The Department of the Interior manages 500 million acres of public land — about one-fifth of the United States. It oversees chunks of national energy production, maintains relations with Native American tribes, supplies water to communities, and guards the national parks. David Bernhardt, who ran the department under Trump from 2019 to 2021, told the Boston Globe it is “anecdotally... often called ‘the Department of Everything Else.’” And now, on top of everything else, it is the department in charge of making Washington, D.C. look the way Donald Trump wants it to look.
The current secretary, Doug Burgum, has become the point man for the president’s second-term overhaul of the capital’s iconography. Per the Globe’s account, his portfolio runs from a Triumphal Arch to a Garden of American Heroes to a “US Open-caliber” golf course — and, of course, the Reflecting Pool — plus the semiquincentennial events that took over the National Mall this summer, including the Great American State Fair and an IndyCar grand prix. David J. Hayes, a deputy interior secretary under Obama and Clinton, calls Burgum “the president’s out-front spokesman” for the D.C. projects and says “this kind of a role for the secretary of the interior has never been seen before.”
Hayes allows that some of this is structural: interior secretaries run the National Park Service, and the Park Service owns the monuments. “What is unusual,” he said, “is the fact that you have a president that wants to, by himself, make these enormously important decisions.” A department spokesperson offered the official version: “Secretary Burgum is the lead on our National Parks, and a big swath of our nation’s capital is in fact a national park.” This is technically true and also a remarkable thing to say: the reason the interior secretary is supervising a grand prix is that the venue is, on paper, parkland.
The pool
The Reflecting Pool saga is where the construction agenda meets the contracting rules, and it is worth following step by step. Interior approved a $13 million no-bid contract to seal the pool, on the grounds that it had to look right for the 250th anniversary. At a May hearing, Democratic Representative Joe Neguse asked Burgum whether “serious injury to the government” would have occurred without the urgent contract. Burgum: “I suppose a lawyer could decide that... but I think that maybe all of us could all agree that we would want our nation’s capital looking great for the 250th. I mean, this is a common-sense decision.” The legal standard for skipping competitive bidding, notably, is not whether everyone can agree the result would be nice.
Then came the vandalism that wasn’t. Burgum promoted — and Trump amplified — a narrative that vandals had torn the lining from the pool. The US attorney for D.C., Jeanine Pirro, was tasked with prosecuting a man for the alleged crime and dropped the case in July for lack of evidence. In a court filing she conceded that “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by DOI.” In August, per the Globe, Pirro faced off with Burgum in the Oval Office, accusing him of misleading the president about why the renovation failed. So the pool needed $13 million of sealing because the previous sealing had been done badly, and the explanation for why it was done badly was, briefly, a criminal defendant.
The résumé
Burgum came to this via an unusually gilded path for an interior secretary. A North Dakota software entrepreneur, he sold his company to Microsoft in 2001, worked there as an executive, then moved through venture capital and real estate before becoming governor in 2016. He ran a short presidential campaign in 2024, dropped out, and was reportedly a finalist to be Trump’s running mate — before Donald Jr. and Eric Trump reportedly talked their father into JD Vance. The Senate confirmed him with 80 votes; only Marco Rubio drew more bipartisan support among this term’s Cabinet picks. “As governor, he had pieces of almost all of the portfolio as interior secretary,” said Brent Sanford, his former lieutenant governor. “He really had about as good a resume as you could probably have.”
Some of those 80 votes presumably reflected a hope that Burgum was, as Sanford put it, “more down the middle on his politics.” That hope has not been rewarded, at least according to Laura Daniel-Davis, acting deputy interior secretary from 2023 to 2025. “What I’ve seen is, essentially, a fealty to a constituency of one,” she said. Bernhardt hears the same facts and reaches the opposite verdict: “I think he’s done a fantastic job... what matters when you serve in those offices is what the president thinks because you serve at the president’s pleasure.” Both of these descriptions can be true simultaneously, which is sort of the point.
The critics add that the D.C. pageantry is crowding out the rest of the job: history has been scrubbed from national monuments, the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario have been renamed at Trump’s behest, wind and solar projects have been paused while oil and gas drilling expands. “We need him to do his whole job, not just run errands for the president,” Daniel-Davis said. Though if the department’s own position is that the Mall is a national park and the secretary is just doing park maintenance, then the errands are the job description — which is a neat trick, and possibly the most successful construction project of all.