Doug Burgum would like you to know that the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is a “big success.”
For sure, it was a big something.
After Donald Trump ordered the pool repainted “American flag blue” for the country’s 250th birthday, the water turned green and the paint started flaking off. But wily Burgum—Trump’s Secretary of the Interior and the man in charge of our national parks and a fifth of the nation’s land—fingered the culprits, “vandals,” and he found a receptive ear in the very stable genius inhabiting the Oval Office.
Alas, the guy who got the $14.7 million no-bid contract acknowledged he was the one who screwed up.
Still, the pool is a puddle compared to Doug’s real legacy.
On day one in office, Burgum reopened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—one of America’s last untouched wildernesses—to oil and gas exploration. Since then, as chief executor of Trump’s “Unleashing American Energy” agenda, he’s freed millions more acres of public land to drilling, including areas bordering national parks.
Harold Hamm, the oil billionaire, brags he hand-picked Doug for the job. They’re buds from when Burgum was North Dakota governor. In fact, Hamm’s company, Continental Resources, kicked in a quarter million to Burgum’s 2023 presidential run. (He did run, right? Right?) And Continental Resources still pays Doug’s family for oil pumped from their farm. In 2026, Doug returned the favor, helping Continental dodge a court order and score 70-plus drilling permits.
After all, what are friends for?
But not all American energy gets unleashed. Trump, ever the champion of birds and his golf course vistas, hates wind power, and so does Doug. Burgum personally pulled the plug on Revolution Wind, an offshore wind farm that was already 80% built. Then his department paid a French energy giant nearly $1 billion in taxpayer money not to build wind farms.
No wonder the White House calls Burgum “one of the most valuable members” of Trump’s cabinet.
Standing strong for fossil fuels takes rare political courage—and an appreciation for who’s your sugar daddy—especially now that wind energy costs consumers way less than oil-fired power.
