1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

Vote No on Steve Pearce to become the lead of Bureau of Land Management. 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.” 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 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. 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. 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.