Doug Burgum’s “Energy Dominance” is a Scam, and Americans Are Paying the Price
Memorandum: Doug Burgum’s “Energy Dominance” is a Scam, and Americans Are Paying the Price
To: Interested Parties
From: Save Our Parks
Date: Tuesday, April 7, 2026
Contact: Jayson O’Neill, Save Our Parks Spokesperson
While Interior Secretary Doug Burgum brags about “energy dominance,” American families are experiencing the Trump-Burgum energy crisis firsthand, paying over $4 a gallon at the pump. At the same time, diesel has blown past $5 a gallon, putting additional price pressures on everything from fertilizer to groceries. The International Energy Agency has called the current crisis “the greatest global energy security challenge in history.” Per EIA data, March 2026 was the largest month-to-month increase in gas prices (25%) since the EIA started tracking.
Burgum’s response? A press release and rhetoric so empty that even a friendly Fox News host couldn’t defend it.
His Department of the Interior is touting ramped up offshore oil production as evidence his agenda is working. But while “domestic production” has worked to line the pockets of Burgum’s and Trump’s Big Oil allies and donors, it’s done absolutely nothing to protect American families from skyrocketing fuel costs. Oil is priced on global markets, and Burgum’s team failed to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve before Trump started a war with Iran, leaving the economy even more exposed to the kind of supply shock the country is living through right now.
Meanwhile, Burgum has been systematically dismantling the energy sources that would actually lower Americans’ bills. Over 22 gigawatts of wind and solar projects, enough to power over 16 million American homes, have been canceled or buried under this Interior Secretary’s reign. Burgum then brokered a really bad deal that made his crisis worse by handing $1 billion in taxpayer money to a French energy company to walk away from two offshore wind projects. At a time when energy prices, at the pump and in the home, are skyrocketing with no end in sight, Burgum’s oil and gas only, anti-clean energy crusade is bad politics and bad policy.
It’s all part of Burgum’s fail-by-design plan for America’s national public lands and parks. Remember, Burgum told every American who cares and loves our parks, public lands, and the trillion-dollar outdoor economy they are “financially illiterate.” And, it’s not at all popular with Americans or North Dakotans, who are paying more for less because of his mismanagement.
Here is how Burgum’s plan to sell out and sell off America’s outdoors works. By shutting down and canceling alternative, cleaner forms of energy, he induces demand for selling off and drilling on our public lands, in our waters, and near our national parks, regardless of its impacts or public opinion. Burgum’s using high energy and fuel prices caused by this administration to revoke protections and fast-track development, including sentencing wildlife to extinction, voiding informed decision making, upending certainty, and icing the public out.
Meanwhile, Burgum is desperately trying to please two masters: his windmill-hating boss and the extractive industry who funded Trump’s 2024 win. Burgum’s nakedly corrupt, restrictionist plan has something for everyone, and for American families, it’s higher energy and fuel bills, fewer public lands, threatened national parks, polluted waters, and a grid that’s less diversified and more dependent on volatile fossil fuel markets. And, for all that ramped up production Burgum’s touting, expect a record amount of domestically-produced oil and gas to be exported, lower revenues due to royalty rate reductions, and inflation.
This is Trump and Burgum’s energy agenda in a nutshell: kill the cheap renewables, double down on the expensive stuff, send a press release, and call it “dominance.” Big Oil and the extractive industry pocket the profits as American families pick up the tab. This administration’s and Burgum’s buddies continue to cash checks and send everyone else the bill.
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