A Nightmare at the BLM

Trump's nominee to head the Bureau of Land Management may be his most extreme yet

Steve Pearce | Courtesy: Bureau of Reclamation

Earlier this month the White House issued a small press release that went largely unnoticed. In it they quietly announced President Trump’s nominees for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Bureau of Land Management. You can guess which one is about to give you a headache.

Allow me to introduce Steve Pearce, a former Congressman and failed gubernatorial candidate from New Mexico who’s entire career has been defined by extreme hostility to public lands ownership.

Let me put that another way, President Trump has just nominated one of the most deranged anti-public lands ideologues in political history, to run the Bureau of Land Management.

That’s right. The agency in charge of safeguarding 245 million acres of land—one in every ten acres in the United States—is about to be run by a guy who doesn’t believe those lands should even exist.

Sound familiar? It should. Remember Yosemite Scam aka William Perry Pendley? Let me help you, picture Yosemite Sam if he’d traded his six-shooters for oil leases and a law degree from PragerU. Yeah, that guy. The one a judge had to evict from the agency he was dismantling during Trump’s first term and who then went on to write the public lands section of Project 2025. Well, they found his successor.

Steve Pearce has had a long career in the public sphere and, well, it’s not good. In addition to being a far-right extremist in nearly every sense (more on that later), Pearce has argued that Theodore Roosevelt was wrong to create national forests and parks, and that federal lands should be turned over to states and/or sold off entirely to private interests.

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Reverse Roosevelt

Let’s just sit with this for a second. Pearce has explicitly denounced Teddy Roosevelt, the father of American conservation, for having the gall to create national parks and forests. In a now-infamous speech, Pearce derided Roosevelt’s “big ideas of big forests and big national parks” and pledged to “reverse this trend of public ownership of land”.

Not even that snake Utah calls a Senator, Mike Lee, is insane enough to trash Theodore Roosevelt. You know, the guy in the glasses on Mount Rushmore.

Think about that though. The derangement it takes to say Theodore Roosevelt, one of the most revered Presidents in American history, was wrong to preserve land for all Americans. Roosevelt’s conservation efforts saved the Grand Canyon from mining. He created the National Wildlife Refuge System and the U.S. Forest Service. He gave future generations a shot at seeing landscapes that weren’t strip-mined, paved over, or filled with natural gas flares.

And Pearce thinks he was wrong. And now he appears poised to sail through Senate confirmation and be the next Director of the BLM.

An Oil Man’s Dream

Steve Pearce made his fortune running an oilfield services company.

Yes, there it is. Go ahead and nod and let out that “ahhhh”.

He sold the company for millions while in Congress, and continued collecting massive income from affiliated businesses. While supposedly representing the people of New Mexico, he was pocketing seven figures a year from the same industry he was writing laws for — and doing it from his perch on the House Natural Resources Committee, the very body tasked with overseeing the oil and gas industry.

It’s almost poetic in its corruption. A man literally profiting from the same drilling he was supposed to help regulate — and now Trump wants to put him in charge of the agency that regulates most of it.

Over his career, fossil fuel companies poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Pearce’s campaigns, a steady IV drip of industry money to keep their man in office. And he paid them back with interest. Every vote, every bill, every talking point was pulled straight from the oil lobby’s playbook and delivered with enthusiasm. He pushed to speed up drilling permits, scrap environmental reviews, and exempt entire categories of oil and gas projects from public oversight. He even sponsored bills that would let companies drill first and ask permission later.

He called it “common sense.” What it really was, was theft.

Not Your Garden Variety Pro-Extraction Politician

But here’s where Pearce goes beyond being just another oil-soaked politician. He didn’t stop at parroting the industry line — he surpassed it. For him, it’s not enough to let oil and gas pillage the land.

He’s the rare kind of extremist who looks at a national park and sees a mistake. He’s said federal lands “don’t belong” in government hands, and he means it. He’s not just fighting for deregulation; he’s fighting to disinherit you. Public land offends him. It represents limits — limits on greed, on exploitation, on the divine right of the powerful to take whatever they want.

So yes, he wants to drill every last acre, but even if there were no oil left to pump, he’d still want those lands denuded, parceled out, and privatized. Because to him, the mere existence of shared public space — something held in trust for everyone, for future generations — is intolerable.

That’s why he tried to shrink Organ Mountains–Desert Peaks National Monument in his own district by 92%. Not because it stood in the way of jobs. Because it stood for something bigger than him. That’s why he co-sponsored the HEARD Act, which would have forced federal agencies to identify land to sell off for deficit reduction. Translation: a fire sale on your public lands to help cover tax cuts for billionaires and donors.

Pearce isn’t just an industry stooge. He’s an anti-public lands zealot.

But it goes even further than that.

Back in 2011, at a town hall in Arizona, Pearce stood before a crowd and urged local counties to “take control” of all lands within their borders — including federally owned lands — without federal consent.

He praised a New Mexico sheriff who threatened to arrest U.S. Forest Service staff for doing their jobs—federal employees whose “crime” was enforcing laws passed by Congress and signed by presidents of both parties.

That’s the ethos he’s bringing to the agency in charge of the majority of your public lands.

Sgamma Wasn’t Evil Enough

Now some of you might have been thinking, “This is awfully late into a presidency to be putting forth a BLM director nominee”. And it would be, but this is actually Trump’s second nominee to direct the BLM this year. His original pick was Kathleen Sgamma—a literal oil and gas lobbyist who’d spent her life fighting for more drilling and less oversight. Perfect fit, right?

Wrong. Turns out she made the mistake of not defending the violent January 6th insurrection as a patriotic rally. She privately said the violence was “disgusting” and questioned Trump’s role in inciting it.

Oops.

That was enough to get her pulled. Not because she was an oil lobbyist, and not because she was determined to gut public lands protections. No, she was removed because she dared to acknowledge that a violent attempted coup might be bad.

The Sgamma episode is chilling. It shows that, for Trump, loyalty to him personally outweighs even loyal service to his pro-industry agenda. In her place, Trump sought someone with the same anti-public lands agenda and an unquestioned allegiance to Trump’s narratives. Steve Pearce perfectly fits that bill.

After losing his House seat, Pearce served as New Mexico’s GOP chairman and became a fierce Trump surrogate. Notably, Pearce was an enthusiastic promoter of Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. For a full year after Biden won, Pearce loudly insisted the election was stolen, claiming democracy had been “tarnished” and even suggesting ballots were “purchased” by Democrats.

This Isn’t Just About Land—It’s About Power

Steve Pearce’s nomination isn’t just about logging, drilling, or even conservation. It’s about power. Raw, centralized, undemocratic power.

It’s about whether a president can hand 245 million acres of your land to a man who has openly said it shouldn’t belong to you at all.

And it’s about whether this country will let its most beautiful places be converted into profit centers for the same industries that bankroll political corruption and climate catastrophe.

We’ve already seen him install a timber executive as the head of the Forest Service, a right wing bomb-thrower as the head of USDA, the world’s wealthiest fascist as the head of an agency tasked with purging the federal workforce, and so many more outrageous appointments. We’ve seen an all out assault on our public lands and the environmental protections that keep them intact (and our water safe to drink and our air safe to breathe).

Now, with Steve Pearce, he wants to finish the job.

What About the So-Called Senate Stewardship Caucus?

Ah yes, the Senate Stewardship Caucus — that shiny new bipartisan alliance launched just weeks ago with great fanfare. Surely they’ll doom this insane nominee right?

The caucus was created by Senators Tim Sheehy (R-MT) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM) to champion “responsible management of public lands,” “protect access for hunters and anglers,” and is all about “protecting and expanding access to public lands and waters, recovering wildlife, and restoring habitat.” Those are quotes from their inaugural reception.

Let’s not forget, Sheehy was among those who tanked Mike Lee’s attempts to include a public lands firesale in the Republican reconciliation bill.

How fortunate right? The Stewardship Caucus includes Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Thom Tillis (R-NC), John Hickenlooper (D-CO), Steve Daines (R-MT), Chris Coons (D-DE), and Katie Britt (R-AL) along with Sheehy and Heinrich. That’s four Republican no votes right there. Nomination over.

Except, of course, that’s not how this story goes.

Because it turns out that some of these self-described “stewards” have a funny definition of the word. Take Steve Daines, one of the caucus’s founding members, who wasted no time gushing about Steve Pearce:

“I knew Steve in the House days, and Steve is a great pick. And I particularly like the fact that it’s a Westerner,” Daines said. “I think it’s helpful when we have leaders in those important positions that come from the West, when they understand uniquely the challenges we face as it relates to federal land, state land, private land. And Steve Pearce has lived it and breathed it.”

“Lived it and breathed it.”
That’s one way to put it.

Steve Pearce has lived the destruction of public lands and breathed the fumes from every oil rig he’s helped unleash on them.

But wait, there’s more.

You see, that feel-good “bipartisan” launch party for the caucus — the one splashed all over social media with smiling senators and talk of “stewardship” — was hosted and underwritten by Nature Is Nonpartisan, a glossy greenwashing outfit crawling with industry lobbyists, Republican operatives, and professional climate deniers.

It’s led by a young right-wing activist who’s spent years marketing himself as a “conservative environmentalist” while doing PR cleanup for polluters. His organization’s board is a fever dream of corporate influence — fossil-fuel boosters, Trump cronies, far-right media personalities, tech billionaires, and dark-money financiers — all wrapped in the language of “unity” and “common sense.”

So no, this “Stewardship Caucus” isn’t some courageous bipartisan breakthrough. It’s political theater dressed up in fleece vests and fly rods. You don’t get to preach about “bipartisan conservation” while letting the oil lobby pick the music.

But don’t just take my word for it, let this confirmation vote be the test. Because if they line up behind Steve Pearce, if they vote to confirm a man who thinks Theodore Roosevelt was wrong to create the national parks, then the mask is off. The Senate Stewardship Caucus will go down as what it was from the start — an image-laundering project for Republicans wanting to look look like they still possess a shred of integrity. The Democrats in it were just hopeful enough, or desperate enough, or naive enough to believe it could be more than that.

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You Know What Comes Next

Yes, here’s the part where I ask you to write each member of the Senate Stewardship Caucus and implore them to do what they said they were going to do. Below is the contact information for the Senators in the Senate Stewardship Caucus.

I’m well aware that some of these guys don’t allow people outside their state to use their contact forms, so I’ve instead linked the emails of their chiefs of staff. If they don’t like it, they can stop accepting your tax dollars.

• Steve Daines (R-MT) (email)

• Tim Sheehy (R-MT) (email)

• Katie Britt (R-AL) (email)

• Thom Tillis (R-NC) (email)

• Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) (email)

• John Hickenlooper (D-CO) (email)

• Chris Coons (D-DE) (email)

• Martin Heinrich (D-NM) (email)

Sample Email

Subject: You Cannot Be in the Senate Stewardship Caucus and Vote for Steve Pearce

Dear Senator [Last Name],

As a member of the Senate Stewardship Caucus, you’ve pledged to defend America’s public lands, to protect access for hunters and anglers, and to ensure responsible management for future generations.

That pledge is incompatible with voting to confirm Steve Pearce as Director of the Bureau of Land Management.

Steve Pearce is not a steward. He is one of the most radical anti–public lands politicians in the history of this country. He has spent his career attacking the very idea of public ownership — repeatedly and loudly calling for federal lands to be turned over to states or sold off entirely. He’s attempted to revoke popular national monuments, fought wilderness designations, and even criticized President Theodore Roosevelt for creating our parks and forests in the first place.

If the Senate confirms him, whether as part of a grouped vote or a standalone nomination, it will not just be another bad appointment. It will be a betrayal of everything the Stewardship Caucus claims to stand for.

You cannot call yourself a steward of America’s public lands while voting to put their greatest enemy in charge of them. If you vote to confirm Steve Pearce, you are telling the American people that the word “stewardship” means nothing.

Please, do what your caucus was founded to do.
Stand up for our public lands.
Vote NO on Steve Pearce and implore your fellow caucus members to do the same.

Sincerely,
[Your Full Name]
[Your City, State]

Thanks for reading. Until next time,

Jim