Interior Secretary Doug Burgum argued while speaking at a Breitbart News policy event that the vast majority of the legal hoops the American energy industry has to jump through are setting the U.S. back, while China skips over bureaucracy in the race for AI dominance.
Burgum, the chairman of President Donald Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council, told Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle that the “Silicon Valley Titans” who do not necessarily see eye-to-eye with Trump understand the issue, which is why they largely supported his 2024 campaign.
“In November ’24, who was standing on stage at the inauguration? Tim Cook, Elon Musk, [and] Mark Zuckerberg,” the secretary said. “I mean, you know, Silicon Valley Titans were all standing there within 20 feet of the president. Think, why?”
“Because,” Burgum said, “They all got behind electing a president that understood that we needed more energy, and that we could not win the AI arms race without more electricity, and that the policies that the competition was offering was going to end up with energy subtraction.”
In its own words, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has stated that their AI theories, technologies, and applications should “achieve world-leading levels” and make China “the world’s primary AI innovation center” by 2030.
As Breitbart News’s Wynton Hall noted in his latest book, Code Red, “Nearly half of the world’s top AI researchers are Chinese,” and the country produces “nearly twice as many AI-relevant PhDs as the United States does.”
Burgum stated that Trump’s mission to beat China in the AI race is what caused a “giant shift” to occur, with major technology companies throwing their support behind the president in order to achieve this goal.
“It was important that it was happening because if we were going down a path, which was continuing to do energy subtraction, we have no chance,” the Interior secretary argued. “Now, we have a chance.”
According to Burgum, the Chinese “are not spending years caught up in court, in litigation over a bunch of, say, bureaucratic rules — not even laws.”
In the Department of the Interior, Burgum said that the rules in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) have been hindering progress — but he has changed it so that the agency now follows the 20 percent that is “actually in the law.”
“I mean, even in Interior, as we go back and release the rules around NEPA, we went through the NEPA rules and found that 80 percent of what people were being held accountable for was never in the original law,” the secretary told Boyle. “We’ve put it all in an appendix […] if you want to go through NEPA right now on a DOI property, you’re going to focus on the 20 percent that’s actually in the law.”
Some necessary processes that formerly have taken years to do have since been completed in a matter of days, Burgum remarked.
“We did an [Environmental Assessment] EA in 12 days, and didn’t cut any corners,” he announced. We did an [Environmental Impact Statement] EIS in 24 days. These take two years. It’s like, ‘How is that possible? You must be cutting corners.’”
No, he has not been cutting corners, Burgum stated.
“It was all like, ‘Oh, I’m going to send it to Matt.’ Matt gets back to me in 30 days. And then Matt sends it to John for 30 days,” the secretary said, explaining the bureaucratic process. “That’s what a government business process looks like.”
But China goes “fast,” he added. “They don’t have to worry about the permitting issue.”
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.