Burgum shrank Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by more than 90% — nearly 3 million acres stripped of protection — with the executive orders themselves explicitly citing the coal, uranium, and mineral reserves underneath as the reason. He sidestepped direct questions about whether Trump’s “Freedom 250” celebration would disclose its corporate donors, even as brands lined up to attach their names to the Reflecting Pool and the White House for the right price. And when the Reflecting Pool renovation he oversaw turned to algae within a week of refilling, he defended the sabotage theory publicly, citing “expert and eyewitness testimony” — testimony his own Justice Department would later contradict in a court filing dismissing charges against the man wrongly accused of vandalizing it. An Interior Secretary is supposed to be a steward of public land held in trust for the next generation. Burgum has run the department like a liquidation sale with a donor list nobody’s allowed to see.