Department of the Interior (DOI) Secretary David Bernhardt told Breitbart News Daily on Friday at the 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that the Trump administration is a stark contrast to the socialism the Democrat Party is promising to impose on the country if it wins the White House in 2020.
“Here’s the contrast,” Bernhardt said. “The socialists have come up with the concept of the great Green New Deal.”
“Which, really, they even admit, is a policy to control the lives of Americans,” Bernhardt said. “You contrast that with President Trump’s vision for America, which has been to unleash our energy potential on federal lands and eliminate the paralysis by analysis that’s been caused by regulation.”
“Regulations have literally gotten to the point where they were so burdensome that they were freezing the government from making decisions,” Bernhardt said. “And the president came in and said, ‘Look, let’s ensure that we have clean air, clean water, health, and human safety, but let’s find a way to do those things — maintain those values — and at the same time have a common sense approach to the business that we need to have in our country to fast-track economic opportunity, to develop natural resources.’”
Bernhardt said over the past three years his agency has worked to “dramatically modify our regulatory paradigm in a way that didn’t sacrifice those high values but at the same time dramatically has allowed us speed up our decision making process.”
Breitbart News Daily host Matthew Boyle asked Bernhardt to explain why energy independence is part of the president’s vision for the country.
“The United States has become a net energy exporter, which was really not thought of years ago,” Bernhardt said. “And largely because of American innovation and technology through the utilization of new development techniques, and those techniques started in the mid-2000s and really benefited private land.”
“When we come into office the president recognized that there was an opportunity for those technologies to be more utilized on public land,” Bernhardt said, referring to hydraulic fracturing, a technology that has been around since 1862 but reached its peak performance over the last few decades.
As the largest manager of land in the United States, DOI has a huge responsibility, Bernhardt said.
“Interior alone manages one of every five acres of land in the United States,” Bernhardt said.
“What we’ve done responsibly is allow people to move forward with proposals that have dramatically improved things,” Bernhardt said. “This year for the first time ever we had on federal lands and Indian lands that we manage together over one billion barrels of oil were produced.”
Bernhardt said that DOI has increased the number of permits for drilling wells by 300 percent.
“And the revenue to the American public has dramatically increased — nearly doubled,” Bernhardt said, adding that energy independence has also bolstered national security when the United States is not dependent on nations that may not have our country’s best interests in mind.
“We have fundamentally changed the game and that is really a testament to [Trump’s] belief in American innovation, American technology and [a] commonsense regulatory paradigm,” Bernhardt said.
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