President Donald Trump on Wednesday nominated former New Mexico congressman Steve Pearce to run the Bureau of Land Management, picking a staunch ally who has peddled election conspiracy theories and opposed public lands protections to manage hundreds of millions of acres of federal land.
Pearce, who is 78 years old and last held public office in 2018, has a long history of opposing the expansion of national monuments and has advocated for drilling in the Otero Mesa, one of the country’s most ecologically sensitive and diverse landscapes.
During his time in Congress, Pearce pushed legislation that would limit the Antiquities Act — the law that gives the president sweeping power to protect federal lands — to prevent presidents from using it to unilaterally create large national monuments.
“Previous administrations abused their executive authority by designating overly expansive monuments under the Antiquities Act. In New Mexico, many private and state lands are land-locked by monument designations,” Pearce said in 2017.
The Obama administration protected about 700,000 acres of land in New Mexico from development in 2013 and 2014 (including land in Pearce’s then-district) — land that is now managed by the BLM that Pearce has been selected to lead.
After a failed run in 2018 for governor of New Mexico, Pearce became a fierce Trump advocate as the state’s Republican party leader. For a year after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Pearce continued to make conspiratorial claims about the loss, suggesting that democracy had been “tarnished” and ballots had been purchased by Democrats.
Pearce is much more aligned with Trump than his previous pick to lead the bureau, Kathleen Sgamma. Trump withdrew her nomination in April after a memo circulated that she had written following the Jan. 6 capitol riots, in which she said that she was “disgusted by the violence witnessed yesterday and President Trump’s role in spreading misinformation that incited it.”
Public lands groups quickly came out in opposition to Pearce’s nomination.
“Steve Pearce’s nomination is even more proof that President Trump and Interior Secretary Burgum are determined to undermine, sell out, and eventually sell off America’s public lands. Pearce’s entire political career has been dedicated to blocking Americans’ access to public lands while giving the oil and gas industry free rein to drill and frack anywhere they wanted,” the Center for Western Priorities’ executive director, Jennifer Rokala, said in a statement.
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