After months of opposition by Senate Republicans, Tracy Stone-Manning was recently sworn in as the Bureau of Land Management’s new director.
The BLM looks after 245 million acres, most of it in the West.
But it hasn’t had a confirmed director since the Obama administration.
In recent years, it has been run by a series of acting directors, one of whom moved the agency’s headquarters out of Washington, causing a number of employees to leave.
Taylor McKinnon with the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity said the new director has an opportunity to rebuild the agency.
“She’s inheriting a broken, and in many ways drained agency," McKinnon siad. "But there’s I think a big opportunity for rebuilding the agency in a way that’s suited to meeting the challenges of our time.”
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has moved the bureau’s headquarters back to Washington.
