Interior Secretary Doug Burgum argued while speaking at a Breitbart News policy event that the vast majority of the legal hoops the American energy industry has to jump through are setting the U.S. back, while China skips over bureaucracy in the race for AI dominance.
Burgum, the chairman of President Donald Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council, told Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle that the “Silicon Valley Titans” who do not necessarily see eye-to-eye with Trump understand the issue, which is why they largely supported his 2024 campaign.
“In November ’24, who was standing on stage at the inauguration? Tim Cook, Elon Musk, [and] Mark Zuckerberg,” the secretary said. “I mean, you know, Silicon Valley Titans were all standing there within 20 feet of the president. Think, why?”
“Because,” Burgum said, “They all got behind electing a president that understood that we needed more energy, and that we could not win the AI arms race without more electricity, and that the policies that the competition was offering was going to end up with energy subtraction.”
In its own words, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has stated that their AI theories, technologies, and applications should “achieve world-leading levels” and make China “the world’s primary AI innovation center” by 2030.
As Breitbart News’s Wynton Hall noted in his latest book, Code Red, “Nearly half of the world’s top AI researchers are Chinese,” and the country produces “nearly twice as many AI-relevant PhDs as the United States does.”
Burgum stated that Trump’s mission to beat China in the AI race is what caused a “giant shift” to occur, with major technology companies throwing their support behind the president in order to achieve this goal.
“It was important that it was happening because if we were going down a path, which was continuing to do energy subtraction, we have no chance,” the Interior secretary argued. “Now, we have a chance.”
According to Burgum, the Chinese “are not spending years caught up in court, in litigation over a bunch of, say, bureaucratic rules — not even laws.”
Hellbound and Down 