# Department of the Interior The **Department of the Interior (DOI)** is the federal government's principal land-and-resources manager, established in 1849. It oversees roughly 500 million acres — about one-fifth of the U.S. landmass — through the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. It is simultaneously the steward of the national parks and the gatekeeper of energy and mineral extraction on public land, a tension that defines almost everything the department does. For the KB, Interior is the battleground over **extraction versus conservation**, and over the federal government's relationship to the rural West, where "Sagebrush Rebellion" hostility to federal land ownership runs deep. The department is also the locus of the federal trust responsibility to Native nations through the Bureau of Indian Affairs — a relationship perpetually underfunded and contested. ## Leadership (2025–) **[[Doug Burgum]]** — the former governor of North Dakota and a software entrepreneur — was confirmed Secretary of the Interior on January 30, 2025, by an 80–17 vote. Burgum has also functioned as a central energy-policy figure in the administration (chairing a White House energy council), making Interior a hub of the "energy dominance" agenda: opening public lands and offshore waters to oil, gas, and mineral development. ## Major bureaus Tracked as plain references until individual pages are built: - **Bureau of Land Management (BLM)** — manages 245 million acres of public land; the front line of the drilling-and-grazing-versus-conservation fight. - **[[National Park Service]] (NPS)** — the parks, monuments, and historic sites; targeted by staffing cuts and monument-shrinking, and the vehicle for the FY2026 [[National Park Service Funds Diversion]] (~$1B in fees and project funds redirected to D.C. vanity projects). Interior spoke for the government in defending the August 2026 tree removals at the [[East Potomac Golf Links Redesign]] as "routine maintenance." - **U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service** — endangered-species and wildlife protection; the Endangered Species Act enforcer. - **Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)** — the federal trust relationship with Native nations. - **U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)** — mapping, water, hazards, and earth science. - **Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM)** — offshore leasing for oil, gas, and wind. ## The capture lens The [[Project 2025]] blueprint pushes Interior toward maximal extraction: opening public lands and offshore waters to drilling, shrinking national monuments, weakening Endangered Species Act protections, and relocating or downsizing bureaus to disperse career staff (the first-term move of the BLM headquarters to Colorado was an early template). The patterns the KB tracks: - **Energy dominance** — accelerated oil, gas, and coal leasing on federal land and water. - **Monument shrinkage** — reducing or eliminating national-monument designations. - **Endangered-species rollback** — weakening the ESA to clear regulatory obstacles to development. - **Bureau relocation and attrition** — using reorganization to thin the conservation-minded career workforce. ## See Also - [[Project 2025]] - [[Cabinet Departments Hub]] - [[Federal Agencies]]