# Bureau of Land Management The **Bureau of Land Management** is the [[Department of the Interior]] agency that administers roughly **245 million surface acres** — about one-tenth of the United States land base, overwhelmingly in the eleven western states and Alaska — plus some 700 million acres of subsurface mineral estate. It is the largest single land manager in the federal government, and by a wide margin the least protected: BLM land is governed by a **multiple-use, sustained-yield** mandate under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (FLPMA), which directs the agency to balance grazing, mining, energy development, timber, recreation, and conservation rather than to preserve. Created in 1946 by the merger of the General Land Office and the Grazing Service, the BLM inherited the disposal-era machinery of American westward expansion and was only converted into a permanent land-management agency by FLPMA thirty years later. That conversion — the moment the federal government formally announced it would *keep* the public domain rather than dispose of it — is the direct trigger of the [[Sagebrush Rebellion]]. ## Why it matters to this KB The BLM is the primary institutional target of the anti-federal-lands right. It manages most of the acreage inside contested national monuments, including [[Bears Ears National Monument]] and [[Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument]]; it writes the resource management plans that county governments and state legislatures fight; and its multiple-use mandate is the doctrinal hinge on which the [[30x30 Conservation Initiative]] fight turned. **Leadership as flashpoint.** [[William Perry Pendley]] — former president of [[Mountain States Legal Foundation]] and a self-described sagebrush rebel who had written that the federal government should sell off the public lands — ran the agency as acting director from 2019 to 2021 without ever being confirmed by the Senate; a federal court ruled in September 2020 that he had served unlawfully. He went on to write the Interior chapter of [[Project 2025]]. **Headquarters relocation.** The first Trump administration moved BLM headquarters from Washington to Grand Junction, Colorado in 2019–2020, a move critics characterized as a staff-dispersal tactic that cost the agency much of its senior career workforce. The Biden administration restored the Washington headquarters in 2021 while keeping a western office. **The Public Lands Rule.** The BLM's 2024 Conservation and Landscape Health Rule — which would have allowed third parties to hold *restoration and mitigation leases* on BLM land, treating conservation as a use co-equal with grazing and drilling — was the single most contested public-lands regulation of the Biden era. It was rescinded effective June 11, 2026. See [[30x30 Conservation Initiative]]. **A confirmed director, for the first time under Trump.** No BLM director was confirmed in the first term; the agency ran on acting officials, Pendley chief among them. On **May 18, 2026** the Senate confirmed **Steve Pearce** — a 78-year-old former New Mexico congressman, Vietnam-era pilot and former owner of an oil-well-servicing company, on record in Congress favoring the sale of federal land to reduce the deficit — by 46–43 on party lines, en bloc with some fifty other nominees. More than eighty conservation groups had opposed him; the Western Energy Alliance and the cattlemen supported him. The confirmation, the June 2026 rescission of the Public Lands Rule and the Interior Secretary [[Doug Burgum]]'s "energy dominance" orders put the disposal-era question back on the table for the first time since FLPMA: whether the government keeps the public domain at all. See [[Sagebrush Rebellion]] and [[Executive Order 14154]]. ## See also - [[Federal Land Management Crosswalk]] — the BLM column beside the other three land agencies, and the five levers that change what may happen on its 244.4 million acres - [[Federal Land Policy and Management Act]] - [[Resource Management Plan]] - [[Public Lands Rule]] - [[Stevan Pearce]]