As President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team looks at building out a cabinet, there’s one senator whose name keeps coming up for a position: Sen. Markwayne Mullin.
Mullin, a Cherokee citizen who led the Trump campaign’s Native American outreach, is now under consideration to lead the Department of Interior or the Department of Veterans Affairs, according to a source familiar with the transition.
However, sources told NOTUS that Interior would be the more likely landing spot for him, given his background and expertise.
The secretary of interior position is responsible for the conservation of most federal land and oversees a number of agencies, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service.
Since 2020, much of Mullin’s old House district in Oklahoma has been deemed tribal reservation, giving Mullin some experience working with Native American leaders.
When he was appointed to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in 2023, Mullin said in a statement that he was honored to work on the committee that is responsible for “ensuring that the federal government upholds its trust and treaty responsibilities to Tribal nations” and that he looked forward to “strengthening tribal sovereignty, pursuing self-determination policies, and fostering economic growth in Indian Country.”
Mullin, who advocates for tribal sovereignty and for the U.S. government upholding the treaties with Native American tribes, also advocated in October for the ability of tribal nations to drill on reservations, according to the Associated Press.
“Why is tribal land treated like public land?” Mullin said at an event in North Carolina. “You have natural resources being pulled out of the ground right across the fence from reservations. You have private landowners that are extremely wealthy and you have people that are literally starving inside reservations.”
If nominated and confirmed, Mullin would only be the second Native American cabinet secretary in history after the current secretary of interior, Deb Haaland.
But that’s if Mullin would want the job.
Two sources familiar with Mullin’s thinking said the senator has not indicated whether he is interested in serving in the administration and isn’t actively lobbying for a position. But one of the sources emphasized that if he were asked to serve, he would consider it.
In the Senate, Mullin would be one of Trump’s top allies. As a former House member, he’s also acted as a Senate liaison to the House. Mullin is in his first term in the Senate after winning a special election to replace retiring Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma. Prior to the Senate, he served in the House for nearly 10 years.
His relationships on both sides of the Capitol could prove vital to Trump as he attempts to pass an ambitious agenda with slim margins in both chambers. (The Senate currently looks like it will have 53 Republicans, well short of the 60-vote threshold to overcome a filibuster, and Republicans in the House could potentially have an even slimmer majority — or no majority at all.)
“President-Elect Trump will begin making decisions on who will serve in his second Administration soon,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump, said in a statement the Trump transition team has used before. “Those decisions will be announced when they are made.”
Trump has already made public three appointments that show just how he plans to run the government this go-around. He appointed Susie Wiles as chief of staff, former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan as the border czar and Rep. Elise Stefanik as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Meanwhile, CNN reported that hard-line anti-immigration activist Stephen Miller will be Trump’s deputy chief of staff on Monday morning.
—
Reese Gorman is a reporter at NOTUS.