The Oil Industry’s Inside Woman Hid Public Records at Trump’s Interior

Kate MacGregor, President Trump's nominee for the No. 2 post at the Interior Department, participated in systematically concealing public records of her meetings during her previous tenure at the agency, according to documents obtained by Fieldnotes. As a key fixer for the fossil fuel industry during Trump's first term, MacGregor's official meeting records were stored in Google Docs that she then failed to preserve—effectively hiding information about her extensive interactions with oil & gas executives, including Trump megadonor and Continental Resources chairman Harold Hamm.

MacGregor was a key player in Trump's first term, rising from Assistant Secretary to Deputy Secretary of the Interior and staying in the agency all four years. Viewed as both competent and capable of keeping out of the limelight, MacGregor was the go-to DOI official for the oil industry. In a closed-door meeting in 2017, oil lobbyists were caught on tape bragging that they knew her "very well" and that if there was a problem, "We'll call Kate." That boast proved prescient when she fast tracked "deficient" permits for a well-connected oil company that same year, as was revealed by Documented and Public Citizen in 2019.

With her confirmation hearing set for April 2, MacGregor is poised to return to the No. 2 position at DOI, where her fans expect her to again wield considerable influence. As Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) told the Trump transition team in November 2024 while recommending MacGregor for the top job at Interior, she has proved herself “very effective at bending the bureaucracy to the administration’s will.”

A longtime legislative staffer on Capitol Hill, MacGregor was particularly effective at concealing records of her meetings with oil companies during the first Trump administration. During her first two years at DOI, MacGregor and her then-boss, David Bernhardt, held 12 times more meetings with fossil energy companies than with non-fossil interests, according to an analysis of their official calendars. But breaking with previous practice, notes, briefings, and other records related to MacGregor’s meetings were often stored in Google Docs that were never preserved as federal records, making them unrecoverable by public records officials and, as a result, preventing the public from ever seeing them.

In one instance, MacGregor met with Harold Hamm in 2017 to discuss the Bureau of Land Management’s venting and flaring rule, an Obama-era regulation intended to reduce methane emissions and boost royalty payments from drilling on public lands. Hamm, a major political and financial backer of Trump then and now, is the billionaire chairman of Continental Resources, a major fracking company with interests on public lands in North Dakota and Wyoming. Continental was one of the biggest players in North Dakota, and was systematically burning a massive amount of gas from its wells on public lands—the very issue the BLM’s rule was supposed to address.

Documents obtained via Freedom of Information Act request reveal that, on April 3, 2017, an assistant emailed MacGregor a briefing—a Google Doc titled "0404 Domestic Producers Alliance Mtg”—for her meeting with Harold Hamm and other oil executives the following day. A Freedom of Information Act request for documents from that meeting was filed on May 31, 2017. After seven years, the request could only be completed in part because the Google Docs created by DOI could not be accessed by records officials and the record holders, including MacGregor, did not comply with the request. The use of Google Docs implies MacGregor was not following record-preserving procedure either by failing to maintain records as she should under the Federal Records Act or alternatively disposing of information against DOI protocols. This same destruction of public records played out multiple times, with multiple hot-button issues, including with executive and secretarial orders related to offshore drilling and coal, according to partial records obtained by Fieldnotes.

The Trump administration declined to answer questions about MacGregor’s incomplete recordkeeping. Instead, Interior spokesperson Katie Martin responded with a lengthy statement that read, in part: “This line of attack from the media is a desperate and lame attempt to take down an extremely well qualified woman nominated to a leadership position in the Trump administration.” Attempts to reach MacGregor via her last known employer, NextEra Energy, were unsuccessful. Meanwhile, a woman who answered when Fieldnotes called a phone number known to be associated with MacGregor hung up after the researcher identified themselves. "I'm not doing that, sorry," the woman said. A follow-up text to that same number detailing the missing records similarly went unanswered.

While the vast majority of the records in question have been lost, some documentation from the meeting with Hamm was captured in a memo to then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. The memo, obtained via Freedom of Information Act request, includes a list of grievances the oil industry had with the BLM’s venting and flaring rule.

MacGregor, it appears, went on to spearhead efforts to kill the rule, following the oil & gas industry’s playbook of suspending implementation and ultimately repealing and replacing it with a much weaker one.

As part of that effort, oil & gas trade group Western Energy Alliance met with MacGregor on April 25, 2017, to discuss the original rule. In an internal memo to WEA members, Kathleen Sgamma—then the group’s president, now Trump’s pick to lead BLM—wrote: “I left Kate with a document of suggested next steps on the methane rule which had been developed by our legal team and vetted with litigation funders.” Soon after, DOI followed Sgamma’s recommendations by suspending the rule and eventually repealing the Obama-era requirements.

In December 2017, Sgamma sent a note thanking Zinke for suspending the rule, writing: “We wish to specifically recognize the efforts of Kate MacGregor regarding executing on the energy dominance agenda.”