- 5/29/2025
During a House Appropriations Committee hearing before the congressional recess, Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME) questioned Interior Secretary Doug Burgum about national park workforce.
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00:00Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you very much for giving us a little extra time.
00:04I know you've been here for quite a long time and appreciate that,
00:07and I appreciate the level of knowledge that you've shown about many of the issues and concerns that we've talked about,
00:14and I just want to reinforce one thing and then ask a question.
00:17I think Mr. Amaday brought up some issues around the staffing cuts to agencies,
00:23and you and I had a chance to talk a little bit about that.
00:25So when it comes to the reorganization, the level of cuts that have been made,
00:30you know, I expressed it in my opening remarks and also to you individually,
00:36that just we have deep concerns about how it was done with the probationary workers being fired
00:42and then people being offered these opportunities to resign, and we've lost some critical positions.
00:47So as you're moving forward and when we get a full budget,
00:50I hope we can be much more involved in the conversation about what are those strategic positions,
00:56where are we getting people back and where could we have less people doing the work.
01:00So I know you've already expressed a lot of that.
01:02I do want to say we had one critical position at Cadia National Park in the Skudik Peninsula
01:09where there was only one licensed water operator, a critical position.
01:13That person resigned. I'm assuming it was because of the opportunity to resign.
01:17But the hiring freeze meant there's no opportunity to put a replacement in.
01:21So there's a critical position about clean water.
01:24It impacts all the people who visit the park, yet at this moment it's just kind of absurd that we can't do that.
01:30So if you could just take a quick look at that at some point.
01:33I would say on that one we had this situation at Yosemite, too,
01:37where some of the people that were doing the water plant operations took the deferred retirement program option,
01:47and we were able to replace those positions.
01:49So if we need to bring somebody back in as a water operator at Cadia,
01:54we should talk because we can get that position posted.
01:56Thank you very much for looking at that.
01:58In this case, that would be very beneficial.
02:00So if you could look into that.
02:02They did, I think, get some temporary replacement because of an outside funding group.
02:06As you mentioned, there are these amazing organizations, Friends of Acadia, Friends of Katahdin Woods and Waters,
02:11who really do help run our parks.
02:14I'm quite confident that they would not want to take the national park over.
02:17So as you're discussing that, and you did make that clear that you're thinking differently
02:22about the national parks than some of these other entities.
02:24But I do think we have to make sure there's a strong base of support
02:27before we give up, you know, the national ownership of this.
02:30But let me just ask one last question about renewable energy.
02:36You're also the energy czar.
02:37So I know this is something you know a lot about.
02:39And obviously the work that you've done in North Dakota really speaks to your expertise around energy.
02:44But this administration has declared a national energy emergency.
02:48You talked a little bit about the AI arms race with China.
02:51And I know there's been a lot of expression from this administration about having AI dominance.
02:56And that just is a huge energy requirement.
02:58And I don't think we always put it in that context.
03:00But it's going to require great opportunities for renewable energy and other energies.
03:05So I think that your perspective now from me watching on the outside is that this administration,
03:13and you are disregarding needed investments in renewable energy and focusing solely on fossil fuels.
03:18Renewable energy already generates about 21 percent of the electricity used in the United States,
03:22the wind alone accounting for 10 percent.
03:25Clean energy investments are estimated to save the average household $500 annually in reduced energy costs.
03:32In my home state of Maine where we've put a real focus on this,
03:36conversion to heat pumps in our very oil dependent state, and we're not an oil producer,
03:40as well as rooftop solar panels has really reduced costs for a lot of people.
03:44So we see it as a cost reduction. And in meeting the future needs of greater energy,
03:49it seems like it should be in all of the above. I know you did just, I think last night,
03:53reinstate the construction of the Empire Wind Project. So I appreciate that coming back online.
03:59But you do in your budget eliminate all funding for renewable energy effectively gutting this critical sector.
04:05Now, in my mind, this disregards the climate change concerns that we have and also the economic benefits.
04:12And I do know you were doing work in North Dakota on carbon neutrality, carbon capture.
04:18I've had the chance to observe a lot of carbon capture facilities in places as far afield as
04:22Norway and Iceland. And I know there's still questionable ability of them to do the job
04:27that needs to be done. So there seems to still be a really critical role for renewable energy.
04:31So can you just justify your perspective? Am I missing something that you're doing that we don't know much
04:36about since we're just observing this from the outside? I would say that a key component to this is
04:47understanding the reliability. And I would have a disagreement around some of your statements on cost.
04:56And when you say that we're getting 20 percent of electricity from renewables,
05:03what I hear in that word is intermittent, because right now without the battery technology,
05:08when the sun goes down every night, then whatever we whatever we claim we're getting from solar at night,
05:14it's zero. Thankfully, we need less electricity during the night, but it's zero. So it produces none.
05:20The wind is 10 percent when the wind is blowing. It may be slightly higher than that if the wind
05:26is blowing strongly. But when the wind's not blowing, it's zero. So then what we need to have,
05:31if we've got situations like on the day that President Trump was inaugurated, January 20th,
05:37which you all remember, I'm sure you were here, it was extremely cold in the PJM grid for,
05:43so think Pentagon to Wall Street, think of all the essential activity, think 60 million people,
05:47about the same number of people that experienced that, you know, the blackout in Spain, in this
05:52Washington to New York. At five in the morning, we had zero percent coming from solar, and we had
05:5770 percent coming from fossil fuels, 22 percent from nuclear, six percent from hydro and other oil and
06:03other sources, and two percent from wind. And so on the, when we say that we've got 20 percent from
06:09renewables, that's on a good day. When we don't, we have to still produce 100 percent of the needs. So we
06:15still need the base load, we still need the fossil fuels, we still need nuclear. And so that whole
06:21system has to remain in place, otherwise when the sun's not shining, the wind's not blowing,
06:26then we don't have enough electricity, I mean, not even enough for AI, we don't have enough for
06:30hospitals and schools and Wall Street and the Pentagon. And so the, if you lay in the cost of
06:35having now to own, build two systems, you know, then we're heading down the path of Germany.
06:39Germany spent a half a trillion dollars, 500 billion dollars on wind and solar. They shut down
06:45all of their base load fossil fuels, they shut down their nuclear, partly because, well,
06:51it's well understood that Germany in a multi-party system, where the Green Party was very influential
06:58in driving this, and they were never maybe 10 or 20 percent of the votes, but they were influential
07:02in driving the discussion. You know, Russia was, you know, just like, I mean, as a state,
07:08we were under cyber attack every day. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, every day coming
07:14after our missile sites, coming after our tribes, coming after our communities. Part of that,
07:17part of those cyber attacks include cyber operations filled with the kinds of things
07:23that would advantage an adversary. So Russia, it was to great advantage to have Germany deindustrialize,
07:29shut down all of their base load, become highly dependent on Russian gas. And if anybody thinks
07:34that that wasn't what they were doing, I would just, you guys have got security clearances, go
07:39learn about it. And it is a, and so Germany went down that path, they spent a half trillion dollars,
07:45they produced 20 percent less electricity than they did before, and their electricity is three times
07:53higher cost than it was before. So less reliability, higher cost. The price of electricity in Maine
07:59is exactly about three times what it is in North Dakota. And, and so when, when I hear that people say
08:06that renewables are, are somehow lowering electricity prices, that is just factually not true. It, you know,
08:14it may be true at some marginal cost, but there's hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of,
08:21you know, everything we've talked about here that would solve every problem for interior with this
08:26little, you know, $10 billion, little $10 billion budget we're talking about that's being cut this
08:31and that. There's hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies for wind in the IRA. And I saw a report,
08:39a legitimate report from legitimate people that the, the cost per kilowatt for offshore wind is 10 times
08:45higher than it's like double onshore wind. And it's 10 times higher than a natural gas plant. You know,
08:53that's like at the wellhead in Pennsylvania. And, and so part of what we're, you know, I, you know,
08:59as we pursued in North Dakota, and then you were saying carbon capture may not be working in Norway,
09:03it's working in North Dakota. And we've been doing it for, we've been doing it for 20 years,
09:08or 42 million tons of CO2 that we've captured that's been shipped up to Saskatchewan. We got,
09:15you know, zero carbon ethanol plants in North Dakota. We have some of the greatest CO2 storage
09:19in the world, you know, that's, that's right there. So when people tell me it's unproven,
09:23I would just invite them come to North Dakota and see what we're doing. But on the, what we're for,
09:28for the national, you know, energy emergency, it's not necessarily about gas at the pump. It's about,
09:34we don't have enough electricity. And the AI arms race is not a, it's not for the tech companies,
09:39it's for national security. I mean, we can't have missile defense without, without AI. I mean,
09:45we will, that is, there, there, there is no, I mean, when the bad guys are firing 400 missiles at Israel,
09:53and we knock down 399 of them, it's not just because we have smart people. I mean, there is,
09:59there is incredible IT systems that are causing that to happen. And then we all get up and go to
10:04work the other day and, oh, only one missile got through. Or what else, you know, what was the
10:07score of the baseball game? If all 400 missiles had land on Israel, you know, we, World War III would
10:12have started. I mean, we, you know, we're stopping, we're stopping those kinds of catastrophic things
10:17from happening and wiping out an entire country or ally because of technology. And so we are, we,
10:24we have, we can't come in second in the AI arms race. I mean, that, this is like,
10:28it's like the nuclear race. We have to, and, and it's going to train, AI is going to transform
10:34every job, every company and every industry. And right now on the path that we're in,
10:38New England would have ended up with, with, with these really high electric costs, a huge,
10:44you know, anti natural gas, a bias that you, we'd end up with New England, which is a huge part of
10:50our population, part of our, of our thing would have no advanced manufacturing, no AI data centers.
10:57There's not enough electricity to run that micron chip plant in upstate New York, unless we get more,
11:03more power that's coming from non intermittent sources. I mean, we need the right mix of
11:09intermittent plus base load. If we don't have enough base loaded, the queue at FERC is 95%
11:15wind, solar and batteries. 95% is wind, solar and batteries. If we have 95%,
11:20when we're already in a destabilized, we're already at a point, like I described on the,
11:24on the inauguration day, we're already at this point where we're dangerously close
11:28to the tipping point of having too much intermittent to, to, to balance the grid.
11:33And the grid, the grid is the mother of all other networks. If the grid isn't working,
11:37then nothing works. I mean, not at the Pentagon, you know, that everybody's it systems.
11:42So electricity, we've just become so complacent about it. When in fact,
11:47we've put ourselves at real risk as a country. And, and I part of what the president cares about
11:52is that everybody that all 48 states and whether they voted for him or not,
11:57that everybody's got to make sure that we've got a resilient, resilient grid
12:01for a thing, because without there's economic development is going to go where the electricity
12:06is. That's the new thing. And electricity has never been worth more than is right now in human
12:11history. A one, you can, a kilowatt hour today in an AI data center. It's not like a data center that
12:17is, does shopping claims or, or, uh, you know, I mean, a shopping order or a health claim. I mean,
12:23that's what data centers in the past. Okay. We're going to process a medical claim. We're going to
12:27process a shopping order today. An AI data center is actually turning electricity into intelligence.
12:32I mean, that's what AI is. It is like now, you know, if I was, I mean, the current versions
12:37program and they program as well as there's all, but like the top 100 programmers in our country.
12:43So then if I was going to leave here today, walk out the door and start a company,
12:47I wouldn't need to hire a thousand programmers. Like we used to,
12:49I got to hire a few and then have them have an army of robotic programmers called AI for practically
12:54free. And, and software has always been the thing that's transformed human capability in the
12:59last 40 years, more than anything in human history. So we're at this precipice of, of an incredible
13:04change. And, and then we've got States that are like, we're okay with, with really high
13:09electric prices and, and lack of reliability. They're going to just completely miss out.
13:13I mean, they'll de-industrialize just the way Germany did. And the population will move to places
13:18where you can actually get permits and pipelines built, you know, to get, because in the near term,
13:23the next five years, it's going to be natural gas in the 2030s. Nuclear can play a huge role,
13:28but we're at least five years away from that becoming a significant thing. And we've got to
13:32fix the permitting because we're a country where it takes you 10 to 20 years to build a nuclear
13:36plant. That doesn't work with small modulars. We've got to go more quickly. Geothermal
13:40is a, you know, that's green, but it's persistent base load. If we can get access to that 350
13:46centigrade heat, you know, below the ground, I mean, geothermal, but we got, we got a little
13:50more material science we're doing. So I'm very optimistic. And then you started out with climate
13:54change and I'm like, man, with, with AI and with all the new technologies and with nuclear,
13:59all that stuff that's coming in the next 10 years, we will solve the 21, the year 2100 temperature
14:05problem. I mean, we will solve that, you know, with innovation, we can't solve it by regulating
14:10our sources of energy out of business now, because we need that energy to create the solutions. And
14:15the, and the, and the existential threat of the disadministrations are focusing on is Iran
14:20cannot get a nuclear weapon and we can't lose the arms race to China. That's, that's, that's the
14:25number one and number two. And if we solve those two things, then we, then we will, we will have
14:30plenty of time to solve, you know, any issues related to, uh, you know, potential temperature
14:36change that's 70 years out. I mean, I just, I, I know that for sure because of, of what's coming,
14:42because we've just, we, we, we, we're going to have capabilities we've never had before.
14:46And they're arriving literally right, right now that'll cure diseases. And it's going to change how,
14:51you know, what we have to spend on education, what we have to spend on healthcare, all these things
14:55are, those budgets will get dramatically changed in the next decade based on, on what the contributions
15:00of AI, but we won't have any AI if we don't have electricity. And if we don't have a sound energy
15:05plan, then we won't. So you can't separate national security and world peace and, and prosperity at home
15:11from our generation of energy. So that's the, that's the short answer.
15:16That was a, uh, that was a short answer. Um, so look, I didn't mean to, uh, get my, uh,
15:21whole committee involved in a, in a conversation about, um, what energy policy in the future should
15:26be. But I do appreciate the depth of your knowledge. Um, I disagree on a few things. Look,
15:31we do not like having high electric rates in anywhere in New England or in Maine. And, um,
15:36we are not in the same situation as North Dakota. That's the reason years are much lower is because,
15:41yes, we are moving natural gas into our state, but it had to move from somewhere else. You had the unique
15:45opportunity to have it right there under the ground. Um, and I don't think that people of Maine are ready
15:50for offshore drilling off the coast of Maine. And most people don't think that we have resources of
15:54offshore drilling. That's you do. You won't need to offshore drilling, but what we do need is to me
15:59to get that mother load of gas from Pennsylvania through New York up to you, because right now, 80% of the
16:05homes, as you know, in Maine are burning heating oil. Yeah. And so if you want to reduce CO2 in New
16:12England, the number one way we can do it is replace home heating. And look, I do not want to
16:19disadvantage my colleagues by debating every possible point. But I will say, I understand
16:24you about grid modernization. I think we all realize that we have a permitting process that
16:28doesn't work for anybody, whether you're a blue, red or purple or green state, it just doesn't
16:32matter. It's not working for any of us. Um, I do believe that solar and wind belong in part of the
16:37mix. I believe we're investing in battery storage. And in many cases, that's the best way to go about
16:42doing it. All of these mixes have a real up, you know, there's a reason for having a mix. And I understand
16:48that we have to have dependable load. I counter a little bit on the solar panels on the roof when
16:53they're very cheap. I personally have batteries in the basement and it works just great for me.
16:56And it's much cheaper than having to import oil. So look, there are a whole variety of ways to do
17:00it. And you've got a lot of what you say. I want you to know, I agree with that. I mean,
17:03rooftop solar, where you don't have to build a transmission line, uh, and you've got for,
17:08you know, for home use, that's one of the, that's one of the niche markets, but powering the grid with
17:13solar at large scale, that's not there because we haven't, we've got a battery solution for you,
17:17for your home. We don't have a battery solution for how to store enough power to run New York.
17:22I just, I just, I just won on one point. Yes. Um, but thank you. And really,
17:25it's not running. We just agree. There's places, but it's not, it's not the whole thing. I agree.
17:30I'm just, I'm just teasing. And I would love to see more of the carbon capture work. I have seen
17:33some interesting projects and I'm not saying that they're not all, uh, got real opportunities.
17:38I'd love to come to North Dakota to do that. I will stop this. But I would say, just to be clear,
17:43if, if, if Congress decided to eliminate subsidies for wind, then there would be no applications for
17:49wind projects. I mean, they, they just, they, they, they had 30 years of subsidies and they've
17:54never made money and they're not going to make money. And people would argue that we've subsidized
17:58oil for many years and that to have, uh, the kind of nuclear power that you're talking about will
18:02also require a lot of subsidies. So we are, we do invest in energy choices,
18:07carbon capture requires subsidies, battery technology requires subsidies. We make these
18:11decisions. Anyway, I think you're, uh, I appreciate this argument very much and appreciate the
18:17opportunity. I would love to talk to you more about it and do believe it's part of our committee's
18:21mandate. And I will stop here because I know there are a lot of people who have questions
18:25and I apologize for taking up all the time, but thank you. Thank you.