William Perry Pendley is an attorney, commentator, and author who has served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. He was also the president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF), a nonprofit litigation firm. The MSLF describes itself, in part, as “focused on protecting property rights and economic liberty.” The foundation’s named donors’ bios recount examples of the government using a heavy hand to deprive people of their rights—for example levying a large fine for altering the course of a river and executing a fruitless search to find evidence of a crime.
According to the bio on Pendley’s Amazon author listing, he “led [the MSLF] and took it from the verge of bankruptcy to a renowned nonprofit, public-interest law firm with its own headquarters [and] ten million dollars in the bank.” This success raises the question of how the firm went from near bankruptcy to financial stability. The firm’s donors’ page mentions anonymous donors, including one credited with paying for “its professional national headquarters.”
According to Documented (“an investigative watchdog and journalism project”), the “MSLF received significant funding from the fossil fuel industry, including large grants from oil billionaire Charles Koch and ExxonMobil. Additionally, Documented claims, “MSLF has received significant funding from oil, gas, and mining interests.” These include Chevron, Shell, Anadarko, and Devon Energy. On its financials page, the MSLF points out that its donors have the right to remain private.
During his tenure in the Reagan administration, Pendley reportedly identified with the Sagebrush Rebellion, an effort that started in the late 1970s to strengthen state or local control over federal land and management decisions. The federal government owns significant amounts of land in the western states, and local interests have often been in conflict with the federal government over the best use of those lands. Issues include whether the lands should be sold outright or opened to such activities as mining, drilling, fracking, grazing, and logging—or, alternatively, among other things, left largely untouched to preserve wildlife and foster recreational use. An E&E News story recounts one such conflict regarding coal mining. According to E&E News: “As the Reagan administration planned its first Powder River Basin coal sale…Pendley pushed for the ‘highest possible level of leasing.’ Writing for the Interior Department’s energy and minerals office, he declared, ‘Excess’ leasing neither degrades the environment nor creates community impacts.”
The title of an article written by Pendley for the National Review makes his views clear: “The Federal Government Should Follow the Constitution and Sell Its Western Lands.” Regarding endangered species, the Guardian reports Pendley as saying: “This is why out west we say ‘shoot, shovel and shut up’ when it comes to the discovery of endangered species on your property…And I have to say, as a lawyer, that’s not legal advice.”
Pendley’s appointment to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was part of a trend of the Trump administration to appoint adversaries of federal government agencies to leadership positions in those agencies. As the Guardian recounts, for example, Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency was Scott Pruitt, a former coal industry lobbyist. According to the National Review, Pruitt has cited “disagreement about whether carbon dioxide is the main cause of global warming.” The Guardian also refers to a New York Times article claiming that Pruitt was part of a “secretive alliance” of fossil fuel companies.
Another Trump appointee was Ryan Zinke to the Department of the Interior. Zinke has been quoted as saying: “when there’s a volcano in the Philippines that erupts and produces more C02 than humans have produced in 200 years–is C02 really the problem?” Another Trump appointee cited by the Guardian is Rick Perry, who was appointed to the Department of Energy. Regarding Perry, the Guardian writes: “Perry wrote in a 2010 book that ‘we have been experiencing a cooling trend.’ [and] ‘Calling CO2 a pollutant is doing a disservice the country, and I believe a disservice to the world…I’m not a scientist.’” Another such appointment was that of Betsy DeVos to lead the Department of Education. DeVos has been quoted by the Florida Phoenix as saying: “I personally think the Department of Education should not exist.” DeVos is a staunch advocate of school privatization measures.
Pendley’s appointment to the BLM was controversial from the start. Seeking to halt his appointment, public interest groups pointed out his career in service of those advocating for private use and ownership of publicly owned land. Accountable.US released a statement in opposition to his appointment, for example: “William Pendley is uniquely unqualified for this position. He has spent his career fighting for a far-right ideology that puts the wishes of extractive industries ahead of the needs of communities that rely on our public lands….We urge the Senate to reject his nomination.”
In another example of the opposition to the appointment of Pendley to the BLM, the Wilderness Society issued a press release stating: “Today, 301 organizations, Tribes, and businesses sent a letter to members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee opposing the nomination of William Perry Pendley to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).” The letter cites “Pendley’s long history of climate denial, his bigoted and extremist views and actions, and his commitment to selling off America’s public lands to fossil fuel companies.”
Pendley’s tenure with the Trump administration was marked by controversy regarding his role and status with the agency. Pendley’s Linkedin page lists his employment at the BLM as Deputy Director, Policy and Programs from July 2019 to January 2021. According to other sources, however, he served as acting director.
It is important to note that the appointment was as acting director, or what effectively amounted to acting director. As Outside narrates, appointment as an acting director provides an “end run” around “a legally mandated [Senate] confirmation hearing.” His role at the BLM was also marked by “a shady edit of the bureau’s organization chart, seemingly intended to obscure his authority.” Outside further alleges that secretary of the interior David Bernhardt reappointed Pendley “every few months,” presumably as a way of avoiding the legally required confirmation hearing. Others went further in their claims about the legal standing of Pendley’s appointment.
For example, the Missoula Current noted that “Montana conservationists and sportsmen are pushing back against what they see as an illegal move to assign a public land opponent to the top spot in the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.” As the New York Times reported: “A federal judge in Montana has ordered William Perry Pendley, the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, to leave the position after finding that he had served unlawfully as acting director for 424 days.”
During Pendley’s tenure at the BLM, the agency moved its Washington, D.C., office to Grand Junction, Colorado. The move was controversial. As Colorado Public Radio reports, “At least 81 of 179 BLM staff who were asked to move from Washington D.C. to Grand Junction Colorado opted to leave the agency instead.” The Colorado Public Radio story goes on to quote George Stone, a director of the Public Lands Foundation, as saying: “These are employees who specialize in policy, interagency and interdepartmental coordination, working with key constituents. It’s kind of tough to imagine how this kind of work is going to be conducted out west in remote locations.”
As for the building that the agency occupied in Grand Junction, NPR noted that Chevron had an office upstairs and that the Colorado Oil and Gas Association was next door to the agency’s entryway. Additionally, as Raul Grijalva, a Democrat who serves on the House Natural Resources Committee noted in an article in Outside, putting the BLM office “down the road from Secretary Bernhardt’s home town… just makes it easier for special interests to walk in the door demanding favors without congressional oversight or accountability.”
Speaking in defense of the move to NPR, Pendley pointed out: “The oil patch can always afford to fly to Washington and sit down with somebody,” further noting that he was thankful that the agency’s new neighbors did not include a marijuana dispensary. NPR goes on to quote Cody Perry, a local activist and environmental filmmaker, regarding the move: “I think it’s an absolute effort to undermine…an agency.” Or as Grijalva observed: “The agency will lose a lot of good people because of this move, and I suspect that’s the administration’s real goal here.”
Pendley has a record of controversial statements and actions. For example, CNN reports that Pendley said in a 1992 speech to the Heritage Foundation that “Despite the total absence of credible scientific evidence, the media is convinced and is attempting to convince us that we have global warming…and that it is all man’s fault.” Furthermore, as The Intercept recounts in an article titled: “Trump’s Pick to Manage Public Lands Has Four-Decade History of “Overt Racism” Toward Native People: William Perry Pendley pushed rhetoric, legal arguments, and policies that sought to deprive Indigenous people of their rights.” One example is Pendley’s suggestion in a book that Native American people may soon cease to exist. This suggestion is apparently based on the use of the blood quantum to determine membership in a tribe. Pendley is reported as further claiming that “The day may come sooner than many expect given that, with ever-declining blood quantum per tribal member, recognized tribes may soon be little more than associations of financial convenience.”
Addressing the issue of the blood quantum, The Intercept quotes Jill Doerfler, a first-degree descendant of the White Earth Nation and professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth. The Intercept writes: “Doerfler’s scholarship shows that blood quantum was imposed by European Americans attempting to diminish the number of tribal citizens able to access land.” Further: the blood quantum has been used “to diminish the number of people that have that legal and political status as American Indians.”
The Intercept also recounts how Pendley has taken action against Native interests. The news source notes: “As acting assistant secretary for energy and minerals under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, Pendley sought to delay oil and gas industry royalty payments owed to Indigenous people.” The Intercept cites Western Values Project as a source for this claim. The Intercept goes on to provide this quote from Pendley’s book Warriors for the West: “The history of the federal government’s treatment of American Indians has not involved overt, intentional racial hatred, but instead an attempt to achieve a Jeffersonian ideal of a United States of America in which all adopted the English language, Christian religion, and Anglo/American culture and lived side by side.”
The Intercept goes on to argue that Pendley has misrepresented history by characterizing the history of the relations between the United States government and Natives as racial rather than legal. For example, The Intercept mentions “the 1974 Supreme Court decision known as Morton v. Mancari, which affirms the U.S.’s obligations to Native people under the Constitution.” Pendley, according to The Intercept, “has repeatedly and inaccurately argued that the decision supports unconstitutional racial preferences.” According to The Intercept, Pendley has gone on to argue for the repeal of Morton v. Mancari.
Later in the article, The Intercept recounts that “As a lawyer with Mountain States Legal Foundation and in his writing, he has argued against tribes and Native people in cases related to voting rights, tribal courts’ jurisdiction, tribes’ tax-exempt status, and the right of Indigenous people to speak their languages in the workplace.” Pendley has also argued against Native interests in controversies regarding the Devils Tower (a butte in Wyoming) and the Bears Ears National Monument.
Pendley’s opposition to such things as Native interests and conservation have been noted in his contribution to Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. This is pointed out in an E&E News article titled “Trump BLM chief: Let’s do away with Antiquities Act: William Perry Pendley, the former Bureau of Land Management leader, proposes repeal of the Antiquities Act and more cuts to existing sites in the next Republican administration.” The article states that under the Antiquities Act, presidents can designate existing public lands as national monuments to protect areas of cultural, historic or scientific interest. Pendley has opposed the efforts of the administration of Joe Biden to reestablish the boundaries of Bears Ears and other sites that were put in place before President Trump’s administration acted to reduce those boundaries.
E&E News quotes a critic of Pendley’s proposal in the Mandate for Leadership as saying: “This is a full scale assault on America’s national monuments and all of our common natural heritage…. It makes clear that the end goal is to do away with the Antiquities Act altogether and sever a president’s authority to protect lands as national monuments.”
Regarding Pendley’s plans for the Department of the Interior as laid out in the Mandate for Leadership, the Huffington Post published this article: “Trump’s Second-Term Blueprint Would Take A Wrecking Ball To Public Lands: William Perry Pendley, an anti-federal land zealot, wrote the playbook for a Republican-controlled Interior Department, with an assist from an oil buddy.” The buddy is Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas trade group. In a footnote in the Mandate for Leadership, Pendley credits not just Sgamma but also Dan Kish and Katie Tubb for writing the section on energy in its entirety. According to the Climate Power web site, Dan Kish is a senior vice president of policy at the American Energy Alliance and Katie Tubb is a former senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. Climate Power also states that the American Energy Alliance and the Heritage Foundation both have deep ties to the fossil fuel industry. Climate Power has published an article outlining the policy goals of Pendley, Kish, and Tubb on its web site. The article is titled “Trump’s Project 2025: A Dream for Polluters and Nightmare for America.”
