Donald Trump’s presumptive Interior secretary, Doug Burgum, caught the president’s attention as an oil and gas governor, a reputation earned over two terms as North Dakota’s drill-friendly chief executive.
But Burgum was also an influential proponent of a flood-control project that a former Biden administration official deemed key to protecting the state’s most populated region against climate change.
By 2027, the metro area of 260,000 people should reap the benefits of the Fargo-Moorhead Diversion Project, a $3.2 billion re-plumbing of the Red River designed to harness stormwater from 40,000 square miles of farmland and shield Fargo and neighboring Moorhead, Minnesota, from catastrophic floods.
The project — conceived by the Army Corps of Engineers in 2008 and built under a federal, state and local cost-share agreement — was deemed the “ultimate climate resilience project” by Michael Connor, the former assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, who left the agency last fall.
