Burgum said:

Again, I have to smile because, apparently... having been in the private sector for my whole life until being a governor, and then working in a state where we had to balance the budget, which is different.

I mean, if the federal government is like a ranch that, where they threw everything in the barn for 100 years, and great grandpa and grampy never threw anything away, and has accumulated everything and you never had to clean it out, that would be—that's what the federal government is. //

From administration to administration, Democrat and Republican, they have simply thrown things into the federal barn without any assessment of whether they have any purpose or use, and instead of assessing this, they hire people to manage or oversee the barn, without assessing whether its contents are even worthy of management or oversight.

Burgum continued,

And typically the federal government would send in a committee of 25 people who pick up one object, spend two weeks talking about, should we get rid of it, what did great grandpa use this for, maybe we should save it, it might be historic. What we're doing right now is emptying out the barn and deciding what should go back in. And what should go back in is what actually serves the American people. //

Take national parks for an example. There is so much overhead of people that work for the park system that don't work in a park. We could actually increase the number of people. Like this summer, we'll have more people working in Yellowstone than we had in 2020. More people working, but we could end up with fewer people across the whole park system. Because, guess what? We may not need that many people in IT, we may not need that many people in HR, there's things that we can do to streamline. And if we've got people who are in this business because they care about the environment and they care about our lands, we've got customer-facing, land-facing jobs available. We have 5,000 jobs posted to go work in the parks[..]. wildfire fighters, people that are for summer help, come work for us. But work in a job where we're serving the public as opposed to in D.C. or in a regional location, where you're just doing overhead that's part of the barn that's never been cleaned out. //

Random US Citizen
30 minutes ago
The federal government owns 640 million acres. That's almost 30% of the land in the U.S. Fully 80% of Nevada is owned by the feds. In Utah, it's 65%. While that's a lot of land to manage, that management shouldn't require 50% of its 80,000 employees to live in Washington D.C. Probably 800 of them should be in D.C. and the other 79,200 should be on or near the land that's being managed.