Doug Burgum is Playing God With America’s Wildlife
Memorandum: Doug Burgum is Playing God With America’s Wildlife
To: Interested Parties
From: Save Our Parks
Date: Friday, March 27, 2026
Contact: Jayson O’Neill, Save Our Parks Spokesperson
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has spent over a year silencing scientists, erasing history, handing America’s public lands over to extractive interests, and blacklisting any news outlets that dare to report the truth. Now, he’s convening a secretive committee with the power to sentence America’s most endangered wildlife to extinction.
On Tuesday, Burgum will convene the so-called “God Squad,” the Endangered Species Committee, at the Interior Department for the first time in three decades. The meeting is being called to consider granting Big Oil an exemption from the Endangered Species Act so they can ramp up oil and gas activities in the Gulf of Mexico. If granted, the exemption could be the nail in the coffin for species already teetering on the edge, including sea turtles, sharks, corals, and the Rice’s whale — a whale found nowhere else on Earth, with a population so decimated that only dozens remain.
Burgum and his cronies are convening the God Squad in defiance of the administration’s own science. A May 2025 NOAA Fisheries biological opinion found that Gulf oil and gas operations put the Rice’s whale on a path to extinction, and determined that a scientifically vetted plan to reduce ship strikes could eliminate that risk entirely. There is a lawful path forward that doesn’t require gambling with an irreplaceable species, and Burgum is choosing to ignore it. His God Squad gambit is just the latest chapter in his war on science, public lands, wildlife, and the public interest, this time with species extinction on the line.
Doug Burgum isn’t protecting America’s wildlife heritage. He’s auctioning it off to oil executives and calling it “energy dominance” as gas and electrical prices soar for American families. Congress must demand answers, enforce the law, and hold Burgum accountable before America’s rarest whale, and the legal guardrails that protect all of us, are gone for good.
###
