Burgum spars with Dems over Alcatraz, parks, wildfires

The Interior secretary appeared Thursday on Capitol Hill for the second time this week.

June 13, 2025

Democrats on the House National Resources Committee pummeled Interior Secretary Doug Burgum with questions about the Trump administration’s management of public lands in a combative hearing Thursday.

They probed the reopening of Alcatraz as a federal prison and whether the department has lost firefighters to the administration’s cuts.

Ranking member Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) compared Burgum’s public statements on public lands to vulture capitalism: “Strip the asset, extract the value and move on.

“You’ve often described public lands as part of a federal balance sheet, as if they are assets to be liquidated and sold off to please investors and creditors,” Huffman said.

Abandoning his written testimony, Burgum used his opening statement to refute Huffman’s claims.

“The only people that liquidate balance sheets are people that are going out of business. The United States isn’t going out of business,” Burgum responded. “We have the strongest balance sheet in the world. But that balance sheet needs to get us a return.”

Huffman quipped: “You said nobody liquidates assets unless they’re going out of business. It happens all the time in private equity. Public lands should not be like that.”

The hearing to consider the Trump administration’s proposal to cut the Interior budget by 30 percent was the second in as many days for Burgum. He testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Wednesday.

Huffman and Burgum clashed again over the Trump administration’s proposal to reopen Alcatraz — the historic prison, and current national park site, on an island in the San Francisco Bay.

Huffman asked if Burgum supported reviving the federal penitentiary. The government closed the prison in the 1960s because of high maintenance costs, but President Donald Trump has vowed to reopen it.

“There is no one in the National Park Service from the superintendent down to the janitor who would tell you turning Alcatraz into a federal prison again is a good idea,” Huffman said. “Will you listen to your park service personnel on subjects like that, or will you go along with Donald Trump?”

Burgum said he works for the president and noted that the Park Service is also under White House’s authority. “Front-line soldiers don’t decide whether we go into war or not,” Burgum said.

Wildfires

A back-and-forth also erupted between Burgum and Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) about whether the Trump administration’s efforts to cut staff has eliminated firefighters.

“This is not a gotcha question,” Neguse said, when Burgum did not have an exact figure for the number of employees that have a certification to work on fires, called a “red card.”

Neguse said he was concerned that Interior is “apparently not keeping track of the red card holders that have been purged from your agency.”

Burgum fired back: “There’s been no purging. People keep saying ‘purging.’”

Neguse tried to move to a new question, but Burgum spoke over him: “You’ve said something that’s not true. You said it wasn’t a gotcha.”

Neguse pushed Burgum on “vacancies” at the National Park Service, a nod to dozens of leaders that have exited or retired, partly because of the administration’s pressure on people to leave or take buyouts.

“We’re trying to cut jobs that aren’t in parks, and if there’s a vacancy for a superintendent, we fill it with the deputy. So it’s incorrect for you to say that we have vacancies,” Burgum said.

Burgum also criticized the outcry over potential cuts. “Whatever number might have been in the budget before, if that number has gone down even a penny, people somehow think that that’s going to be damaging to citizens, to land, to services, and to the work and the mission and the fulfilling of the laws,” he said.

Burgum added that the department needs to refocus on how well it’s performing. “It’s not about the inputs, it’s about the outcomes, and certainly under my leadership at the Department of Interior, we’re going to be focused on outcomes,” Burgum argued.

Oil and gas, mining

Democratic Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona asked Burgum whether companies found guilty of colluding on oil prices, referring to a Federal Trade Commission investigation and a subsequent court case alleging some oil companies colluded to keep oil prices high, would be allowed to operate on federal lands.

Burgum demurred, saying he was unfamiliar with the issue. He also said it likely lacked merit.

“The fact that the FTC, or people in the Biden administration, thought that somehow a few companies could collude on the price of a global market — that’s the largest daily market in the world — is just kind of an impossibility,” he said.

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) asked whether foreign companies should pay the Interior Department royalties on hard-rock minerals.

Burgum said he would support that effort. He also argued that companies outside the country shouldn’t be mining critical minerals inside the U.S.

Pressed on whether Burgum will remove protections created during the Biden administration against oil and gas leasing around Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, the secretary said he was reviewing that.

Burgum said representatives from the Navajo Nation, who have members with mineral rights around Chaco, approached him earlier this year.

Leger Fernández argued that drilling could occur far away from Chaco due to horizontal well techniques. “What we are looking for is not, ‘Don’t drill at all in northwestern New Mexico.’ But don’t do it where there are sacred, protected sites that can never, ever be replaced.”

‘Breath of fresh air’

Republicans on the committee praised Burgum and defended his oversight of the agency.

“You are a breath of fresh air,” said Minnesota Rep. Pete Stauber, chair of the Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee.

Stauber earlier asked Burgum for support in reversing a Biden-era mineral withdrawal in the Superior National Forest that blocks potential copper and nickel mining. The administration is indeed moving forward with such a reversal.

“You come from an energy state. You are an executive, and to hear you talk about the opportunities and the importance of strategic national security involving the mining space is a breath of fresh air,” Stauber said.


By:  Heather Richards
Source: Politico Pro