Stop Steve Pearce

The most consequential public lands confirmation fight in a generation is here.

Steve Pearce | Courtesy: Bureau of Reclamation

On Wednesday, February 25th, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a confirmation hearing for Steve Pearce, Trump’s nominee to run the Bureau of Land Management.

Let me put that another way. The agency responsible for safeguarding 245 million acres of your land — one in every ten acres in the United States — is about to be handed to a man who has spent his entire career arguing those acres shouldn’t be public at all.

Pearce has explicitly denounced Theodore Roosevelt for creating national parks and forests. In a now-infamous speech he derided Roosevelt’s “big ideas of big forests and big national parks” and pledged to “reverse this trend of public ownership of land.”

And his confirmation hearing will be chaired by — wait for it — Mike Lee. The same Mike Lee who’s tried repeatedly to privatize your public lands in increasingly desperate series of legislative maneuvers. That’s the fox not just guarding the henhouse but building the henhouse, appointing the hens, and writing the menu.

This is the most important public lands confirmation fight in a generation. And we have five days.

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They’re Installing the Demolition Crew

Pearce doesn’t arrive in a vacuum. He’s the final piece in a pattern so obvious it’s almost insulting that they don’t bother to hide it.

Look at what this administration has done:

Doug Burgum — an oil-soaked billionaire who told industry executives that they are the “customer” of the Department of the Interior — is running Interior. He’s described public lands as items on a national “balance sheet” and floated transferring so-called “low visitation” national park sites to the states.

A timber executive who sees trees as nothing more than lumber waiting to be milled is the Chief of the U.S. Forest Service.

And just a week ago, Trump nominated Scott Socha to run the National Park Service. Socha spent 27 years at Delaware North — the company that infamously tried to trademark the name “Yosemite National Park” and then sued the Park Service for $51 million when they lost the concession contract. This is the same Delaware North that rebranded after its predecessor company, Emprise, was federally convicted for it’s mafia ties. The same Delaware North that held secret meetings in then Interior Secretary Zinke’s office, arranged by a congressman later convicted of insider trading, while simultaneously suing the agency.

Let’s just quickly recap:

Interior: oil industry puppet billionaire.

Forest Service: timber executive.

National Park Service: corrupt concessionaire.

BLM: a man who thinks Theodore Roosevelt was wrong to protect land.

Every agency is being handed to someone whose career was built on opposing that agency’s mission. You don’t do that if your goal is reform or better management. You do it if your goal is liquidation.

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Who Pearce Actually Is

I wrote about Pearce in detail when his nomination was announced, so I’ll try to keep this tight. This guy is not your garden-variety pro-extraction politician. He’s something much worse.

Pearce made his fortune running an oilfield services company. He pocketed seven figures a year from the industry while sitting on the House Natural Resources Committee — the very body tasked with overseeing it. He earned up to $1 million from oil and gas last year alone. If confirmed, his company would be transferred to his wife. Yes, really.

It’s almost poetic in its corruption.

Fossil fuel companies poured hundreds of thousands into his campaigns. He paid them back with interest — pushing to speed up drilling permits, scrap environmental reviews, and exempt entire categories of oil and gas projects from public oversight. He sponsored bills that would let companies drill first and ask permission later.

But here’s where Pearce goes beyond being just another industry stooge. He’s the rare kind of extremist who isn’t content to just deregulate. He wants to disinherit you. Public land offends him. It represents limits — on greed, on exploitation, on the divine right of the powerful to take whatever they want.

He tried to shrink Organ Mountains–Desert Peaks National Monument by 92%. He co-sponsored a bill to force the federal government to sell off public land for deficit reduction. He urged counties to “take control” of federal lands without federal consent and praised a sheriff who threatened to arrest Forest Service employees for doing their jobs.

And just so we’re clear about the character of the man: after losing his House seat, Pearce spent over a year loudly insisting the 2020 election was stolen, claiming ballots were “purchased” by Democrats.

Which brings us to why he got the nomination in the first place. Trump’s first BLM pick, Kathleen Sgamma — a literal oil and gas lobbyist — was pulled. Not because she wanted to gut public lands. She was pulled because she privately called the January 6th insurrection “disgusting.” Opposing public land ownership is expected. Objecting to insurrection is not. That’s the filter.

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Why This One Matters the Most

Under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the BLM director has extraordinary unilateral power. The director can rewrite resource management plans, reclassify lands as “excess” or “suitable for disposal,” and execute sales of up to 2,500 acres each without congressional review.

A man like Steve Pearce doesn’t need Congress to pass a land transfer bill. He just needs to slice a 100,000-acre landscape into 2,499-acre parcels, stamp each one with a boilerplate finding, and run a conveyor belt of disposals across Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and Nevada. The law never imagined a bad-faith executive. Steve Pearce is what bad faith looks like with a government ID badge.

This is the appointment that makes Mike Lee’s wildest dreams come true. The reconciliation bill locked in mandatory lease sales and slashed royalties. The CRA is being weaponized to erase protections. Career staff have been purged. Extraction quotas have been hard-coded.

Pearce is the last piece. He’s the one who actually executes the sell-off from inside.

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Look at What’s Happening This Week

While Pearce prepares for his hearing, the Boundary Waters are hanging by a thread. The House already passed HJR 140, an unprecedented use of the Congressional Review Act to overturn a mineral withdrawal — something the CRA was never designed to do. If the Senate passes it, it won’t just open America’s most beloved wilderness to toxic copper mining by a Chilean conglomerate whose product would be shipped to Chinese smelters and sold on the global market. It will establish the precedent that any land protection in the United States can be retroactively erased by a simple majority vote.

Grand Staircase-Escalante is next. Rep. Celeste Maloy (R-UT) already has a GAO opinion in her pocket calling the monument’s resource management plan a “rule” subject to the CRA. She’s watching the Boundary Waters vote. If it works there, it works everywhere.

The dominoes are lined up.

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The Stewardship Caucus Gets Its Test

Months ago, Senators Tim Sheehy (R-MT) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM) launched a bipartisan “Senate Stewardship Caucus” with members including Steve Daines (R-MT), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Katie Britt (R-AL), Cortez Masto (D-NV), Hickenlooper (D-CO), and Coons (D-DE). They pledged to champion “responsible management of public lands.”

Great. Prove it.

Because Daines already gushed about Pearce, saying he’s “lived it and breathed it.” Yeah. He’s lived the destruction of public lands and breathed the fumes from every oil rig he helped unleash on them.

If the Stewardship Caucus votes to confirm a man who thinks Theodore Roosevelt was wrong to create national parks and forests, then the whole thing was what we suspected from the start: an image-laundering project dressed in fleece vests and fly rods.

Sheehy helped tank Mike Lee’s land sell-off. Now we find out if that was principle or convenience.

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What You Need To Do Right Now

Pearce’s hearing is Wednesday before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Call and email your senators. Whether they sit on this committee or not, this will reach the floor. But don’t stop at your Senators. This will require multiple Republican no votes. Your top targets should be the Republican members of the so-called Stewardship Caucus and Senator Murkowski (R-AK) who is seen as a swing vote on this:

Katie Britt (AL)

Tim Sheehy (MT)

Steve Daines (MT)

Thom Tillis (NC)

Lisa Murkowski (AK)

I’m also told that the following Senators may be persuadable:

Susan Collins (ME)

Lindsey Graham (SC)

John Boozman (AR)

Mitch McConnell (KY)

Ted Budd (NC)

(These are staff emails, many Senators don’t give out contact emails despite serving the American public)

Capitol Switchboard: (202) 224-3121

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Below is a sample email designed to make a good case against Pearce for a Republican audience:

Sample Email

Subject: Vote No on Steve Pearce — Honor Theodore Roosevelt’s Legacy

Dear Senator [Last Name],

I’m writing to urge you to oppose the confirmation of Steve Pearce as Director of the Bureau of Land Management.

The Bureau of Land Management oversees 245 million acres of public land — one in every ten acres in the United States. Its mandate is multiple use and sustained yield: balancing energy development, grazing, recreation, conservation, and local economies. That balancing act requires leadership grounded in stewardship and respect for the uniquely American idea — championed by Theodore Roosevelt — that our public lands are a shared inheritance held in trust for all.

Steve Pearce has openly denounced Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation legacy and pledged to “reverse” the trend of public land ownership that Roosevelt helped establish.

That alone should disqualify him.

Theodore Roosevelt was not a fringe environmentalist. He was a Republican president, a great American, and the standard bearer of the American model of land conservation. He created national forests, national monuments, and the foundation of the public lands system that millions of Americans rely on today for hunting, fishing, ranching, recreation, and local economies.

You cannot claim to revere Roosevelt, to invoke him as a model of leadership, while voting to confirm a man who believes Roosevelt was wrong to preserve land for the American people.

That contradiction is too large to ignore.

This is not about partisanship. It’s about whether we believe public lands are a shared inheritance held in trust for future generations, or a commodity to be parceled off and liquidated. Pearce has made it clear where he stands.

The Bureau of Land Management does not need a director with a privatization agenda. It needs a director who believes in the mission of the agency.

I urge you to vote against this nomination and insist on a candidate who embraces Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy and respects the principle that America’s public lands belong to all Americans — not just to those seeking to exploit them.

Your vote will echo for generations. Your descendants will have to live with the outcome of your decision. I sincerely hope you’ll err on the side of caution when it comes to their inheritance.

[Your Name]

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Thanks for reading. Until next time,

Jim