Conservationists Oppose Pendley as Acting BLM Chief
Eric Galatas, Producer
Monday, October 21, 2019
DENVER – Conservation groups are sounding the alarm about the Trump administration's decision to make William Perry Pendley acting chief of the Bureau of Land Management, and are calling on Pendley to step down until he's officially nominated and goes through the Senate's confirmation process.
Directors assigned with an acting title start work without being vetted by Congress.
Aaron Kindle, senior manager of western sporting campaigns for the National Wildlife Federation, says the public needs to know how Pendley plans to run an agency with which he's been at war for decades.
"He's spent his whole career trying to get the government to divest of public lands, and tried to reduce regulation and oversight of anybody who uses public lands," Kindle states.
As president of a conservative legal nonprofit group, Pendley spent years advocating for the selloff of millions of acres of public land across the West, and has called the Endangered Species Act a ploy to prevent anyone from making a living off public lands.
An Interior Department representative told The Washington Post that the agency is opposed to the transfer or sale of public lands.
Pendley has said he's prepared to follow Interior orders and claims his past has no bearing on his ability to lead the agency.
The Bureau of Land Management is responsible for managing a third of all federal lands, along with 700 million acres of mineral rights.
Kindle points to a 2016 opinion article where Pendley wrote that the "Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold."
Kindle says one of the first things hiring managers do is look at an applicant's record to determine how he or she might act in the future, and the Senate should be able to ask Pendley some tough questions.
"And since Mr. Pendley has an extremely long history of advocating for the transfer and selloff of public lands, that's the best available information we have to go off of to determine how he'll act in this job," Kindle states.
At a recent conference in Colorado, Pendley said the BLM's mission was to drill for oil, mine for coal and cut down trees.
He did not mention recreation or conservation, which Kindle says shows how far out of line Pendley's vision is with the agency's longstanding mission to ensure a balanced approach to managing lands owned by all Americans.
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