Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said the natural assets of the U.S.could be worth triple the country’s $36.6 trillion national debt during a Wednesday policy event hosted by Breitbart News.

The conference, just blocks away from the White House in Washington, DC, featured fiery statements from Burgum as he was interviewed on stage by Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matt Boyle:

“You’ve heard more than once or twice or 10 times that we have 36 and a half trillion dollars of debt. I mean, it’s in advertisements. We hear it,” Burgum, the former governor of North Dakota, said. “We hear it, and and I would invite anybody here from the media side [to] do what I did when I was going through my Senate hearings.”

Describing how he has only moved to Washington, DC recently to join President Donald Trump’s cabinet, Burgum said he started off by asking anyone “in a position of authority or experience” about the national debt. 

“I said, you know, ‘What’s our debt?’ 36 and a half trillion. ‘What are our assets?’ I mean, I challenge anybody to go try to find a current balance sheet for the United States of America,” the secretary said incredulously. 

“And if you come up with one, it might be some financial assets,” he continued, before bringing up national land that could be used as an “asset” to offset the debt:

… I can tell you, as the head of Interior, where just in Interior, we’ve got 500 million acres of surface. Brook Rollins has another 200 million in the U.S. Forest Service, in U.S. grasslands. So 700 million acres of surface, there’s 700 million acres of subsurface that we have the mineral rights, critical minerals, oil and gas, you know, metallurgical and thermal coal resources. 

And there’s 2.5 billion acres of offshore, many of which have not been even explored. All of which represent huge, huge assets for us. So if you take our forests, our lands, our grasslands, our lands that are near urban areas, our mineral resources or offshore resources, I think the number is… Double, triple, what our national debt is. It could be a 100 trillion. 

According to Burgum, Americans would feel more secure about the looming national debt if they knew what the country’s natural assets are. 

“You know that announcement might lower the 10-year rate on interest rates because people [would] say ‘Wow, these guys got it covered and they have a plan on how they’re going to be able to pay down this debt and they’re actually in really good shape.'”

WATCH the full conversation below: