By Emma Rose Brown
President-elect Donald Trump nominated Doug Burgum to be secretary of the interior, a position that oversees most federal lands and natural resources. And with a second position as Trump’s “energy czar,” he will also head the newly established National Energy Council, with broad responsibility for setting administration policies. Burgum ran for president in 2024 and served as Trump’s advisor on energy policy during the campaign, later landing on Trump’s shortlist for vice president.
Who is he? Burgum is a former governor of North Dakota who won that office as a political newcomer in 2016. Burgum attended Stanford Business School, where he befriended future Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Burgum was an investor and president of Great Plains Software, an accounting software company that he sold to Microsoft in 2001 for $1.1 billion in stock. He was then named senior vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions and later went on to found an investment firm.
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He raised $2.3 million during his first campaign for governor in 2016 and $1.9 million for his successful reelection campaign in 2020. That included $1.4 million of his own money and $312,000 from the energy and natural resources sector.
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His brief campaign for president in 2024 raked in $17 million in donations, with $7 million coming from the pharmaceutical industry. He received $470,000 from the oil and gas industry. His single-candidate super PAC, the Best of America PAC, raised $24 million. Single-candidate super PACs primarily support one candidate, either by advertising for the candidate or against his or her opponents. Burgum self-financed $13 million for his campaign.
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In August 2024, The Forum, a media platform based in Fargo, N.D., reported that Farrington Rocket LLC, which donated $2 million to Best of America, was a shell company linked to biotechnology firm founder Michael Chambers and his wife, Victoria. Reporters for The Forum and The Washington Post were unable to discover why the Chambers’ wanted to obscure their support for Burgum.
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Burgum’s support for the fossil fuel industry is likely to shape his tenure as interior secretary. As governor of the third-largest oil-producing state, Burgum backed carbon capture technology as a way to sustain the fossil fuel industry while setting a goal for the state to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030, positioning it as a test case for technology that could be scaled nationwide. Carbon capture has faced criticism from both Republicans and environmental groups, who see it as costly, unproven, and a distraction from expanding renewable energy.
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In May 2024, The New York Times reported that Burgum was part of an “energy round table” that included oil and gas executives from companies such as Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute. At the private Mar-a-Lago event, Trump asked for $1 billion in campaign funds and promised to roll back environmental regulations if elected. The Times reported that, in particular, Trump has promised “to push a ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda aimed at opening up more public lands to oil and gas exploration.”
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Online Ad Spending in the 2024 Election Topped $1.35 Billion |
Online political advertising on the two largest digital ad platforms surged in the days leading up to the election, according to a new analysis by the Brennan Center, OpenSecrets, and the Wesleyan Media Project. This analysis builds on our findings this summer using the same publicly reported data from Google and Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) and the same transparent methodology.
Our updated findings show that total online political advertising topped $1.35 billion on those two services this election cycle — more than double the amount we measured through the end of August. In other words, advertisers spent more from September 1 through Election Day than they did in the prior 20 months combined. This spike in spending before the election appears to have been driven in large part by fundraising appeals from candidates, as well as an uptick in spending by national groups seeking to influence state ballot measure results.
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See our media citations from outlets around the nation this week: |
Who funds Michigan lawmakers? Most get cash from PACs, not voters they represent (Bridge Michigan)
Not going into local communities to fundraise “creates this gulf between the constituents and their needs, versus being more in tune with the needs of people in the state Capitol who are trying to influence them,” Brendan Glavin, research director at the national transparency nonprofit OpenSecrets, told Bridge. |
US Rep. Bryan Steil to chair House cryptocurrency subcommittee (Wisconsin Public Radio)
Digital currencies have a murky federal regulatory status. That allowed President Joe Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler to go after the crypto industry. The industry responded by spending over $130 million in 2024’s election cycle through its PAC, Fairshake. It spent $764,206 to independently help re-elect Steil, according to campaign finance database OpenSecrets. |
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