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On Friday, President Trump announced that he will formally nominate William Perry Pendley for the position of Bureau of Land Management director. Pendley, who currently heads the department in an acting capacity, is a longtime opponent of public lands. He was the president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation which pushed the government to sell off land, and he wrote an op-ed in 2016 that asserted the "Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold.” His recusal list of private companies is 17 pages long and includes oil, gas, and mining companies, severely limiting his capacity to execute the duties of the position without encountering conflicts of interest. “Over the course of his career, he’s argued for eliminating the Endangered Species Act, abolishing the Antiquities Act, and repealing laws that safeguard sportsmen’s access,” stated a letter from 12 senators opposing his appointment to acting BLM director last September. “Keeping Mr. Pendley atop the BLM is an affront to all Americans who believe in the balanced, multiple-use and sustained yield mission of the agency.”
The Bureau of Land Management has not had a Senate-confirmed director for the entirety of the Trump administration. The agency, which oversees 245 million acres of public land and 700 million acres of mineral resources, relocated the headquarters from Washington D.C. to Grand Junction, Colorado during this time—a move that drained the agency of expertise and moved leadership far from where decisions are made.
“If there’s one upside to the year-long delay in nominating Pendley, it’s that the Senate and the country can now see Pendley is not only unfit to run the Bureau of Land Management, he is uniquely incompetent as well, having overseen a disastrous ‘relocation’ of BLM headquarters that led to the evisceration of agency leadership and expertise," stated Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities.
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Even by the Trump administration's standards, trading a coal mine for the border wall is a shocking level of corruption. Our public lands belong to all Americans—not to foreign corporations that pander to the president by pledging allegiance to his divisive and dangerous political agenda.”
