New Federal Lands Manager Wants to Sell Federal Land

Bill Penley. He was just appointed as the acting chief of the Federal Bureau of Land Management, you know, the agency that manages one eighth the entire land mass of the United States. Unless you're really into federal lands issues, or you're one of Penley's eight hundred or so Twitter followers, you've probably never heard of him. But Bloomberg Environment's Bobby McGill says his appointment speaks volumes about where the Trump administration wants to take federal lands policy, and Bobby joins

us in the studio today. Hello Bobby. Hello, So before we get into Penley, let's talk about the BLM itself, because you know, not everyone knows what that is. Myself included what exactly is the Bureau of Land Management and what does it do? So the Bureau of Land Management is the nation's largest land manager. They manage two hundred and forty six million acres of federal land, mostly in

the West. And to give you an idea as to how significant their landholdings are, if you take a road trip through any of the eleven Western states, there's a pretty good chance that if you're outside of a major city's limits, something you see on the horizon is under BLM management. I have taken several of those road trips. That's something I've done personally myself. I can verify that. So the BLM manages all the federal onshore minerals. That

means oil, gas, and coal. That means that even if it's not on federal lands, the BLM manages the oil. So the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that's not BLM land, but it is. But the oil beneath it managed by the BLM. That's really important. So it's not just the land itself, it's what's under the land that's correct. And that leads us right into a great segue for Penley himself. Let's talk about him. He's the acting head of the Bureau of Land Management. He's quite a character. I looked

at his Twitter feed recently. He has a black poodle named Mitcham who he posts a lot of photos of. He had a photo of himself recently on the fourth of July stand next to a big SUV with the American flag on it. He's you know, he basically it seems like he uses Twitter in a lot of the same ways that the President of the United States uses Twitter. He has been called flamboyant and Trumpian. For Trumpian, that's a great term. Who is he and where does he

come from? What's his background and how did he get to where he is now. So William Perry Penley is the former president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation. He's originally from Wyoming. He is sort of a protege of former INTERI your Secretary James G. Watt, who was sort of the figurehead of the Sagebrush Rebellion, which was a response to basically the Carter Administration's management of federal lands

in the West. And should and we should also say, for those of you who want to follow him on Twitter, his Twitter handle is sage Brush Rebel, so that he's he really identifies with that movement. Penley's a character because he is a protege of James Watt. James Watt is long has long been derided by the environmental movement for essentially wanting to dismantle a lot of the federal protections of federal land in the West and encourage certain kinds

of development. So it sounds like he's someone whose viewpoint is that the federal government should be owning as little land as it needs, maybe no land, and it should all go back to the states and cities. That's kind of that was the main thrust of this movement, you know, this this so called sage Brush Rebellion. Penley has written very recently, actually in twenty seventeen in the National Journal that you know, the BLM should in the federal government

should not be in the land management business. He advocated for the federal government to literally sell it all off. And I mean, you know, to be fair, the federal government owns a lot of land in the West. You know, the majority of land in Nevada and Utah is under federal control. This is sort of a sort of the inherent tension between those who think that there is a great national interest in a lot of this land for

many different reasons. And those who believe that, you know, primarily the local local residents and local governments have the biggest stake in this land, right And I mean this is this is the context for all of this. You know, BLM can sometimes be, you know, sort of not an agency that doesn't grab a lot of headlines until you think about their role in a lot of the stuff that's been happening recently. And the main thing I'm thinking of is the Bunde standoff in Oregon. You know, that

was all about who controls public land. And then we should remind our listeners who may have already forgotten that was a group of people, in a lot of them from the Bundi family who basically just commandeered a federal plot of land and refuse to leave and refuse to relinquish it. And it was a sort of a tense standoff for quite a while. That's that's the way people feel in that part of the country. And you know, we now have the head of of BLM, or at

least the acting head. This doesn't seem like a pick that you make when you're trying to build consensus. You know, no, what is what does yeah, what does it say about this is this is not a consensus pick at all. This is Steve Bannon said that, you know the goal of the administration is to dismantle the administrative state, right,

That's literally what they're trying to do. McK mulvaney just this last weekend said in South Carolina that if you want to drain the swamp, so to speak, the best way to do that is to get federal workers to quit, and the best way to do that is to move federal agencies out of Washington. The Interior Department announced the day after Penley started work at BLM on July sixteenth, that they will be moving the headquarters of the BLM

to Grand Junction, Colorado. One'm from d C. From DC, one of the first federal agencies to move its headquarters out west. And so you know, Penley's hiring the move of the headquarters, and you know, these statements from the Trump administration, and according to my sources, they're saying that this these are these are steps you would take to you know, allow greater local control over federal lands. So overall, I mean to sort of put a bow on it.

I guess it sounds like the Trump administration is, you know, we have these these really long simmary intentions in the West about the use of federal land to date back all the way to like the seventies and probably even before that. Things are really coming to a head in

the last couple of years. You have the Bundy standoff and other people who are you know, advocating for the federal government to get out of the landlad And just to just to add to this, I mean, what's there's an important piece of this puzzle here is that in twenty twelve, the state of Utah actually passed a law that demanded the federal government hand over thirty one million

acres within its within its boundaries. It's been unsuccessful, but it's it's part of this movement that has been gaining ground. But overall, it sounds like, you know, the Trump administration is not trying to sort of tamp things down and cooled off the rhetoric and you know, make you know, let's kind of all take a step back and take a deep breath. Quite the opposite, Quite the opposite. That's that's I find really interesting. That was Bloomberg Environment's Bobby McGill.

You can find more of his reporting at our website news dot Bloomberg Environment dot com. That's news dot Bloomberg Environment dot com. If you want to chat with us on social media, use the hashtag parts per b. That hashtag, once again is parts per b. Today's episode of parts Pervillion was produced by myself along with Marissa Horne and Jessica Coombs. Nicholas Anzelada is our audio engineer. The music for this episode is a message by Jazaar. It was

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