Do we like them?

Do we like Doug Burgum?

Our score: 3 out of 10. He signed laws that shut trans kids out of sport, and I couldn't verify enough good to set against that.

Doug Burgum was a two-term North Dakota governor before Donald Trump made him Interior Secretary, the cabinet job that looks after federal lands, energy leasing and national parks. So he's now a bloke with a lot of say over oil, gas, coal and wind on public land.

The harm check is where he stumbles. In April 2023 he signed two bills barring transgender girls and women from female sports teams, in K-12 schools and in college. Both passed with veto-proof majorities, so he wasn't the only one pushing, but his signature is on them.

The twist is that he'd gone the other way before. In 2021 he vetoed a nearly identical school-sports bill. In 2023 his own statement said that across two years and more than 27,000 high school sports participants there was no recorded case of a trans girl playing on a girls' team. He signed anyway, which tells you where the pressure was coming from.

Other reporting I came across says he also signed other anti-trans measures that year, including bathroom and health care limits. I couldn't open those pages, so I'm not counting them here. The sports bans alone are enough to sink the harm test, and that is what we're going on.

On the planet, his job is to push energy production. At a May 2026 House hearing he called solar the “cheapest form of energy”, and by one report described high gas prices as “exciting”. He also copped plenty of mockery online over a no-bid contract to fix the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, though that's critics on social media and not a finding of anything.

On facts, PolitiFact has rated exactly one Burgum claim: a 2024 speech saying Trump shut down Nord Stream 2, Biden approved it, then Biden shut down US gas export capacity. It rated that Mostly False. One rating isn't a pattern, and I'd rather say so than pretend it is.