BISMARCK, North Dakota — Doug Burgum tried to run his state like an American business, top down and his way.
The former Republican North Dakota governor — first elected in 2016 — was smart, tireless and interested in new ideas, recalled people who worked with him. Dashing around his wind-swept rural state bespectacled, with a sweep of silver-gray hair, he looked every bit the wealthy tech entrepreneur he’d been before politics.
“Innovation is forward-looking, regulation is backward-looking,” said Burgum during his State of the State address in 2023, hammering on a central tenet of his grievance with government bureaucracy that he’s sure to highlight as President Donald Trump’s incoming Interior secretary and potential “energy czar.”
But Burgum’s inability — or reluctance — to finesse state lawmakers over two terms in the towering state Capitol on a hill looking over Bismarck often stymied his political priorities. He brought big ideas about how to reshape state government, but often found resistance from conservative Republicans. Eventually, Burgum spent millions of his own money trying to oust Republican opponents who opposed him, building a reputation among some in state politics as a bully.
After eight years and four legislative sessions, Burgum leaves for Washington with a mixed political legacy in his home state.
“He’s never really been good at politics,” said Joel Heitkamp, a Democrat who served in the North Dakota state Senate from 1994 to 2008, from a bar seat at Peacock Alley. The wood-paneled restaurant down the hill from the Capitol building has long witnessed the unofficial caucuses of North Dakota’s lawmakers. But Burgum was not a politician that you’d find bartering compromises at Peacock Alley, Heitkamp said.

So far, Burgum’s relationship with Republicans in Congress has been publicly chummy. At his Senate confirmation hearing to be Interior secretary, Burgum charmed senators with his commitment to their shared priorities like ramping up fossil fuels and curbing Washington’s influence over Republican states.
The Interior secretary job, which oversees more than 60,000 employees and manages roughly 500 million acres of public land, is not unlike Burgum’s former jobs of governor and CEO. It’s a significant role on the national stage, where Burgum first appeared in 2023 during his short-lived campaign for president. He’ll have the ability to put his own stamp on the sprawling department, as long as it remains in lockstep with his boss’ priorities from the White House.
“He’s perfect for Interior,” said Ed Schafer, a Republican who served as North Dakota governor from 1992 to 2000 and as the Agriculture secretary from 2008 to 2009 under former President George W. Bush.
Burgum is a nice guy with an interest in the outdoors — and a reverence for Theordore Roosevelt, the Republican president who launched the nation’s park system, Schafer said. But he noted Burgum’s role leading the nation’s energy policy, as chair of an energy council the president has pledged to form, could prove more complicated. Trump has also tapped Burgum, who was confirmed by the Senate on Thursday night, for a seat on the National Security Council.

Burgum, who learned the ropes of energy policy as governor overseeing North Dakota’s prolific oil patch, will have to figure out what Trump wants done and then find a way to implement it, while potentially juggling other factions in the administration, Schafer said.
“Doug is going to be kind of thrown in there,” Schafer said. “If he does something that Trump doesn’t like, you know what Trump’s gonna do is throw him in the river.”
A businessman in the governor’s race
Burgum is no newcomer to political strife. It characterized much of his last eight years.
He ran in North Dakota’s 2016 gubernatorial race as an outsider, known for his business acumen and helping revitalize downtown Fargo — a small but bustling river city located about three hours east of the state’s political heart in Bismarck.
Burgum entered the Republican primary against a popular politician named Wayne Stenehjem. A member of the state’s political class, Stenehjem was the state’s attorney general, had family in the Legislature and was the preferred governor for many of the state’s Republican establishment.
Burgum sold his outsider image to voters, not unlike Trump did in his own election of 2016. He also boasted deep pockets thanks to his business accomplishments. He beat Stenehjem by an astonishing 20 percentage point upset in the Republican primary. He then spent millions in the general election, an unheard-of budget for a campaign in the state of just fewer than 800,000 people, smashing Marvin Nelson of the Democratic-Nonpartisan League Party.
Burgum wanted to be a transformational governor, telling his Cabinet after taking office to “spend less time defending institutions and more time reinventing them.”
But that passion for change didn’t translate to deal-making with lawmakers. It probably made deals harder to come by.
“It hurt him a little bit,” said Schafer of Burgum’s norms-breaking beginnings, “because he kind of raked on the Legislature in his campaign, and it set him off with kind of a cantankerous or adverse relationship.”
The 2017 legislative assembly kicked off just two weeks after Burgum was sworn in. The governor and the Republican establishment quickly found themselves in opposition.
The central battleground would be North Dakota’s budget, updated every two years.
That first session, Burgum vetoed the Legislature’s attempt to block bonuses for government staff, saying the Legislature was infringing on executive authority. The Legislature overturned the veto.
In turn, the Legislature sued the newly minted governor for line-item vetoing parts of their budget.
“We felt the line had been crossed, and the governor was legislating with a veto pen,” then state House Majority Leader Al Carlson (R) told Prairie Public Broadcasting in September of 2017.
Burgum pushed for a new accounting approach for the 2019-2021 budget that would force agencies to defend each line in their budgets.
“We don’t have a revenue problem, we’ve got a spending problem,” Burgum said in 2018 on a North Dakota politics podcast.
At a time when the state faced lower revenue from a slump in oil tax revenue, many lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Legislature were on board with cuts — just not Burgum’s.
During his time in office, Burgum frequently advanced budget proposals that were lower than what lawmakers would eventually appropriate. But the tussle was over power more than dollar amounts.
In 2021, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Burgum attempted to block a bill the Legislature had passed that would give a budget section of the Legislature more power than an emergency commission led by the governor in deciding on how to spend federal income over $3 million.
Lawmakers overrode the governor’s veto.
A spokesperson for Burgum did not respond to several requests for an interview for this story or answer a list of questions sent via email about Burgum’s political record.
Family roots
Burgum grew up in Arthur, a town of fewer than 300 people about a half-hour’s drive north of Fargo.
It’s a neat square of a town on a flat sweep of prairie with few trees. The most sizable business is the Arthur Cos. The bundle of companies, and the bulky silver grain elevator that once made them valuable in the rural farmlands, has been in Burgum’s family since 1906.
Burgum was just a freshman in high school when his father — a retired Navy officer — died. But he was supported by the people in Arthur and a close family. His mother, Katherine Kilbourne, went back to work and would become a popular dean of the College of Home Economics at North Dakota State University in Fargo.
Burgum graduated from the school in 1978 and became one of its most famous alumni. He received a Master of Business Administration from Stanford University in 1980. He mortgaged the family property to buy the tiny Great Plains Software company in Fargo in 1983. The business later sold to Microsoft in 2001 for $1.1 billion in stock, with Burgum staying on as a Microsoft senior vice president for several years.

Burgum also developed a passion for urban revitalization and spent millions on real estate in downtown Fargo. Burgum would later face criticism during office when some of his real estate ventures benefited from tax advantages he pushed as governor, critiques recently highlighted in a New York Times article. He still has a stake in several real estate, farming and construction businesses.
Burgum’s successes in Fargo — the city also benefited from Great Plains’ ascendance, as it hosts the second-largest Microsoft campus outside Silicon Valley — had attracted attention from those who saw him as prime for political office in North Dakota. He began mulling a run for governor in 2015.
Robbie Lauf, who had previously worked for former North Dakota Sen. Rick Berg (R), was just a year out of college when he read about Burgum’s political aspirations. He’d crossed paths with the tech CEO related to Fargo economic development.
“I met him and admired him, and I thought he’s an incredible business leader,” said Lauf, who emailed Burgum urging him to run for office. He became Burgum’s first employee as a political candidate.

At the Capitol, Burgum became known for taking the job to heart.
During his annual State of the State address, lawmakers jokingly placed bets on how long it would take before Burgum’s voice cracked with emotion, one current and one former lawmaker told POLITICO’s E&E News.
In 2023, for example, those betting on Burgum shedding tears at the two-minute-and-15-second mark would have taken the pot. In 2024, Burgum’s voice broke at roughly nine minutes.
Subjects that moved the governor during State of the State speeches included his family; law enforcement officers facing danger; and a leader of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation presenting a late senator’s family with a Star blanket — a gesture to honor generosity or service.
For those who worked with him, Burgum’s sensitivity is a central tenet of his character. He never missed a birthday or an anniversary, whether sending a text or dropping a card on someone’s desk, and once he heard a name, he remembered it, former employees said.
“We didn’t realize how lucky we were, and what we learned from Doug while we worked for him,” said Kim Peterson, a former employee of 40 years. She joined Great Plains just before Burgum bought the business in 1983, and she credits him with helping her career take on an entirely different trajectory — she’d been an interior designer before she took the marketing gig.

Burgum first joined the company just as a regular worker, she recalled. He hung out with the other employees and had a little apartment in town. Then six months in, he surprised everyone by buying the firm. He told his employees to be proud of being from North Dakota. Drilling down on their uniqueness as a tech company outside of Silicon Valley, he once had everyone dress up as cowboys at a tech conference where everyone else was in fancy dress.
Sandi Sanford, the North Dakota Republican Party chair, acknowledged that Burgum was inexperienced when he first became governor. But it’s a credit to Burgum’s nature that he blazed a path for himself, assembling a strong staff and learning how to work with the Legislature, she said.
“He came in green in regard to the Legislature, but God, he’s a student of life, and he’s fast and quick, and he outworks everybody,” said Sanford, whose husband was Burgum’s first lieutenant governor.
A new era
By Burgum’s second legislative session, in 2019, he had more experience working with lawmakers, and pushed through what became a critical project for his legacy.
Lauf first brought the idea of a presidential library for Roosevelt to Burgum. Dickinson State University in western North Dakota had received a $15 million appropriation from the Legislature to build a Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in their town. But the board was struggling to move forward. A history buff, Lauf investigated the project and thought it should be more ambitious. He suggested to the governor a $150 million project to make the library a destination for the state.
Burgum was thrilled by the prospect, but his ambition was characteristically bigger, Lauf recalled.
Burgum said it should be closer to $500 million, and he supported Lauf’s idea that the library should be located not in Dickinson but about 30 miles away in the tiny town of Medora, where the hilly plains of central North Dakota suddenly give way to a broken landscape of small canyons known as the Badlands. Burgum argued in 2018 that Medora — where the Theodore Roosevelt National Park is located — would make it more likely that the project garnered support from then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and nonprofits like the National Park Foundation.
Roosevelt, a New Yorker, traveled to western North Dakota in a period of extreme grief, after his mother and young wife died in 1884. He would later say that the Badlands of North Dakota, which the U.S. government would seize from the Oglala Sioux shortly after Roosevelt’s time there and eventually convert to a national park, saved his life.
In 2019, Burgum pushed a bill in the Legislature for a $50 million endowment to fund the library operations, contingent on an accrual of private funds. Today, the estimated cost of the library, which is under construction, is roughly $450 million. Roughly 70 percent of the money secured so far is private dollars, including an undisclosed sum from Burgum and his wife. It’s scheduled to open July 4, 2026, on the country’s 250th birthday.

“We’ll tell the story not just of Roosevelt but of the people of North Dakota, and we’ll tell that story to generations going forward,” Burgum said in a statement after the endowment bill passed.
The state Legislature in 2023 eventually approved a $70 million line of credit for the library through the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.
For his supporters, Burgum’s presidential library agenda is evidence of his vision, and his ability to drive ambitious ideas from proposal to completion.
“If there’s ever anything that I’d associate with [Burgum], it’s his love of North Dakota. I mean deep, unending, passionate,” Lauf said. “He was told he could not build a world-class company here. He did. … What he’s done is just constantly say, ‘No, North Dakota is worthy of great things.’”
But detractors quickly pointed to the library’s price tag.
Republican Jeff Magrum was elected to the state House of Representatives the same year that Burgum won the governor’s race. The two were friendly, even holding a campaign event together, at Burgum’s suggestion, Magrum recalled, sipping coffee from his wind-rattled ranch house south of Bismarck.
But Magrum, a plumber and rancher, chafed at Burgum’s attempt to control the state budget, saying, “He wanted his budget to be priority over ours.” Magrum thought the library was a waste of money for a governor who had promised to make cuts.

“He’s a big spender,” Magrum said.
Magrum wasn’t the only one with complaints. One Republican state representative blasted the $70 million “slush fund.”
Magrum, who is now a state senator for a rural district southeast of Bismarck, was also aggravated at the move of the library to Medora, near where Burgum owns property and oil and gas interests. Burgum recently committed in his ethics disclosure to divest from the oil lease on that property.
The library dispute heightened the ongoing budget fights with Magrum and other conservatives — and both sides would dig in their heels.
“We were actually, you know, friends, somewhat, friends. But he changed,” Magrum said of Burgum, who would become one of the governor’s most stubborn opponents in the Legislature. “He just got to be more of an authoritarian.”
Burgum wouldn’t forget the opposition.
Getting tough
It was 2020 and had been a long day when Magrum answered a call from the governor. He was expecting it. A political blogger had just leaked the news that Burgum was going to bankroll an effort to oust Magrum from his seat and replace him with a friendlier ally.
Burgum was courteous, but not long after the call, the attack ads started rolling in. Fliers crammed mailboxes, accusing Magrum of not supporting law enforcement or the military or the coal industry.
Magrum kept many of the mailers, recently laying them out on his kitchen counter for a reporter, the dust-colored open landscape of central North Dakota visible in the windows behind him.
“I do give him respect for identifying the fact that I wasn’t going to be on his side of things,” Magrum smiled.
Stamped on the corner of many of the ads was the Dakota Leadership Political Action Committee. In 2020, Burgum was responsible for the majority of the $3.6 million put into the PAC.

Burgum didn’t just go after Magrum. The Dakota Leadership PAC targeted a suite of legislative seats. The most important was likely Jeff Delzer, the longtime chair of the North Dakota House of Representatives Appropriations Committee. A fiscal conservative, Delzer opposed many of Burgum’s initiatives, had been behind a push to essentially ignore Burgum’s budget proposal in 2017 and was an outspoken critic of the Roosevelt library project. Delzer, who lost his bid for reelection in 2022, could not be reached for this story.
The effort almost succeeded. Burgum’s supported candidate, 55-year-old David Andahl, tragically died from complications related to the Covid-19 virus shortly before the election that he would win posthumously.
A second candidate supported by Burgum, Dave Nehring, also won. Burgum tried to appoint a replacement for Andahl. But the state’s attorney general — and Burgum’s former opponent in the governor’s race of 2016 — Stenehjem, said Burgum lacked the authority. The state’s Supreme Court unanimously sided with Stenehjem the same year, directing the local voting district’s Republican executive committee to name Andahl’s replacement. They put Delzer back in his longtime seat, continuing his 25-year run in political office.
Burgum’s efforts to oust Magrum also failed. Magrum won his reelection, and he continued to lock horns with the governor.
But Burgum’s purge had changed the tone at the state Capitol. Lawmakers worried privately that if they opposed the governor’s priorities, he’d bankroll a campaign to replace them, Schafer said.
The following legislative sessions went smoother for the governor, but his reputation of struggling to get his priorities past lawmakers stuck. One of his biggest failures was a central spoke in his agenda — his attempt to cut income taxes. Conservatives in the Legislature supported property tax cuts and viewed income tax cuts as a benefit mostly for wealthy businessmen like Burgum.
Schafer, who was also a political outsider when he was elected governor in 1992, said Burgum never mastered the transition from running a business to running government.
“They’re totally different, and part of that, of course, is the process of policy,” Schafer said. “The process was hard for him, because he had such a bad relationship with the Legislature.”