Trump's pick to lead BLM has long history of pushing to privatize public lands

President Donald Trump has put forth a new nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management.

His first pick, Kathleen Sgamma, withdrew her name from consideration back in April after it was revealed that she’d been critical of Trump’s role in the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021.

The new nominee is former New Mexico Republican Rep. Stevan Pearce. If confirmed, Pearce will have a lot of influence on public lands in the West.

For a look at his resume, and what it suggests about how he might lead the Bureau, Wyoming Public Radio’s Hanna Merzbach joined The Show.

Full conversation

SAM DINGMAN: To start, remind us what exactly the leader of the Bureau of Land Management does.

HANNA MERZBACH: Yeah. So they’re nominated by the president, confirmed by the Senate, and this leader has the authority to provide direction to the BLM and all of its future field offices. So the BLM manages 245 million acres of land. That’s like about a tenth of all land in the U.S., and it’s more than any other land agency like the National Parks or the Forest Service.

The BLM also manages 700 million subsurface mineral acres, too. So, unlike national parks, the BLM has this dual mandate from Congress. So it has to conserve natural, historical and cultural resources, but it also has to manage public land for multiple uses. So there’s recreation, camping, rafting, hunting, that kind of thing, but also timber harvesting and renewable and traditional energy development.

So in the past few years, the Biden administration has tried to restrict that oil and gas development. But now with this new potential leader, Steve Pearce, we could be going in quite a different direction.

DINGMAN: Yes. Well, let’s. Let’s talk about Stevan Pearce. He’s a former congressman from New Mexico. He also ran unsuccessfully for governor there in 2018. What does his tenure in the House of Representatives suggest about his point of view on public lands?

MERZBACH: Yeah, so he’s the former chair of the Congressional Western Caucus, and in that time, he really pushed to privatize land. During the Obama administration, he co-authored this letter to Congress pushing to sell or lease more public lands for oil and gas drilling to offset the government spending deficit. In that letter, he said, “Over 90% of this land is located in the western states, and most of it we do not even need.”

He’s also tried to limit the expansion of national monuments. So in 2012, he called for the reduction of the Organ Mountains Desert Peaks National Monument in southern New Mexico, which was designated by President Obama. That was roughly like 500,000 acres. He wanted to reduce it to, like, 50,000 acres. Yeah, big cut.

DINGMAN: Yes.

MERZBACH: And, yeah, he also used to operate an oil field services company before, and potentially he did some of this work during his time in politics.

DINGMAN: So, as you mentioned, Hannah, now that Pearce has been nominated, it will be up to the Senate to confirm him. What has the response been from Senate Republicans to Pearce’s nomination?

MERZBACH: Yeah. So in my state, Wyoming Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis, right after the nomination, she came out, sent this press release. She called Pearce her friend, and said his nomination is a major win for Wyoming, the entire West, and she urged a swift confirmation.

Then Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines, he told Politico that he really likes the fact that Pearce is a Westerner. He said it’s important for these leaders to understand the challenges we face as it relates to federal, state and private land. And he said that Pearce has lived it and breathed it.

DINGMAN: And Pearce’s politics — from what we know in his past positions, even outside of land issues — are pretty far to the right, correct?

MERZBACH: Yeah, I’d say that’s correct. He questioned the results of the 2020 election and basically said following the Jan. 6 insurrection that none of that was really Trump’s fault.

DINGMAN: In your reporting about this, you spoke to a representative from the Western Energy Alliance, Aaron Johnson. Let’s take a quick listen to what he told you.

[AUDIO CLIP PLAYS]

AARON JOHNSON: We think that Steve Pearce would be a good director at the Bureau of Land Management. He comes with a strong background in public lands policies and has a record of advocating for multiple uses on public lands, which is the mission for BLM.

[AUDIO CLIP ENDS]

DINGMAN: So, Hannah, we heard Aaron Johnson refer to multiple uses there, but based on what you’ve been telling us, help us parse what he means by that.

MERZBACH: Yeah, he said this is kind of the exact kind of person we need for this position because it’s somebody who prioritizes energy development, which, by the congressional mandate, that is what the BLM is supposed to do, in addition to managing for conservation and recreation and timber harvesting, all those other things.

But it is the BLM’s role. We’d have to go through an act of Congress to take this out of their job. Johnson also highlighted that a lot of revenue from energy development supports a maintenance backlog in national parks, for instance. So he really said we need to be making money here to support this recreation on public lands.

DINGMAN: Yes. And if I’m not mistaken, when he was in Congress, Pearce advocated for selling off public lands to make up for budget deficits.

MERZBACH: Yeah, exactly.

DINGMAN: And we should also say here that the Western Energy Alliance, it’s perhaps not surprising that they’re supportive of Pearce since Kathleen Sgamma, the previous nominee, was the president of the Western Energy Alliance.

MERZBACH: Yes, exactly.

DINGMAN: You also got a comment from Dan Ritzman, a representative from the Sierra Club, about Pearce’s nomination Nation. They were much less excited. Let’s listen to what Ritzman told you.

[AUDIO CLIP PLAYS]

DAN RITZMAN: He will not have in mind the values that are in these landscapes that are important to all of us, whether it’s clean water or places to hunt and fish or places to recreate or the economic value of visitors coming to our communities. He is going to put the values of the oil and gas industry and their leaders first.

[AUDIO CLIP ENDS]

DINGMAN: Hannah, what did you make of Ritzman’s argument there?

MERZBACH: He basically said this nomination is just bad news overall for public lands. And Ritzman, he lives in New Mexico. He’s been following Pearce for a long time.

He pointed to the League of Conservation Voters, which ranks all these people in Congress for how environmentally friendly they are. And this league has classified 96% of Pearce’s votes as anti-environment.

And some people like Ritzman are worried that this nomination could mean more proposals to sell off lots of public land. Like we saw earlier this summer from Utah’s (U.S. Sen.) Mike Lee. That didn’t go through, but I think we’re expecting to see a lot more of these arguments in the years to come.

I should note that in order to sell off a lot of wide swaths of public land, this typically has to come through Congress. The BLM director can’t really make these moves laterally. But we are seeing more and more people at the top that the Trump administration is nominating, favoring these kinds of ideas.

We have Interior Secretary Doug Burgum as well. And this all comes as the Trump administration tries to unleash American energy. And everyone I’m talking to says this nomination puts us in that direction.