Do Western senators really care about keeping public lands in public hands? Steve Pearce, President Donald Trump\u2019s nominee to run the Bureau of Land Management, is a litmus test of their commitment.<\/p>\n
Throughout his political career, Pearce has worked to privatize and undermine our public lands. As a New Mexico congressman, he co-sponsored several bills to dispose of national public lands. This alone ought to disqualify him from running the agency charged with stewarding 245 million acres for current and future generations.<\/p>\n
In a 2012 letter to House leadership<\/a>, Pearce argued that the federal government owns \u201cvast\u201d land holdings, \u201cmost of (which) we do not even need,\u201d and called for a massive sell-off to pay down the national debt. Pearce\u2019s vision for our public lands is not conservation or even balanced management \u2014 it\u2019s liquidation.<\/p>\n President Trump has been down this road before: During his first term, he nominated anti-public-lands zealot William Perry Pendley to run the BLM. Pendley never even received a hearing, and the White House dropped the nomination after his record was revealed. Pendley went on to write the public lands chapter of the now-notorious Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump administration.<\/p>\n Pendley spent his career as a lawyer arguing that the federal government should not own public lands. Steve Pearce has gone even further. From inside Congress, Pearce spent 14 years undermining public lands, seeking to gut wildlife protections and sell off huge amounts of public land.<\/p>\n Pearce\u2019s nomination comes as our public lands are being attacked from all sides. Over the last 10 months, President Trump has elevated officials such as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, both of whom view our public lands as nothing more than assets to monetize through drilling, mining and logging.<\/p>\n These officials are currently working to execute Trump\u2019s vision of selling out public assets for private profit. Pearce would accelerate this effort, liquidating lands to the highest bidder\u2013including corporations and luxury developers.<\/p>\n Even by recent standards, Pearce\u2019s public lands record is radical. It is also unpopular. This spring, Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee tried to include a public land sale provision in the sprawling budget bill, framing it as a housing solution. The measure would have mandated the sale of 2-3 million acres of BLM and Forest Service lands.<\/p>\n But Lee\u2019s amendment triggered immediate backlash from hunters, outdoor recreation groups and Western lawmakers. Within days, he abandoned the effort. If the Senate rejected Lee\u2019s market-rate sell-off as radical, it should be easy now to reject a nominee whose goal is to get rid of even more public land.<\/p>\n That brings us to the Senate Stewardship Caucus, co-chaired by a Republican, Tim Sheehy of Montana, and a Democrat, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico. It launched last month to \u201cadvance bipartisan efforts to conserve the nation\u2019s lands and waters\u201d with science-based policy. The caucus has been applauded by hunting, outdoor recreation, and conservation organizations as a promising start for defending public access and wildlife.<\/p>\n Pearce\u2019s nomination is the caucus\u2019s first real test. If its members cannot draw a bright line at a nominee who has worked tirelessly to sell off public lands and weaken laws that protect them, then its vision of \u201cstewardship\u201d is nothing but empty branding.<\/p>\n The stakes are immense. BLM\u2019s multiple-use mandate requires balancing energy, grazing, recreation and conservation under long-term land use plans grounded in science and public input. That mission collapses if the agency\u2019s leader believes we must \u201creverse this trend of public ownership\u201d of the very lands he is charged with managing.<\/p>\n Westerners understand what happens when responsible stewardship is abandoned. Rural communities lose the long-term economic engine that healthy public lands provide. Hunters, anglers and campers lose access they have relied on for generations.<\/p>\n Steve Pearce\u2019s nomination is a referendum on whether Congress believes our shared lands still belong to all Americans. The Stewardship Caucus and every senator who claims to care about the West\u2019s outdoor heritage should reject Pearce\u2019s nomination. America\u2019s public lands are a unique legacy we pass down to future generations, not a portfolio to liquidate.<\/p>\n Aaron Weiss is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities and co-host of The Landscape podcast.<\/em><\/p>\n Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more. <\/a><\/em><\/p>\n To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online<\/a> or check out our guidelines<\/a> for how to submit by email or mail.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Do Western senators really care about keeping public lands in public hands? 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