00:00Thank you, Mr. Secretary.
00:03If the chairman of the full committee and the ranking member of the full committee come in,
00:08we'll let them make an opening statement when they come.
00:12First, let me ask you about this.
00:15As I mentioned in my opening statement, the President's skinny budget request proposed cuts to the Department of Interior
00:20that we may not be able to fully replicate in our FY26 bill.
00:25You may have seen that we had EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin testify before our subcommittee last week,
00:32and I asked him the same question that I'm going to ask you.
00:35If Congress chooses to provide discretionary appropriations for the agency that are levels above the President's budget request,
00:45how would you handle that?
00:46In other words, would you spend the amounts provided in an enacted bill
00:51and for the specific programs that Congress identifies?
00:56Yes, that would be the law.
00:58Okay.
00:59Let me ask you another question.
01:01I also wanted to take a moment to ask about land exchanges.
01:06Secretary Burgum, in order to assess and execute all land exchanges that come before the Department,
01:11does the agency have all the tools it needs to carry out the current processes
01:16or are additional authorities necessary?
01:19And I assume that the processes include you have to have appraisals and all of that type of thing,
01:25you have to do public hearings, you have to have tribal consultations, et cetera, et cetera.
01:29Do you have all the tools to do that or are additional authorities necessary?
01:33Well, we have a good set of tools in the tool bag today.
01:39And one example of that that we've already completed was a land exchange with the state of Utah
01:46that we completed back in February.
01:48It's about 200,000 acres of federal and 188,000 acres of state.
01:54This is a project that had worked on for some time, but it was able to get completed in February
02:01and was able to sign that with Utah Governor Spencer Cox.
02:07As you know, out west, we've got plenty of places where we've got a checkerboard of land.
02:13And in this case, we were able to trade lands to sort of fill in the checkerboard for the state
02:18and fill in the checkerboard at the federal level.
02:20In the case of the lands received from Utah, we were able to fill in a checkerboard of a wilderness area
02:26that was a federal wilderness area that will remain wilderness area,
02:31but is now doesn't create the complications of us trying to have every other section be wilderness area
02:38with the state having a different set of regulations, a different set of people managing those resources in between.
02:45Conversely, at the state level, the state now has got contiguous opportunities to choose
02:51whether they want to do that for affordable housing, whether they want to do it for recreation,
02:54whether they want to do it for state parks or state recreation.
02:59So it was definitely a win-win in both cases.
03:03And in this case, these are public lands that remain in public hands
03:08because it was a swap between the federal government and a state.
03:12I think there's more opportunity to do that.
03:15As you know, when the railroads transected the west as one of the incentives to get those railroads built,
03:21they gave at one time in the private sector these checkerboard of land as an incentive.
03:27And so I think there's a big opportunity for those kinds of swaps.
03:32And I also, as governor of North Dakota, was chairman of the land board.
03:38And so I've got, you know, eight years of experience of where we were able to, you know, once in state hands,
03:43sometimes it was better for us to move those lands, you know, down into more local control for local uses.
03:50And so we were able to do that because, again, as a general principle, I've, as a governor,
03:56I found that state game and fish, state land management, state grazing associations, local, I mean, all this.
04:05I mean, I have to say I never met someone from D.C. that cared more about the land, the water, the wildlife,
04:11the fish at the local level than the people in those states.
04:14And I know that the representatives at this table have all come from states that have got deep commitments
04:19to the land and the wildlife and their environment.
04:22So I think that there's plenty of opportunities for us to do both, which is have more efficient use of public lands
04:28and do all the protection we need about the things the public cares about that we all care about so deeply.
04:34But apparently you do have the authority to do this right now.
04:37You do have the tools to do this.
04:39We do.
04:40And we certainly will be taking a look to see if there's other things that are getting in the way
04:45of efficiently using public lands.
04:50I think in particular we're paying attention to the western states.
04:53I think it's maybe not well known, but we do have in states that are represented on this committee.
04:58Utah, over 60% of that is federal land.
05:04Nevada, over 80%.
05:06Alaska, Nevada's number one in terms of percentage owned by the federal government.
05:11Alaska, massive amounts of federal land.
05:14And in many cases we're restricting the opportunities for those states that should have the same opportunity
05:22under the United States of America to prosper as we have other states.
05:27We've got states in the east, including, you know, the 13 states that were part of the original colonies.
05:31None of them have more than 2% of federal land.
05:34And I don't think any of them would stand up and say we need more federal ownership in our states.
05:39I haven't heard that.
05:40I haven't heard people saying that.
05:42So it's a, I think there's a path forward here.
05:48There is.
05:49Idaho is third on the list with 64% federal land.
05:55And I will tell you, as I've told the reporters and stuff, the reason people live in the west, the reason people live in Idaho, because we love our public lands.
06:05And we want to make sure that they remain public so that your favorite hunting grounds or fishing hole or hiking or snow machining area is not cut off because of private ownership that bans travel.
06:18And in Idaho, travel doesn't mean, oh, they've closed this road, I'll just go down another mile and take the next road.
06:26It sometimes means you're leaving the state and going into Montana and coming back across the mountains to your face.
06:31You know, unreasonable stuff.
06:33So those are concerns I have personally about access and public lands for public use.
06:40So anyway, let me stop for just a minute.
06:43And you might have one member that would be happy that they came to Montana for a while before they came back in.
06:48Yeah.
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