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Wright, Burgum, and Zeldin Hold a National Energy Dominance Council Town Hall in Utqiagvik, Jun. 1, 2025

June 1, 2025 · U.S. Department of Energy · 0:56:50

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin held a National Energy Dominance Council town hall in Utqiagvik, Alaska, in the Department of Energy’s upload of the June 1, 2025 community session. The moderator noted the visit was, as far as the hosts could determine, the first time the three officials who lead the council — Burgum as chair, Wright as vice chair, and Zeldin as a member — had come to Alaska together, and the first such cabinet visit to Utqiagvik itself, as the session’s hosts stated it.

North Slope community leaders addressed the officials directly, including Arctic Slope Regional Corporation President Rex Allen Rock Sr., who thanked the secretaries and described his people’s history of preserving their culture and control of their destiny against federal decisions made far away, as he recounted it. Wright, responding, said he could not be more in agreement, and that he was humbled to be among people who had lived in the region for 10,000 years in one of the toughest places on earth to live. The session followed a stakeholders meeting in Anchorage on the Alaska LNG project and the state’s energy and mining sectors, as the hosts described the trip.

Why it matters

Utqiagvik is the NEDC’s leadership taking its Alaska agenda to the community that lives on top of it — and hearing, on the record, that local control of land and destiny is the condition the North Slope sets. Wright’s agreement, stated from the council’s vice chair seat, is the administration’s Alaska pitch in its most exposed setting.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the National Energy Dominance Council’s first joint Alaska visit, June 1, 2025 — the council’s chair, vice chair, and EPA member in Utqiagvik together, as the session’s hosts stated it, with the Alaska LNG project among the trip’s subjects. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of Energy, “National Energy Dominance Council Town Hall in Utqiagvik, Alaska - June 1, 2025” (official upload, embedded above; proceedings as delivered at the session, including remarks by Secretary Wright, Secretary Burgum, and Administrator Zeldin).