Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has a simple fix for the billions of dollars in interest the U.S. is forking over each year to its creditors: leverage public lands.
In interviews and speeches since taking his post in January, the former North Dakota governor has argued the government needs to ink an exhaustive inventory of federal land and all the mineral wealth they contain. In short, he wants a U.S. “balance sheet.”
Creditors would be wowed by the value of Interior “assets” — like lithium and copper on public lands — or the vast unexplored reserves of oil and gas found offshore, he said during a policy panel last month.
“Our national assets far exceed the $36.5 trillion in debt,” Burgum elaborated at an oil industry conference. “Just showing the markets what that number is would probably reduce the 10-year, long-term interest rate.”
If the Interior Department was a stand-alone company, Burgum said to the crowd of oil executives, it would have the “largest balance sheet in the world.”
Burgum’s crusade positions public lands at the center of a larger Trump administration promise that running the government more like a business will reap tremendous economic rewards. It runs alongside Burgum and President Donald Trump’s pledge to slash the size of government and raise revenues by unleashing a “drill, baby, drill” ethic on federal land.
But Burgum’s balance sheet proposal doesn’t reflect the financial realities of the U.S. government, two experts said. For example, the concept of tapping assets to lower interest rates suggests the U.S. would offer its public lands as collateral, potentially allowing foreign entities the right to seize federal government property if the country doesn’t meet its obligations.
James Stock, an economics professor at Harvard University with a focus on energy, environmental and climate economics, said the balance sheet proposal sounds “logical” but isn’t.
“It’s how it works with companies. It’s how it works with people. It is not how it works with the United States,” Stock said. “The analogy is just not correct. It breaks down.”
The federal government does indeed boast an enviable portfolio of public lands — Interior alone oversees 500 million acres and manages 700 million acres of subsurface mineral rights. In different appearances, Burgum’s mused assets could add up to anywhere from $100 trillion to $200 trillion.
Meanwhile, shrinking interest rates could take a bite out of the $800 billion in debt interest the U.S. paid last year. That’s about the same amount the government spent on Medicare, the health insurance program for senior citizens and one of the federal government’s largest mandatory expenses.
Burgum says the display of U.S. wealth and rates are related: show the country’s assets and interest rates across the board will start tumbling.
“People would say, ‘Wow, these guys got it covered and they have a plan on how to pay down this debt and they are actually in really good shape,’” he said last month.
How Burgum’s idea would play out amid Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs, and the tumult they have triggered in the financial markets, isn’t clear. But here are four things to know about Burgum and his balance sheet.
What’s on the balance sheet?
A comprehensive accounting of the United States’ physical assets, along with its mineral wealth, is key to Burgum’s vision.
“There isn’t a good balance sheet here in Washington, D.C.,” Burgum said in a Wall Street Journal podcast earlier this month. “You can’t go to one spot and say, ‘What are all these acres worth? What are all these subsurface minerals? What’s all the offshore worth?'”
But experts noted that the U.S. does have an extensive balance sheet. It’s part of the Financial Report of the U.S. Government compiled and published every year by the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget.
“It lists the liabilities, and obviously the debts, the one that we’re concerned about, and it also lists assets,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, a Republican budget hawk who led the CBO during the George W. Bush administration. He is now president of conservative research firm American Action Forum.
The Treasury report may not be exactly what Burgum has in mind — it doesn’t, for example, enumerate fair market value for U.S. lands.
But Holtz-Eakin said figuring out the value of the land owned by the federal government is a difficult task. How does a country estimate the monetary value of a place like the Grand Canyon, he said.
More than that, he said, the government’s most powerful “asset” is the power to tax businesses and citizens. Holtz-Eakin said he had been part of several efforts over the last two decades to improve the U.S. financial books, but there is little room for improvement because of these complexities.
The government also often accounts for its mineral wealth. Interior, for example, has regularly updated detailed estimates of offshore oil and natural gas resources since 1975.
Burgum is right that the federal valuation of what is available likely falls short. For example, one of the U.S. Geological Survey’s central responsibilities is mapping the nation’s vast resources. Some of those maps, though, are stuck in the past.
“A lot of our critical minerals we haven’t mined much, especially in recent decades,” said Colin Williams, the USGS mineral resources program coordinator. “Our geophysical coverage got to be very, very out of date.”
The agency is currently mapping the U.S. for those critical minerals through the Earth Mapping Resources Initiative, or “Earth MRI,” which was launched during the first Trump term and given a funding boost during the Biden administration.
USGS now has roughly 36 percent of the country mapped for minerals using modern techniques, up from 6 percent when the program began, with one year left of supplemental funding, assuming the Trump administration’s broad government funding cuts don’t target the program.
“We’re pushing very hard, with a focus on making sure that we can get relevant information on those resources in a timely fashion for the administration,” Williams said.
Would interest rates drop?
The U.S. debt creates an enormous expense for the country in yearly interest payments. But why would a public “balance sheet” change those numbers?
Stock said Burgum isn’t making a “crazy argument.”
“All he’s saying is that if you’re a really trustworthy, credit-worthy person, because you’ve got lots of other assets to back you up when you take out your home loan and that sort of thing, then you’re going to get lower interest rates,” he said.
But a critical difference between private companies or individuals and the U.S. government is that companies and people sign contracts in which their assets can be seized or sold for nonpayment. The U.S. government does not enter into those agreements, he said.
“Forty percent of the [U.S.] debt is held by foreigners. So, suppose we decide not to pay back China, that means we’re giving them the legal right to come and seize our public land,” Stock said.
Holtz-Eakin, the former CBO director, had the same critique.
“It is hard to imagine any sort of asset transaction that’s going to fundamentally alter global capital markets’ view of the U.S. capacity to pay, because in the end, its capacity to pay is that power to tax. And the question is, are you going to use it?” he said.
Trump and congressional Republicans are trying to extend, and potentially expand, sweeping tax cuts inked during the first Trump administration.
Could ‘drill, baby, drill’ save the day?
Burgum’s plan for Interior calls for dramatically increasing the revenues brought into federal coffers from developing the energy potential of public lands, from oil drilling to mining to geothermal expansion.
Stock said ramping up production and taking in more money is certainly possible, but the revenue gains are limited.
Energy revenues from federal lands and waters in fiscal year 2024 brought in $16 billion, a fraction of the $800 billion interest paid that year. The Trump administration could maybe double energy income through laxer regulations to boost production and by increasing royalty rates, but to increase the income by many magnitudes is “beyond credulity,” Stock said.
Slashing regulations is a strategy the administration has already started. Burgum signed a suite of secretarial orders shortly after taking office promising to unleash U.S. energy resources, review onerous regulations and potentially pare them back.
But it seems unlikely this administration would raise royalty rates. The Trump administration has threatened to roll back anti-oil policies in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, for example, which increased royalty rates for oil and gas on federal lands for the first time since 1920.
Meanwhile, despite increased interest in mining, the push to impose royalties on hardrock mining on public lands has repeatedly landed with a thud on Capitol Hill. Private companies currently pay no royalties to the government on minerals like gold and silver if they are dug up on federal land.
What about selling off lands?
The limitations on the government’s ability to increase energy revenues have raised worries among conservationists that Burgum aims to sell public lands. That move would both gin up new cash and cut the cost of managing land, forests and wildlife habitat.
Burgum has not explored the sale of public lands in interviews, and Interior did not respond to a request for Burgum’s position. Sales could be on the table under this administration, as leading Republican lawmakers are currently mulling sales to help pay for a massive budget reconciliation bill to advance Trump’s agenda.
In his public statements, Burgum’s pitch has been for land exchanges or transfers to state ownership as cost savings. He’s also insisted his desire to unleash the productivity of U.S. lands does not mean eroding cherished landscapes like national parks.
“No one should be concerned about us exploiting the public lands,” he said on the Wall Street Journal podcast, noting his efforts with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to identify public lands that could be used for affordable housing. “But if we have an opportunity to get land back into the hands of states and let states manage it as opposed to the federal, that’s also a way for us to reduce costs.”
Jenny Rowland-Shea, who co-authored a recent Center for American Progress report on how Trump’s order to create a sovereign wealth fund could be funded by the sale of public lands, conceded that Burgum is not likely looking to sell the crown jewels of the Interior Department, such as national parks.
But she said Burgum could target national monument land and other federal properties.
“I think there are plenty of landscapes out there that are treasured and have really strong values for people and for wildlife that Burgum is talking about,” she said.
Ken Ivory, a Republican Utah state representative and a leading voice in favor of state management of public lands, said it’s time for Interior to let states take over. While he hasn’t spoken to this administration, Ivory said he thinks they could help bring about this massive shift.
“Land is only a liability to the federal government. To everyone else, it’s the greatest asset you can have,” he said.
But Ivory doesn’t think the state should pay for the land — blunting any idea that land sales would be huge revenue drivers. Quite the opposite: Ivory believes states like his are likely owed for all the years they missed out on tax revenue that instead went to the U.S. government. But he echoed Burgum in thinking state ownership would save the country money.
“The revenue … is not in the selling of the land. The revenue is in the productivity of the land,” he said.
Hannah Northey contributed to this report.
Contact Heather Richards on the Signal at @h_richards.99.
