You had two jobs, Doug Burgum, and you’re failing at both.
nevadOne of President Donald Trump’s major priorities in his second term has been his so-called “energy dominance” agenda to boost fossil fuel production by weakening or eliminating environmental protections. On the first day of his second term, Trump declared an “energy emergency” based on the “active threat to the American people from high energy prices.” This “emergency” has formed the basis for the administration’s pro-fossil fuel agenda and has been used to justify abrupt policy actions that circumvent laws and procedures designed to incorporate public input and protect the environment.
As Robinson Meyer lays out in Heatmap, the promise Trump and Interior Secretary/National Energy Dominance Council Chair Doug Burgum made to Americans was that if we supported these policies to “unleash” domestic energy production by weakening environmental protections, the result would be lower energy prices. But it quickly became clear that there are major flaws in this scheme. As it turns out, it’s only fossil fuels that are being unleashed; domestic sources of renewable energy are being delayed and canceled across the country. A February 2026 report by E2 calculated that Trump and Burgum’s renewable energy project scalebacks and cancellations totaled nearly $35 billion. That was before the Trump administration paid a French company $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to abandon an offshore wind project.
As a result, this plan simply has not led to lower energy prices, demonstrating that public input and environmental protections are not what’s causing high energy prices. A year into this experiment, energy prices are astronomically higher. In January, Burgum declared on FOX News that “with President Trump’s leadership, we got inflation coming down, we’ve got investment going up, we’ve got taxes going down. We’ve got energy prices down.” He concluded that “everything is aligned for us to have a banner year in 2026.”
That prediction turned out to be true, but not in the way Burgum intended. At over $4 a gallon, gas prices are the highest since April 2022. According to data released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the month-to-month increase in gas prices for March 2026 was the highest since the EIA started tracking it in 1990. Home electricity prices also increased by an average of over $100 per family in 2025, a trend that is predicted to continue: an analysis of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act found that the policies in the bill are expected to increase home electricity prices by $130 per family by 2030.
All of this makes Burgum’s claim to Bloomberg TV in January that “affordability is something that matters” look preposterous, to say nothing of his promise that “they’re going to see lower prices at the pump here in America.”
After setting the stage by kneecapping domestic renewable energy sources, the Trump administration decided to start a war in Iran, which had an immediate impact on global energy markets, and therefore on Americans’ gas prices. Meanwhile, the administration has declared an “AI arms race” and has been working to facilitate and promote the construction of data centers and new fossil-fueled power plants to serve them—further driving up costs for ratepayers.
Burgum has been touting high oil prices as a win for industry, and now has the impossible task of convincing us that we can have both high oil prices and low gas prices. This clearly makes no sense, and Americans can tell when the math isn’t mathing. While the complexities of international oil markets may not be top of mind, Americans are seeing high gas prices at the pump, and feeling a squeeze in their wallets, no matter how many times Burgum tries to tell us otherwise. Meanwhile, oil company quarterly earnings will be reported later this month and are expected to reveal windfall profits at a time when Americans are struggling to pay higher gas prices on top of other rising costs.
With the failure of the “energy dominance” agenda turning into a major embarrassment for Trump, at some point Burgum’s job will be in jeopardy. The question is, which job? In addition to being tasked with increasing American energy production in his role as Secretary of the Interior, Burgum also serves as chair of the National Energy Dominance Council (NEDC), created by Trump in a February 2025 executive order. The NEDC’s tasks include advising the president on energy production and permitting issues. However, one year into the council’s existence, Burgum was still educating industry members on the council’s existence and looking for projects to support.
Whichever hat Burgum is wearing, he is failing to deliver on his and Trump’s promise to lower energy prices. The Trump-Burgum deregulatory agenda on our national public lands has proven to be wildly unpopular, and has accomplished nothing. Perhaps Trump and Burgum should pivot to something Americans would actually benefit from: protecting outdoor recreation access, wildlife habitat, and clean water for Westerners who cherish these resources and need them now more than ever.