Good afternoon,

Pasted below you will find background on Secretary Bernhardt’s appointment of William Perry Pendley to be the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) newest leader. Pendley, the former president of the anti-conservation Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF), was recently tapped as deputy director of BLM’s policy and programs. Subsequently, Bernhardt elevated Pendley’s position within BLM’s organization chart and designated him acting BLM director.

-Marc

Toplines: 

• Pendley has built a career dedicated to undermining public lands and their protections. His brief stint in public service is marked by enriching the coal industry and undercutting American taxpayers. He holds views that are antithetical to the BLM’s mission to manage resources on behalf of all Americans and is uniformly unqualified to run the agency.  

• Pendley now joins Karen Budd-Falen at the Interior Department, another senior official who has spent her career “fighting against the very existence of U.S. public lands,” according to the Center for Western Priorities. In context of Sec. Bernhardt’s recent announcement to disassemble the BLM by moving its headquarters and scattering senior officials across the West, the recent personnel and policy decisions reveal an administration intent on dismantling and weakening the agency in order to appease industry and sell out America’s public lands. 

Background on Pendley: Between 1981 and 1984, Pendley was the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) deputy assistant secretary for energy and minerals. He served under Interior Secretary James Watt, who resigned under a cloud of corruption after reports showed him being too closely tied to private interests. In 1984, Pendley was criticized by an independent commission for mismanaging the agency’s coal-leasing program to benefit industry, and shorting taxpayers approximately $100 million in a Powder River Basin sale that was below fair market value. From 1989 through 2018 - nearly 30 years - Pendley was president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF), where he frequently sued federal agencies to challenge conservation policies and regulations, including national monument designations.

• Pendley calls for selling off public lands: Pendley authored a January 2016 article in the National Review in which he decried federal land ownership, and argued the U.S. Constitution all but requires the federal government to sell the lands it owns in the West. At the BLM, he will now oversee 245 million acres of public lands. 

• Pendley wants to strip protections for wildlife: In a 1993 USA Today op-ed, Pendley called the Endangered Species Act a “disaster” and said the “implementation of the act is little more than a land grab, as federal officials demand that private lands be handed over to the U.S. government as the price for economic activity.” He now joins a department that is actively working to strip away longstanding ESA protections. 

• Pendley embraces extreme views and is a climate denier: Pendley has authored numerous articles and books that attack the U.S. government, including a 1995 book: War on the West: Government Tyranny on America's Great Frontier and It Takes A Hero: The Grassroots Battle Against Environmental Oppression. Under his direction, the MSLF publicly supported Cliven Bundy, who led an armed standoff with BLM officials in 2014 over land-use issues. On social media, he has revealed himself to be a climate denier and has repeatedly criticized diversity initiatives in the United States. 

• Pendley conflicts of interests: A number of conservation groups have already voiced their concern about Pendley’s involvement in pending litigation, including asking him to recuse himself from a case involving oil and gas leases in Badger-Two Medicine in Montana. Further, actions taken by Pendley may lead to legal challenges given that his appointment to BLM acting director could run afoul of the Constitution’s advice and consent requirement and be in violation of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. 

Marc Rehmann

Center for American Progress

Senior Campaign Manager, Law of the Land Project

mrehmann@americanprogress.org

202-481-8167