1. United States
2. Ga.
3. Letter

The Senate advanced Steve Pearce as the next director of the Bureau of Land Management the agency that manages 245 million acres of your public land. Steve Pearce co-founded an oil and gas drilling company. The oil and gas industry paid him $2.3 million in campaign contributions over his 14 years in Congress. His personal stake in oil and gas companies paid him up to $2 million in a single year. He scored a 4% rating from the League of Conservation Voters one of the worst records in the entire House. He called for selling off federal public lands to “pay down the deficit,” writing that the government owns 650 million acres and “most of it we do not even need.” He voted to fast-track public land sales. He fought to shrink national monuments. He blocked reforms that would have made oil and gas companies pay fair royalties to the public for extracting resources from public land. That’s the guy the Trump administration want running the BLM. On the same day he was advanced, the BLM officially killed the Public Lands Rule the rule that required the agency to treat conservation as an equal use of public land alongside drilling, mining, and grazing. So the rule is gone. And the man about to enforce that is someone who spent his entire career trying to sell the land off entirely. 76% of Westerners oppose selling public lands for oil and gas development. 98% of public commenters told the BLM to keep the conservation rule. Nobody asked for this.