This story was produced by Public Domain and Fieldnotes and is co-published here by permission.
On April 23, 2025, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s aide received a text message from an employee at Continental Resources, the oil and gas behemoth founded by billionaire Harold Hamm. The Continental employee was writing to confirm the details of a get-together between the two powerful men at Oklahoma City’s Skirvin Hotel. Burgum, who runs a federal department that controls vast oil and gas resources, was at the hotel to attend a summit on energy and artificial intelligence hosted by the Hamm Institute for American Energy.
“The secretary will be meeting with Mr. Hamm at 5 PM in the Pearl Mesa room,” Burgum’s aide later confirmed.
Few Americans have such access to top government officials, but Hamm and Burgum have tight ties that go back to Burgum’s tenure as the governor of North Dakota. During the 2024 election cycle, Continental donated $250,000 to support Burgum’s run for president. Burgum has earned up to $50,000 in royalties since late 2022 from a lease his family signed allowing Hamm’s Continental to develop oil and gas on 200 acres of the family’s farm. (When he became Interior Secretary, Burgum was required to divest from his financial ties to Continental.) Burgum even blurbed Hamm’s memoir.
Hamm has not been shy about trumpeting his relationship with members of the Trump administration — particularly Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who he has called “a dream team of unimaginable proportions.”
It is unclear what exactly Hamm and Burgum discussed at their hotel room meeting. Burgum, however, made a major announcement that same day, telling the summit of tech leaders and energy executives that he planned to open more federal lands to oil, gas and mineral extraction while speeding up the issuance of permits.
Since then, the Interior Department has delivered a series of policy changes that have been favorable to oil and gas companies in the Western United States. Continental, which is controlled by Hamm and his family, has directly benefited. Public Domain and Fieldnotes obtained public records that show how Hamm’s company has used its access at the Interior Department to shape the Bureau of Land Management’s oil and gas oversight and obtain permits for new wells on federal land. Continental’s influence is particularly evident in Converse County, Wyoming, where Hamm’s company has staked much of its future.
Hamm’s company wanted federal drilling permits in Converse County, despite a court injunction that had halted BLM oil and gas permitting across much of the county. Emails show that a Continental staffer last summer contacted a top political appointee at Burgum’s Interior Department, providing a “roadmap” that laid out how the BLM could issue the permits anyway while effectively skirting the court injunction. The Interior Department and the BLM largely obliged. Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, the BLM has granted Continental permits for 71 new wells across the county.
“This reminds me of days of the Bush-Cheney administration’s massive push to drill the West, when it was obvious that the oil industry was calling the shots when it came to public land management,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of Western Watersheds Projects, a conservation group involved in litigation over oil and gas drilling in Wyoming.
“But we never had such direct and obvious proof that oil corporations were giving the orders, and BLM officials at the highest levels were obediently carrying them out.”
In a statement, an Interior Department spokesperson said that “Secretary Burgum has complied with all federal ethics requirements and remains committed to protecting America’s ability to responsibly use and care for our federal lands for the profit and benefit of future generations.”
A ‘roadmap’ around an injunction
Converse County, rich in federally-owned oil and gas resources, is critical for Hamm and his company. The county sits at the southern end of the Powder River Basin, which along with the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico, is one of the few U.S. regions where Continental believes it can grow oil production.
North Dakota’s Bakken is “tapped out,” said Hamm at an industry conference in Texas last May. “The only ones that really got a lot of growth is the Permian and the Powder.”
In 2020, the final year of the first Trump administration, the BLM greenlit up to 5,000 new oil and gas wells across 1.5 million acres in Converse County. Soon after, conservation and local landowner groups sued over the landscape-scale environmental impact statement underlying the decision. In the fall of 2024, a federal judge found that the BLM in its environmental review had relied on flawed modelling that overestimated available groundwater by a factor of 10,000. The judge issued an injunction that led BLM to temporarily pause the approval of new federal drilling permits across much of the county.
This caused a headache for Continental. At the same industry conference that Hamm spoke at in Texas last May, CEO Doug Lawler said that the company expected to run out of approved permits in the area by the end of the year. “In the Powder River Basin, the issue with the BLM and the speed with which permits have been approved is a major, major issue to us,” he told the crowd.
Last summer, things started to change. A couple months after the Hamm-Burgum confab in April 2025 in Oklahoma, a top Interior Department appointee received an email from an employee at Continental.
Continental was seeking permits for three wells in Converse County, some 30 miles northeast of Casper. In a June 3 email, the Continental staffer asked that the BLM review the company’s applications in accordance with the Interior Department’s new emergency permitting procedures. Continental also specifically requested that the BLM complete its environmental analysis of the applications “without tiering to or otherwise using the Environmental Impact Statement prepared for the Converse County Oil and Gas Project” (emphasis in original). In other words, the company explicitly did not want its permits associated with the environmental review that was the subject of the court injunction. Continental attached a six-page memo laying out a “roadmap” for how the BLM could do that.
The morning after receiving Continental’s email, Adam Suess, a former oil and gas executive then serving as Interior’s acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management, reached out to the BLM’s leadership seeking fast action on the request. “Please let’s talk today about the path forward,” he wrote.
When the acting BLM director suggested they follow the normal procedures, Ryan Hofmann, an advisor to Suess, agreed. “We would want to follow our established process if possible, and ensure that the WY office does the first stage in vetting,” Hofmann wrote.
Still, Suess sought to keep close tabs on Continental’s permits as they moved forward. “If you don’t mind, please keep us up to speed so that we can aid in your efforts,” he wrote to the BLM Wyoming office’s leadership in early June.
In August, the BLM began approving a flood of permits in Converse County, within the area covered by the 2020 environmental review that conservationists had sued over. Continental and other companies have since received approval to drill and frack hundreds of new wells.
The BLM had closely followed Continental’s suggested course of action, basing the approvals on an 18-year-old environmental impact statement as well as a pair of environmental assessments finalized in August and September. The agency, per Continental’s request, did not base the new permits on the 2020 environmental impact statement that was tied up in court. In following this strategy, the agency effectively circumvented the judge’s 2024 injunction that had hindered a slew of new federal drilling permits in Converse County.
Conservationists were confused to see permits getting approved, then frustrated when they learned about the workaround. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — a bedrock law that mandates environmental reviews for major federal actions, including drilling projects on federally-owned land — is being undermined, they believe.
“Continental effectively handed the agency a playbook for sidestepping the new NEPA analysis, and BLM was all too willing to follow it,” said Sarah Stellberg, a lawyer with Advocates for the West, which represents the conservation groups involved in the lawsuit over Converse County oil and gas drilling. “The priority was clear: Move permits out the door and sideline environmental safeguards.”
Continental Resources did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
‘A changed world’
Maria Katherman, a local who has lived in Converse County for 30 years, says what the BLM is doing is “dishonest.”
“We have regulatory protections that if you have a landscape-level development, then you also have a landscape-level environmental analysis of its impacts,” said Katherman, who is on the board of the Powder River Basin Resource Council, a group involved in the lawsuit. Now, the BLM is allowing oil and gas development to surge ahead without the proper analysis, “but it still is having those landscape-level impacts to the water, to the wildlife,” she said.
In contrast, Hamm seems elated. “It’s a changed world, all of a sudden,” he said, speaking in October 2025 at a summit hosted by the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. “You can get permits in Converse County, Wyoming for the first time.”
In February 2026, the federal judge threw out the disputed 2020 environmental impact statement for oil and gas development in Converse County because it didn’t consider alternatives that would have slowed the pace of development and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. It was a win for the conservation groups who challenged the project. The state of Wyoming, Continental, and Devon Energy are now appealing that decision.
Despite the court’s ruling, the BLM continues to sign off on new drilling permits in Converse County using workarounds. Since Trump took office for a second time, the agency has approved a total of 511 wells within the county — 482 of them within the area covered by the now-vacated environmental impact statement. The majority of the drilling permits have gone to Anschutz Exploration, Devon Energy, Continental, and Anadarko Petroleum. These totals don’t include wells drilled on private land to access privately-owned minerals.
As the drilling boom continues, it’s changing the landscape irrevocably. Katherman used to ride her horse in the area where much of the oil and gas development is occurring. She’d see antelope, eagles, and sage grouse on the windswept steppe.
“One of the great beauties is the open sky, because you can stand there and you can see for miles and miles,” she said. Now, “you see flares, you see well pads, you see a tremendous amount of truck traffic.”
Hamm, on the other hand, seems pleased with the changes the Trump administration has made to public land policy.
“Some of the regulatory hurdles that was there before, they’ve been removed,” he said at an event in Washington, DC in January. “And that does lower our cost of doing business.”
Ted Auch contributed to this report.
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