Steve Pearce Now Controls the BLM—National Monuments May Soon Be in His Crosshairs
Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon, Bears Ears, Cascade-Siskiyou, Grand Staircase-Escalante, Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks,... all are more at risk now than they've ever been
In the weeks before Steve Pearce was officially confirmed as Director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the agency has been paving the way for him to hit the ground running with his anti-public-lands agenda.
Just in the past few weeks alone, while Pearce’s confirmation was pending, the BLM transferred 1.4 million acres of public land to Alaska, loosened its grazing rules, kicked bison off federal lands in Montana, and rescinded the Public Lands Rule, which put conservation on equal footing with drilling, mining, logging, and other extractive activities on BLM lands.
In a very real sense, and perhaps anticipating his confirmation, even before Steve Pearce became the head of America’s largest public land management agency, it had already started to fulfill his wildest dreams.
Pearce, a former Republican congressman from New Mexico with deep ties to the oil and gas industry and a long record of opposing federal land protections, will now oversee an agency responsible for roughly 245 million acres of public land and 700 million acres of subsurface mineral estate. The Senate confirmed him Monday, May 18, on a 46-43 party line vote.
The question now is not only how Pearce will manage grazing permits, oil and gas leasing, mining approvals, renewable energy applications, or wild horse controversies.
It’s also whether he will help the Trump administration reopen one of the most consequential public-lands fights of the last decade: the effort to shrink, weaken, or even abolish national monuments.
I keep coming back to BLM-managed national monuments for one simple reason. “National Monument Designations” are a specific, detailed part of Project 2025—the principles on which all of the Trump administration’s public-land policies are founded.
It’s important to know that the Interior Department section in Project 2025 was written by William Perry Pendley, who served as the unconfirmed acting Director of the BLM during the first Trump administration.
Pendley’s disdain for public lands and conservation is matched only by Pearce’s.
When it comes to conservation on public lands, these two men are the same. And Pendley has literally written the blueprint—the playbook—that Steve Pearce will now continue to implement, no doubt with excited enthusiasm.
National monuments in the West—several of which protect fossil beds, which often also means: fossil fuels and potentially other minerals—are a major part of that playbook, and that cannot be overlooked or understated.
In Project 2025, Pendley defended the first Trump administration’s shrinking of “two national monuments in one state (Utah)”, while also writing that “[m]onuments in Maine and Oregon, for example, should have been adjusted downward” as well.
That national monument in Oregon, as I’ve written about elaborately before, is Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. It’s the only monument mentioned by name in Project 2025, which is why I continue to keep a close eye on what happens there. (Interestingly, neither Bears Ears nor Grand Staircase-Escalante are named, though they are alluded to.)
“Furthermore, the new Administration must vigorously defend the downward adjustments it makes to permit a ruling on a President’s authority to reduce the size of national monuments by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Pendley wrote in Project 2025.
The fact that Pearce cannot, by himself, erase a national monument offers little consolation. That authority, if it exists at all, rests with the president and remains legally contested. However, as BLM director, Pearce would be in a powerful position to shape the administrative machinery that makes such decisions possible.
He could help identify monuments for review, advise Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the White House, produce maps and management justifications, reinterpret “compatible use,” and direct the agency’s posture toward protected landscapes.
In the bureaucratic world of public lands, the person who manages the maps, agency rules, and policy proposals often helps determine what happens on the ground the future.
That’s why numerous conservation groups reacted to Pearce’s confirmation with enormous skepticism, distrust, and concern.
“Steve Pearce’s confirmation vote is yet another blatant attack on America’s public lands,” said Aaron Weiss, Executive Director of the Center for Western Priorities. “Congress has put a man who disdains federal land managers in charge of the BLM, just as the Trump administration has forced out much of BLM’s senior leadership. It will be even easier for Pearce to mismanage our public lands now that half of BLM state offices lack a state director.”
The BLM’s National Conservation Lands include 906 units covering more than 38 million acres, including 31 national monuments.
Those monuments include some of the most culturally, scientifically, and ecologically significant landscapes in the American West—places with migration corridors, fossil beds, Indigenous cultural sites, desert grasslands, archaeological resources, and economies that are increasingly dependent on outdoor recreation rather than extraction.
While in Congress, Pearce urged the Interior Department during Trump’s first term to reduce Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, the dramatic landscape outside Las Cruces, New Mexico, that President Barack Obama designated in 2014. Pearce argued that shrinking the monument would preserve traditional business activities on public lands, while environmentalists saw it as an attack on one of southern New Mexico’s defining landscapes.
The Organ Mountains fight remains central to understanding why Pearce’s confirmation has touched such a nerve.
The monument protects volcanic peaks, desert grasslands, petroglyphs, historic trails, and wildlife habitat across a landscape that local advocates had worked for years to protect.
“The Bureau of Land Management exists to wisely steward our public lands now and for future generations, but Mr. Pearce has spent his career doing just the opposite. As a member of Congress from New Mexico, he sponsored legislation for public land selloff and opposed the designation of the beloved Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument,” said Emily Thompson, Executive Director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.
“Now, an overwhelming 71% of New Mexicans oppose his nomination. Adding insult to injury, Mr. Pearce has also explicitly committed to ‘reverse this trend of public ownership of lands’—a statement which he has refused to disavow in the nomination hearings.”
To Pearce, however, the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument designation represented what he and other Western anti-conservation conservatives, including Republican Senator Mike Lee from Utah, have often called federal overreach under the Antiquities Act.
To supporters of the monument, it represented exactly what the law was designed to do: protect nationally significant places when Congress is too slow, too divided, or too captive to local extraction politics to act.
The Antiquities Act, signed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, is a short law with enormous consequence. It authorizes presidents to declare national monuments on federal lands to protect “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest.” It also says the reserved land must be confined to the “smallest area compatible” with protecting those objects.
Over more than a century, presidents from both parties have used the law to protect places that later became or helped form national parks, including Grand Canyon, Olympic, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Acadia, Grand Teton, Lassen Volcanic, Katmai, and Joshua Tree.
The law was born out of alarm over looting and destruction of archaeological sites in the Southwest. But its meaning soon expanded. Roosevelt used it to protect not merely individual ruins or artifacts, but whole landscapes whose scientific, cultural, and scenic values could not be separated from each other.
That broader interpretation has endured through Democratic and Republican administrations alike. It’s also the interpretation now under renewed attack.
The legal dispute centers on a deceptively simple question: if the Antiquities Act lets presidents create monuments, does it also let later presidents shrink or abolish them? The statute does not expressly say so. The Congressional Research Service has noted that the act does not explicitly authorize a president to modify or abolish earlier monument proclamations, leaving the issue unsettled and subject to litigation.
During Trump’s first term, that ambiguity became a political weapon.
In 2017, as I already mentioned earlier, Trump dramatically reduced Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, removing roughly two million acres from monument protections. Those actions triggered lawsuits from tribes, conservation groups, and others who argued that only Congress has the power to shrink monuments.
President Biden later restored the boundaries, and a federal judge dismissed a challenge by the state of Utah—it’s always, always Utah—to those restorations, affirming Biden’s authority to reestablish protections under the Antiquities Act.
Guided by Pendley’s recommendations in Project 2025, the second Trump administration has since gone further.
“[T]he new Administration must seek repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906, which permitted emergency action by a President long before the statutory authority existed for the protection of special federal lands,” Steve Pearce’s predecessor Pendley wrote.
And indeed, in May 2025, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion concluding that the Antiquities Act allows a president to alter prior monument declarations and, in some circumstances, eliminate the land reservation associated with a monument entirely. That opinion reversed a long-standing understanding reflected in a 1938 attorney general opinion that a president could not abolish a national monument.
That new legal theory gives the administration, and BLM Director Pearce, a potential roadmap.
Early last year, Interior Secretary Burgum ordered reviews of monument boundaries and land withdrawals as part of a broader energy-development push, indicating that officials were considering reductions to several Western monuments to encourage mining, drilling, or other development.
Pearce now steps into that landscape of law, politics, and administrative opportunity. His confirmation comes just after the administration has moved to reverse Biden-era conservation priorities, including the Public Lands Rule, which had formally placed conservation on par with other BLM uses.
Over the course of the past fourteen months, Trump and congressional Republicans have been unraveling Biden-era regulations, opening public lands for mining and drilling, using obscure laws like the Congressional Review Act, and canceling conservation rules.
The BLM has always been a complicated agency, asked to reconcile an almost impossible range of mandates: grazing, mining, drilling, recreation, archaeology, wildlife habitat, wilderness, wildfire, tribal consultation, and conservation.
Unlike the National Park Service, whose central mission is preservation, the BLM operates under the multiple-use framework of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA). But monuments within the BLM system are different. They’re designated because certain objects, landscapes, and cultural resources have been judged nationally significant. Their management is supposed to begin with protection.
That distinction matters. A national monument does not necessarily prohibit all traditional uses. Many BLM monuments allow grazing, hunting, hiking, scientific research, tribal access and other activities. Some allow existing rights to continue. But monument status changes the baseline. It tells the agency that certain values—cultural, ecological, scientific, historic—are integral to the landscape.
For Indigenous nations, that can mean protection for ancestral sites, burial areas, and ceremonial landscapes. For wildlife, it can provide intact habitat at a time when development, roads, fencing, and climate stress are fragmenting migration routes across the West.
For nearby communities, it safeguards the durable economic value of protected open space: outfitters, guides, restaurants, hotels, artists, retirees, and visitors drawn to places that remain recognizable as wild, historic, or sacred.
The BLM itself says its monuments and conservation areas contain threatened and endangered species habitat, significant cultural and paleontological resources, critical wildlife migration corridors, and world-class hunting and fishing access. The agency also notes that surrounding communities derive economic benefits from tourism and long-term job and population growth.
Pearce has tried to reassure senators that he will listen to local communities and operate within the law. At his confirmation hearing, when pressed about his past support for public-land sell-offs, he said he did not believe the federal government would conduct wholesale sales of BLM land, while also saying, “I’m not so sure that I’ve changed,” when asked about his public-lands record.
That sentence may follow him into office.
Because for many westerners like myself, the concern is not that Steve Pearce has hidden his philosophy. It’s the opposite—it’s that he has been remarkably consistent about it.
For decades, he’s viewed the federal government as an absentee landlord, argued for stronger local control, and supported efforts to limit presidential monument authority.
Now, he will lead the very agency that manages many of the monuments he once criticized from Congress.
In the months ahead, the first signs may be subtle: a review notice, a change in planning language, a new interpretation of “smallest area compatible,” a shift in how BLM evaluates mineral potential inside or around monuments.
Pearce’s confirmation does not guarantee that national monuments will be shrunk. But it places a longtime critic of expansive federal land protection at the helm of the nation’s largest public-lands agency at precisely the moment when the Trump administration has revived the legal and political tools to attack them.
The future of America’s national monuments may soon depend not only on presidential proclamations, but on what Steve Pearce’s BLM chooses to recommend, defend, weaken, or ignore.
“Anyone who cares about the future of public lands, national monuments, or the redrock knows that Steve Pearce has fundamentally disqualifying views—such as opposing the very existence of public lands—and should not hold the position of Director of the Bureau of Land Management,” said Travis Hammill, DC Director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). “While the Trump Administration continues its deeply unpopular efforts to undermine public lands protections, SUWA’s work continues to protect Utah’s redrock country for current and future generations.”
Lastly, I’m also particularly curious about the following.
The first “immediate action” that William Perry Pendley describes in Project 2025 for the Interior Department to take involves the BLM headquarters. It was Pendley who moved the agency’s headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Colorado during the first Trump administration—a reorganization that quickly turned into a fiasco and a huge loss of staff, and was reversed under Biden.
Calling it “the epitome of good governance,” he’s now recommending that Interior does that again.
In fact, Pendley’s two-and-a-half-page recommendation about the BLM headquarters—it’s a rant, really—is the longest individual section in Project 2025’s entire Interior Department chapter.
He really wants the headquarters to be moved back out West this time.
And considering that the Forest Service is already trying to do the same, it’s not unlikely that the BLM, which now, finally, has a new director in Steve Pearce, will make similar plans once again.
Thanks for reading!
See you on our public lands and waters,
Bram
Image 1: Grand Canyon Trust / Tim Peterson
Image 2: BLM / Bob Wick
Image 3: BLM / Lisa Phillips
Image 4: Grand Canyon Trust / Amy S. Martin
Image 5: Grand Canyon Trust / Tim Peterson
Steve Pearce is our worst nightmare. At least, one of them....
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