general that Interior's withholding of exculpatory evidence may have walked federal prosecutors into a Brady and Giglio violation.
The day after prosecutors moved to dismiss the case, Burgum posted on X and repeated the vandalism claim anyway, after his own department's evidence had unraveled it. Burgum’s post received an embarrassing community note and generated more bad publicity. The debacle has led Rep. Jamie Raskin to launch a probe into Burgum’s mishandling of the Reflecting Pool. .
5. Ethics violation after scrubbed calendars were quietly restored
Burgum's own ethics agreement barred him from working on matters involving North Dakota without written sign-off from ethics officials for one year. Reporting exposed two 2025 meetings with former North Dakota colleagues he appointed, including the state's attorney general, who has separately backed Utah's effort to seize more than 18 million acres of federal public land.
There was no record of ethics officials being consulted, even though the same calendars show he sought ethics clearance for dozens of other meetings. Interior pulled those calendars from its public records library, then reposted them only after a reporter asked why they had disappeared.
6. Burgum’s fail-by-design plan and historic gutting of public land protections on false pretenses
In July, Trumpillegally shrank Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante by roughly 90 percent, gutting 3 million acres of protected land. Trump and Deputy Secretary Kate MacGregorfalsely claimed Americans couldn't hike, hunt, or fish inside the monuments, even after Utah officials told the administration otherwise weeks earlier. Days before the announcement, Energy Fuels executivesmade the largest insider stock purchases in company history, prompting a congressional insider-trading investigation.
7. Burgum’s consolidation of power and control under his office
Burgum has stacked Interior with unconfirmed loyalists exercising authority Congress never approved.Watchdog group PEER warned Kevin Lilly's original acting appointment violated federal law before Burgum pushed his permanent confirmation anyway. Burgum alsosits on the National Capital Planning Commission rubber-stamping Trump's D.C. vanity projects, and installed a partisan operative toreview Interior grants, a role previously reserved for qualified, career staff.
Each move strips independent checks from decisions affecting America's public lands.
What Congress should be doing right now — with or without a new majority
Subpoena Interior's records-retention policies and any guidance on Signal or other disappearing-message platforms.
Compel production of Burgum's personal email communications related to department business.
Obtain the Departmental Ethics Office file on Burgum's North Dakota meetings.
Demand full documentation on Dennis Kirk's hiring, reporting lines, and any walls between him and pending referrals.
Secure sworn testimony from Burgum, his chief of staff, and each official under ethics review.
Refer the alleged records destruction to the National Archives and Records Administration.
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