Gov. Greg Gianforte (R., Mont.) wears many hats. In addition to representing Montana as its governor, he also serves as the chair of the Republican Governors Association (RGA), which will see plenty of action this year.
In an interview with the Washington Reporter, Gianforte laid out his goals for this cycle: ensuring that “Montana is open for business” and keeping as many states Republican-led after the November elections.
“This is a huge year,” Gianforte said. “We have 36 governor’s races this year. That’s basically the entire country. It’s a jump ball. And there couldn’t be a stronger contrast between red states and blue states. In red states, we’re seeing lowering taxes, we’re seeing support for law enforcement. We’re seeing job creation. We’re seeing in-migration. In blue states, we’re seeing higher taxes, less respect for law enforcement, and out-migration. Americans are voting with their feet because their wallets matter, and we’re seeing it in Montana.”
“If you care about your take home pay, if you care about your freedoms, if you care about keeping boys off of girls sports teams, you need to vote for Republican governors,” he explained.
While the stakes are high this cycle, Gianforte said the RGA is “very pragmatic” when it comes to its investments. “We’re going to engage where we can make a difference,” he explained. “And there are some real battleground states coming up this year that we can make a difference in.”
He laid out several of his organization’s defensive and offensive priorities: “Joe Lombardo in Nevada has done a great job. That’s a defend for us. Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, she’s done a great job. That’s a defend. Brian Kemp in Georgia has chosen to retire. That’s a purple state; that’s going to be a fight. Ohio, the same thing. Kansas is a Republican state. We just need a Republican governor. Arizona is Republican state. We just need a Republican governor. And Michigan, Wisconsin, we have opportunities this year. Tom Tiffany in Wisconsin. In Michigan, we’ve got a Democrat running as an independent. They’re going to split the vote. That’s an opportunity for us.”
Gianforte has found that businessmen in particular have been effective governors, “because a governor is essentially the CEO of a state,” he said.
“We’ve seen this, whether it was Doug Ducey in Arizona or Pete Ricketts or Bill Haslam in Tennessee,” he added. “What I found is that the leadership qualities necessary to run a private sector business are nearly identical to running the executive branch of government, and this is why I think Doug Burgum was so successful as governor in North Dakota. It’s the reason why Doug Ducey did such a good job in Arizona, and we’ve seen many other cases. We’re just better off when we have people running states who have business backgrounds.”
One of the most important ways that governors of both parties impact federal policy is by presiding over redistricting sessions, Gianforte told the Reporter, and the Montana governor wants to see “fair districts” across America.
“We shouldn’t have elections where people have cheated to win, because when we allow cheating, and in particular drawing unfair districting, like we saw in Virginia, people stopped trusting government, and they feel aggrieved, we’ve saw, with some of the violence we’ve seen erupt, that they feel they have to take matters into their own hands,” he said. “I don’t think that’s good for our republic. It’s not good for our future.” In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.), for example, moved to redraw Florida’s congressional map ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Along with Gianforte’s national role, he keeps close tabs on local policies, visiting every county in his state every year. As governor, he’s also worked to position Montana as a leader on everything from tax cuts to housing affordability to energy policy.
When it comes to taxes, “lower is always better,” the longtime businessman said. When Gianforte was in Congress, he was the only member of Congress who had run a public company. “It’s better in two ways. It’s better because when you let people keep more of what they work so hard to earn, they know how to spend it better than the state does. Also, if you’re a conservative like I am, and you believe in a limited scope of government, when you lower taxes, you are inhibiting the growth of government services in a way that would not be possible with higher taxes.”
In Montana, he explained, “we’ve done three major tax reductions since I came into office. We’ve had three legislative sessions, and we’ve incrementally brought them down. But that was only possible because we had spending discipline. Sometimes people say ‘if you lower taxes, you’re going to have a deficit, and then you’re going to have to do special things.’ Well, we paired spending discipline with lower taxes, and what we got was higher revenues,” he said. “We’ve had significant budget surpluses in each of the sessions that we’ve had so far, and that’s allowed us to fix what was broken. We rebuilt. We’re rebuilding our mental health hospital. We’ve invested $300 million in behavioral health. We’ve raised teacher pay. We’re rebuilding our entire prison system. We hadn’t built a new prison cell in 50 years, everyone’s going to be new by the time I come out of office, we’ve taken care of all the deferred maintenance on all the capital buildings that we have.”
The results have been clear. “I paid off the entire debt. Montana has no debt, and we still had money left over, and we sent almost every Montana family a check for almost $4,000, all while lowering taxes. But the thing that made that possible was not growing the size of government…This last session, 2025, we kept budget growth to less than 1 percent per year, and what that’s meant is we end up with some money left over in the piggy bank when we’re done.”
“We need government,” he said. “But there are some people in this country who want government to do everything. I think when you blend the role of government into other areas, it’s not very good. As an example, state government is not a particularly good parent. We can’t raise kids. And yet, when I came into office, we found ourselves with one of the highest per capita number of kids in foster care in the country, and we tackled that problem head on with conservative approaches. We passed a $7,500 adoption tax credit that’s refundable, and then I started an office at the Health and Human Services area called the Faith in Community Service Office that allows faith-based nonprofit organizations to work with the state agencies to recruit adoptive parents and support adoptive parents.”
“Since I came into office,” he continued, “we’ve reduced the number of kids in the state foster care system by almost 50 percent; this is 1,500 kids who now have permanent loving homes that they did not have before by building public-private partnerships and letting the state do what it does well: making and enforcing law, ensuring public safety, and letting the church and families do what they do so well, which is raise families and strengthen marriages.”
Another policy focus area for Gianforte is housing affordability, which he called the “number one issue facing working families, just because of the cost of housing.” And he managed to do it in a bipartisan way.
In Montana, he said, “we took this on head on. I started a governor’s task force on affordable housing. We had national think tank people, we had Democrats, we had Republicans, we had county commissioners, mayors, and I asked them to cast a really broad net and bring me a set of suggested policies that would unleash the private sector to improve housing affordability.”
“There are a couple of things that we realized in that process,” he said. “One is that 40 percent of the cost of a new home is government regulations. We also learned that we don’t have a demand problem, we have a supply problem. So we worked in three areas. One, if you want more houses, you need more carpenters, plumbers, and electricians. So we changed our apprenticeship ratios, and in the process, quadrupled the number of apprenticeship slots in Montana. Secondly, all of the money available for infrastructure was for urban redevelopment, not for new projects. Out of our surplus, we put $150 million into a low interest revolving loan fund specifically for water and sewer, for developments that had at least ten units per acre. This allowed communities to build workforce housing. And then, thirdly, and this is the biggest area, we got rid of all the zoning restrictions; we now allow duplexes anywhere you can put a single family home.”
Gianforte said that housing affordability is one of the only areas where his counterparts across the aisle have been willing to work with him. “One Democratic governor called me after seeing what we did on housing affordability, and said, ‘Greg, could you call some of my Republican legislators and tell them what you did? I want to pass this stuff in my state.’”
That lack of bipartisanship, he said, is “why I’m so involved with the RGA: because I see these free market, smaller government approaches making it easier for people to attain the American Dream. If there are areas we can work on, I’m happy to do it. There’s just not as much common ground as I’d like.”
Gianforte saw that partisanship firsthand when President Joe Biden was in charge. “We couldn’t get a return phone call from Biden,” he said. “They weren’t a partner. They were a wall. On one particular issue [of border security] that was critically important to Montana, I wrote a letter, and 26 other governors signed on. So that’s a majority of the U.S. governors signing the letter. I sent it to Biden and I waited almost three and a half years. All it asked for was a meeting. I didn’t get a return phone call for three and a half years.”
The Trump administration, on the other hand, has been an open book for Montanans. “We’ve had multiple cabinet secretaries to Montana over and over again,” he said. “Many of the Cabinet Secretaries, I have their personal cell phone numbers. They return texts and calls, and we’ve had Secretary Doug Burgum out. Secretary Chris Wright has been out. I communicate with Secretary Brooke Rollins on a regular basis. It is night and day.”
That collaboration, he said, goes in “both directions.” Gianforte and Trump cabinet members are “working an issue right now that I think is a violation of the Interstate Commerce Clause; Montana has 40 percent of North America’s coal…We don’t have a West Coast coal port. We have to ship through Canada, through the Port of Vancouver….I’m using our office, really, as a convener to bring people together, and that’s going to include the large railroads, the coal mines, some of our buyers in the Pacific Rim, the Department of Energy, the Department of Interior, as well. They’ve been very helpful.”
Wright, he said, is a personal friend, but his relationship with Burgum — dating back decades — has proved particularly helpful. Burgum, Gianforte said, is “doing a great job. And I’ve known Doug for a long time. We were both in the software industry. When he was running Great Plains, I was running my software company. In fact, I tried to recruit him to my board of directors over 20 years ago, but there was no way to get from Fargo to Bozeman at the time.”
“It’s great to have a Westerner dealing with western lands issues, whether it’s the parks or BLM, and his leadership on the National Energy Dominance Council has been fantastic,” he said. “There are few people who know more about energy infrastructure than him and Secretary Wright.”
Below is a transcript of our interview with Gov. Greg Gianforte (R., Mont.), lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
People pay a great amount of attention to what 2026 is going to look like on a federal level. What are you looking at with governor’s races across the country as Chair of the Republican Governors Association?
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
This is a huge year. I would encourage everybody to get out and vote. We have 36 governor’s races this year. That’s basically the entire country. It’s a jump ball. And there couldn’t be a stronger contrast between red states and blue states. In red states, we’re seeing lowering taxes, we’re seeing support for law enforcement. We’re seeing job creation. We’re seeing in-migration. In blue states, we’re seeing higher taxes, less respect for law enforcement, and out-migration. Americans are voting with their feet because their wallets matter, and we’re seeing it in Montana. I had a call just in the last month with a business owner, in a state west of ours, and they’re looking at moving over 1,000 positions from their state to Montana. They’ve just put a deposit on some property. And he said to me, ‘governor, if we make this decision, I have one requirement: you need to come to my corporate headquarters, and you and I will do a press conference together, and I’m going to explain to these knuckleheads why I’m leaving here.’ This is not an isolated case. And if you care about your take home pay, if you care about your freedoms, if you care about keeping boys off of girls sports teams, you need to vote for Republican governors.
Washington Reporter:
You’re talking about the difference between the Republican governors and the Democratic governors. When you’re making the pitch as Montana for these businesses in states like California or Oregon or Washington, how do you make the case for Montana over any of the other Republican-run states?
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
It’s not just taxes; since I came into office, we’ve had some of the largest tax cuts in Montana history, letting people keep the fruits of their labor. But we’ve also been working on the regulatory side. The lieutenant governor has headed up our red tape relief effort. We’ve now removed 1,900 regulations from the state code. It’s about 35 percent that we’ve either eliminated or streamlined, and this just removes the friction. Our pitch is pretty simple. Montana is a sanctuary for freedom and free enterprise, and they can’t get permits in these other states. We’ve streamlined permitting; on every area that matters to business, we’ve made it easier. Montana is open for business.
Washington Reporter:
For the Democrats, so many of their potential 2028 candidates are current Democratic governors; you were just laying out the failures that we’ve seen in some of these states like California. Look at Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Wes Moore, Josh Shapiro; several of these are in-cycle Democrats. Do they have a track record that you think that Democrats should lean in on?
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
We even saw Kathy Hochul here recently. She, as New York’s Governor, said that you should do your civic duty and just pay higher taxes. I don’t think that’s a compelling argument. She couldn’t have done herself or her state more of a disservice, but at least she put her cards on the table. We see Abigail Spanberger campaigning as a moderate and then doing a bait and switch once she gets into office. That’s not fair to the citizens of Virginia, with now the rigging of the districts to maintain their power to eliminate the Republican voice from the state. We saw in the initiative that it’s pretty close to 50-50, but not in the redistricting plan. In Republican-led states, we’re seeing significant wage growth, we’re seeing lower taxes. We’re seeing prosperity. We’re seeing the American Dream in closer reach, and that’s in stark contrast to what we’re seeing in the states that you mentioned. The RGA is very pragmatic. We’re going to engage where we can make a difference. And there are some real battleground states coming up this year that we can make a difference in. Joe Lombardo in Nevada has done a great job. That’s a defend for us. Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, she’s done a great job. That’s a defend. Brian Kemp in Georgia has chosen to retire. That’s a purple state; that’s going to be a fight. Ohio, the same thing. Kansas is a Republican state. We just need a Republican governor. Arizona is Republican state. We just need a Republican governor. And Michigan, Wisconsin, we have opportunities this year. Tom Tiffany in Wisconsin. In Michigan, we’ve got a Democrat running as an independent. They’re going to split the vote. That’s an opportunity for us. So we’re being very pragmatic about how we approach this, because it matters to the people sitting at the kitchen table trying to figure out how to balance a checkbook and get their kids into college and put shoes on their kids in the fall for school.
Washington Reporter:
Are there issues that you’re seeing on these statewide elections that you aren’t seeing in federal races?
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
It’s really kitchen table issues. I get to every county in Montana every year. We just kicked off our tenth 56 county tour.
Washington Reporter:
Be careful, I might be joining you on one of these.
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
You can come, shadow along. We do it every two weeks or so, and we do a whirlwind. As long as you have enough stamina, you’re welcome to come with us. I’ve seen this when I talk to a county sheriff, for example. He told me that the individuals he has in his county detention center have behavioral health issues. We have drugs in our community, that’s driving a lot of our crime. This is a direct result of the open border policy with the southern border, and yet we have blue states where they refuse to work with federal law enforcement. It’s doesn’t line up. For our farmers, mostly they want precipitation and lower input costs. It just depends on the community that we’re in.
Washington Reporter:
The Supreme Court made a landmark decision on redistricting; this looks like it will really impact Louisiana. Ron DeSantis has suggested this will impact Florida. What do you want to see Republican governors do in the wake of the Callais decision?
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
We need fair districts. We shouldn’t have elections where people have cheated to win, because when we allow cheating, and in particular drawing unfair districting, like we saw in Virginia, people stopped trusting government, and they feel aggrieved, we’ve saw, with some of the violence we’ve seen erupt, that they feel they have to take matters into their own hands. I don’t think that’s good for our republic. It’s not good for our future. We redistricted Montana. We only have two congressional districts. When people feel like they were cheated in an election, it doesn’t produce a good result.
Washington Reporter:
I’m from Maryland, so I have to ask your assessment on Wes Moore’s tenure as governor, especially with the bridge collapse in Baltimore.
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
My advice: stop worrying about running for president and run the state. He took a surplus and turned it into a deficit. Infrastructure is falling apart. He has some work at home to take care of.
Washington Reporter
Shifting closer to home, how does your background, both federally working in Congress in the past and in business, inform your perspective as governor? What are you drawing on from your time in Congress and your time in business as you look at what you want Montana’s tax levels to be?
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
Lower is always better. We need government. But there are some people in this country who want government to do everything. I think when you blend the role of government into other areas, it’s not very good. As an example, state government is not a particularly good parent. We can’t raise kids. And yet, when I came into office, we found ourselves with one of the highest per capita number of kids in foster care in the country, and we tackled that problem head on with conservative approaches. We passed a $7,500 adoption tax credit that’s refundable, and then I started an office at the Health and Human Services area called the Faith in Community Service Office that allows faith-based nonprofit organizations to work with the state agencies to recruit adoptive parents and support adoptive parents. Since I came into office, we’ve reduced the number of kids in the state foster care system by almost 50 percent; this is 1,500 kids who now have permanent loving homes that they did not have before by building public-private partnerships and letting the state do what it does well: making and enforcing law, ensuring public safety, and letting the church and families do what they do so well, which is raise families and strengthen marriages. In the area of tax, I believe that lower is always better. It’s better in two ways. It’s better because when you let people keep more of what they work so hard to earn, they know how to spend it better than the state does. Also, if you’re a conservative like I am, and you believe in a limited scope of government, when you lower taxes, you are inhibiting the growth of government services in a way that would not be possible with higher taxes. We’ve done three major tax reductions since I came into office. We’ve had three legislative sessions, and we’ve incrementally brought them down. But that was only possible because we had spending discipline. Sometimes people say ‘if you lower taxes, you’re going to have a deficit, and then you’re going to have to do special things.’ Well, we paired spending discipline with lower taxes, and what we got was higher revenues. We’ve had significant budget surpluses in each of the sessions that we’ve had so far, and that’s allowed us to fix what was broken. We rebuilt. We’re rebuilding our mental health hospital. We’ve invested $300 million in behavioral health. We’ve raised teacher pay. We’re rebuilding our entire prison system. We hadn’t built a new prison cell in 50 years, everyone’s going to be new by the time I come out of office, we’ve taken care of all the deferred maintenance on all the capital buildings that we have. I paid off the entire debt. Montana has no debt, and we still had money left over, and we sent almost every Montana family a check for almost $4,000, all while lowering taxes. But the thing that made that possible was not growing the size of government. The rule for me is you have things you have to add into a budget, like workers deserve wages, but we’ve kept the growth of state government to significantly less than the rate of inflation. This last session, 2025, we kept budget growth to less than 1 percent per year, and what that’s meant is we end up with some money left over in the piggy bank when we’re done.
Washington Reporter:
Housing policy is something that you have been leading the way on that isn’t immediately thought of when you think about Montana. Are there ways that you’ve been working with the Trump administration on that, and what have been your policies that have led to both businesses wanting to relocate to Montana and people themselves, on an individual basis, relocating to Montana?
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
Housing affordability is the number one issue facing working families, just because of the cost of housing. We took this on head on. I started a governor’s task force on affordable housing. We had national think tank people, we had Democrats, we had Republicans, we had county commissioners, mayors, and I asked them to cast a really broad net and bring me a set of suggested policies that would unleash the private sector to improve housing affordability. And there are a couple of things that we realized in that process. One is that 40 percent of the cost of a new home is government regulations. We also learned that we don’t have a demand problem, we have a supply problem. So we worked in three areas. One, if you want more houses, you need more carpenters, plumbers, and electricians. So we changed our apprenticeship ratios, and in the process, quadrupled the number of apprenticeship slots in Montana. Secondly, all of the money available for infrastructure was for urban redevelopment, not for new projects. Out of our surplus, we put $150 million into a low interest revolving loan fund specifically for water and sewer, for developments that had at least ten units per acre. This allowed communities to build workforce housing. And then, thirdly, and this is the biggest area, we got rid of all the zoning restrictions; we now allow duplexes anywhere you can put a single family home. We allow ADUs. We required every community of at least 5,000 people to have a master growth plan that’s fully vetted by the public, so that when a developer walks in and says ‘I want to do this subdivision,’ if it matches the growth plan, we can just hand them a permit. There’s no public meetings. In all, there’s between two and three dozen reforms that we’ve implemented, enough that one national publication, their headline, when they wrote about what we did, called us “The anti-California: how Montana performed a miracle in housing.” But here’s the result. In our largest communities, we’ve seen rents come down 15 to 20 percent. We just announced a national study. Montana is number one in the country for new housing starts per capita by two times over the nearest other state. Stripping away the red tape and letting the free market respond to the need for affordable housing, and that has put us in a much better position.
Washington Reporter:
How was working with and/or against the Biden administration compared to working with the Trump administration on American energy dominance?
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
We couldn’t get a return phone call from Biden. They weren’t a partner. They were a wall. On one particular issue that was critically important to Montana, I wrote a letter, and 26 other governors signed on. So that’s a majority of the U.S. governors signing the letter. I sent it to Biden and I waited almost three and a half years. All it asked for was a meeting. I didn’t get a return phone call for three and a half years. In fact, I was at the White House at an NGA meeting, and it was highly scripted. They said the Democrats are going to get one question, and the Republicans got one question, and the questions had to be submitted two days in advance of the meeting. President Biden was feeling his oats that day, and after he answered the two arranged questions, he said, ‘any other questions?’ And I just happened to be there in the front row, and I stuck my hand up, and he says, ‘yes, governor,’ and I just happened to have a copy of the letter with me. I pulled it out, and I said, ‘Mr. President, this is the letter I sent to you three years ago asking for a meeting. We would still like to have the meeting.’ And he came over, and I handed it to him, and he read it, and it was really sad. He spent 25 minutes answering the question. And all I can say, it was a very long walk in a big pasture. The issue I wanted to talk with him about was border security.
Washington Reporter:
As you’ve gone to these NGA meetings, have you found areas that you can work on with your Democratic counterparts?
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
Well, it’s not border security. I don’t know why they want open borders, but they do. The housing affordability is one that I’ve spoken at NGA about. One Democratic governor called me after seeing what we did on housing affordability, and said, ‘Greg, could you call some of my Republican legislators and tell them what you did? I want to pass this stuff in my state.’ So that’s one. We have common ground on trades education. But I will say, that’s why I’m so involved with the RGA: because I see these free market, smaller government approaches making it easier for people to attain the American Dream. If there are areas we can work on, I’m happy to do it. There’s just not as much common ground as I’d like.
Washington Reporter:
Can you contrast what you were just saying with the Biden administration compared to what you’ve seen in the first year and a half or so of the second Trump administration?
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
We’ve had multiple cabinet secretaries to Montana over and over again. Many of the Cabinet Secretaries, I have their personal cell phone numbers. They return texts and calls, and we’ve had Secretary Doug Burgum out. Secretary Chris Wright has been out. I communicate with Secretary Brooke Rollins on a regular basis. It is night and day.
Washington Reporter:
What issues are you working on with them? Burgum is at interior, Wright is at energy, Rollins is at ag; are they coming to help you out? Are you showing them what they could be doing elsewhere?
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
It’s both directions. We’re working an issue right now that I think is a violation of the Interstate Commerce Clause; Montana has 40 percent of North America’s coal. This last year, I did an economic development trip to Korea and Japan, and two years ago, to Taiwan. They buy a lot of our coal. We don’t have a West Coast coal port. We have to ship through Canada, through the Port of Vancouver. Japan and Korea and Taiwan would like to buy more of our low sulfur coal. We don’t have a way to get it to them. So this is one issue we’ve been working on. In fact, we’re going to have a summit in June in Billings to talk about a coal port. I’m using our office, really, as a convener to bring people together, and that’s going to include the large railroads, the coal mines, some of our buyers in the Pacific Rim, the Department of Energy, the Department of Interior, as well. They’ve been very helpful.
Washington Reporter:
Can you talk about Colstrip in Montana and how that fits in with the American energy independence?
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
We should be pursuing on all of the above energy policy. Montana’s portfolio is already 60 percent renewables, because we have a large portion of hydroelectric; that’s good clean energy. We have people like Berkshire Hathaway and Nexterra that are literally investing billions of dollars into renewable infrastructure, whether it’s battery storage, wind, solar, we’re supportive of all of the above. We just got an announcement from the U.S. Air Force. They’re going to put a small nuclear reactor in Great Falls on the Air Force base there, but Colstrip gives us reliable baseload power, and when I came into office, the very viability of Colstrip was threatened because we’re a net energy exporter. We have a large transmission line that goes all the way to Seattle. Montana has been keeping the lights on in Seattle for decades using beautiful, clean coal. They don’t like it. Their regulatory boards have decided they don’t want any electrons that are powered by coal, even if it’s coming all the way from Montana, and they were threatening to shut Colstrip down, which would have destabilized the grid, driven electricity prices through the roof, and caused huge economic damage. There was a study by the University of Montana that said this would reduce employment in Montana by about 5,000 people. It was a major issue. So I worked that issue, and ultimately we negotiated a deal, but the state was not a principle. I was just kind of, as I used to say, broker, no fee to get Puget to transfer their equity to our utility, and Avista to transfer their equity to our utility. And the net result is now the utility that operates in Montana has a majority interest in Colstrip, and they actually want to operate at a long term basis. So from an investment portfolio perspective, we cleaned up the cap table so that ownership is concentrated with people who actually can continue to operate Colstrip. Now the transmission infrastructure is already there. Through a $700 million grant from the Department of Energy, we’re building an electrical transmission line east from Colstrip to connect with the central grid. The North Plains Connector. And Colstrip, over time, is going to evolve into probably the largest Northern Rockies electricity production hub. Coal will be there for as long as it’s economically viable. We’ll complement with natural gas turbines. We have the Bakken Formation; it’s not very far away. There could be small nuclear reactors there at some point, but all the transmission infrastructure, which is one of the most expensive components, is already in place.
Washington Reporter:
One of the things I’ve talked with Secretary Burgum about is the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) that can very easily give the EU regulatory power over American energy companies for their climate agenda. Is that something that you would see impacting Montana if somehow they’re able to regulate American energy companies?
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
It’s a violation of our sovereignty to let some foreign power tell us what to do. We would fight that.
Washington Reporter:
In terms of regulation in general, how important is this regulatory certainty for Montana, and is that something that you’ve seen the GOP’s Working Families Tax Cuts help your state with?
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
Well, the biggest impact of regulatory overreach in Montana was in the first few weeks of the Biden administration; they canceled the XL Keystone pipeline. This would have given us increased national security, lower energy prices, and would have created a tax base that could have funded an incredible number of schools and sheriffs’ departments and other things in eastern Montana. I was very pleased to see that we now have an entity that’s building the Bridger Pipeline, which will bring this back. It was always a good idea. We just needed an administration that gave us certainty. And these investments take years, if not decades, to implement. Without that certainty, as has been said, capital is a coward. It flees risk, and we need that certainty to allow the private sector to make these investments in infrastructure.
Washington Reporter:
I know he’s not a governor anymore, but you did overlap with Doug Burgum as governors. How do you think he’s doing?
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
He’s doing a great job. And I’ve known Doug for a long time. We were both in the software industry. When he was running Great Plains, I was running my software company. In fact, I tried to recruit him to my board of directors over 20 years ago, but there was no way to get from Fargo to Bozeman at the time. Since then, travel has improved, and I’m just really thrilled that he’s representing us out there, and it’s great to have a Westerner dealing with western lands issues, whether it’s the parks or BLM, and his leadership on the National Energy Dominance Council has been fantastic. There are few people who know more about energy infrastructure than him and Secretary Wright, who’s also a personal friend.
Washington Reporter:
Were you surprised to see him run for governor?
Gov. Greg Gianforte:
No I wasn’t, because a governor is essentially the CEO of a state. And we’ve seen this, whether it was Doug Ducey in Arizona or Pete Ricketts or Bill Haslam in Tennessee. There are great examples of very, very successful governors who have come out of the private sector. I came into job, and I said, ‘how many employees do I have here at the State of Montana?’ They told me ‘14,000 sir.’ This is one of the most pleasant surprises I’ve had; Montanans, state employees, are really good people, and they want to do the right thing for the people of Montana, and I’ve made it a priority. My software business was a customer service software business. We had 1,100 employees, we were publicly traded for eight years; I was the only member of Congress who had run a public company when I served in Congress. And there’s a certain amount of stress associated with quarterly earnings calls and hiring and firing and strategic decisions and making payroll. What I found is that the leadership qualities necessary to run a private sector business are nearly identical to running the executive branch of government, and this is why I think Doug Burgum was so successful as governor in North Dakota. It’s the reason why Doug Ducey did such a good job in Arizona, and we’ve seen many other cases. We’re just better off when we have people running states who have business backgrounds.
Washington Reporter:
Governor Gianforte, thanks so much for your time.