Doug Burgum not interested in energy secretary job, says he’s overqualified

Republican presidential candidate and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum said Monday he would not accept the offer of energy secretary from a future GOP president.

Mr. Burgum, a billionaire entrepreneur who’s made U.S. energy production a pillar of his campaign, made the case that he should be the one picking people for his Cabinet rather than serving someone else’s administration.

“I’ve always been the guy that was the CEO or the governor. Those are the two jobs I’ve basically had my whole life,” he said on Bloomberg T.V. “People have said ‘you’d make a great [Department of Agriculture] secretary, you know incredible amounts about ag,’ or ‘you’d be great for the Department of Interior because everything you know about [Bureau of Land Management] and tribal lands,’” he said.

But, he added, “those seem like the qualifications for the top job.”

There is a recent precedent for such a job transition.

Then-Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 against Donald Trump and others, went on to serve as Mr. Trump’s energy secretary despite having advocated the agency’s abolition.

But the prospect of getting to pick his own White House Cabinet doesn’t look promising for Mr. Burgum. He’s polling at an average of less than 1% in recent polls — or 8th place in the crowded primary field — and is struggling to qualify for the second Republican debate set for Sept. 27.

Currently serving his second term as governor, Mr. Burgum wants North Dakota to reach carbon neutrality by 2030 by relying on carbon capture, a method of capturing emissions and storing them underground.

Climate hawks counter that the little-used technology is not a feasible mass-scale solution to combating human-caused global warming.