Weekly Watch: Sell Off Steve Pearce at BLM, Doug Burgum’s Crony Kingdom Grows
Some Western ‘Stewardship’ Senators Support Sell Off Steve Pearce to Lead BLM, While Doug Burgum’s Crony Kingdom Grows
HELENA, MT – Save Our Parks is tracking the massive assault against America’s national parks and public lands system by Donald Trump, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and their cronies, documenting the ongoing consequences of Trump’s unprecedented attack on our nation’s natural heritage.
Trump’s minions in the United States Senate, up to and including the members of the bipartisan Senate Stewardship Caucus, are offering their early support for 78-year-old former New Mexico Representative Steve Pearce, Trump’s latest anti-public land, anti-public access, pro-sell off crony nominated to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The BLM oversees a quarter-billion acres of public lands in the United States and publicly-owned natural resources.
Pearce has a long track record of working to sell off public lands and putting monied interests, like Big Oil, ahead of the American people. If confirmed by the Senate, Sell Off Steve would be perched atop the BLM, and his dreams could finally come true, making the administration’s friends and donors lots of money by ruining and exploiting our public lands and outdoors.
Pearce was an abject failure for the New Mexico Republican Party, both as chair and a member of Congress, and voters in the state have sent him packing multiple times. He would be better suited in a New Mexican retirement home, not in a position to help Mike Lee and Doug Burgum strip America’s vast and treasured outdoors down. There’s a time for choosing, and for Senators like Steve Daines, Tim Sheehy, Mike Capo, and Jim Risch–who claim to oppose public land sell offs–that time is now. If they truly care about the stewardship of our lands, they must publicly reject Sell Off Steve’s nomination to lead BLM.
This all comes as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is concentrating absolute power for him and him alone, transferring 5,000 positions at the department to the Office of the Secretary. One in seven employees at Interior now work directly for him. This has been great for Burgum, who has used a U.S. Park Police helicopter as his personal transportation and forced employees to staff his dinner parties and bake him cookies. But it’s come at great cost to taxpayers and for our parks and public lands, which have spent ten months languishing under Burgum’s fail-by-design plan.
At the same time Burgum uses his government position to run his own personal kingdom, wasting governmental resources and tax dollars to ensure that his employees cater to his every whim, he has cut almost 10,000 positions from the overall department, including nearly 25% of all national park employees. He hasn’t even bothered to call for a National Park Service director nominee or stand up to the additional 30% budget cuts across the department by the Trump administration.
Instead, Burgum, who is carrying out a censorship campaign across our parks and public lands, has announced that, instead of reversing the massive purge of NPS employees, the agency is hiring 500 law enforcement officers. Our parks and public lands were already getting screwed before the government shutdown, forced to operate on skeleton crews and shoestring budgets. Burgum’s mismanagement and consolidation of absolute power at Interior is emblematic of the rot at the heart of his failed leadership, where serving the American people always comes second to personal luxuries on the taxpayer dime.
New polling shows just how unhappy Americans are with Burgum’s fail-by-design plan during his first ten months of corruption at Interior. And they have a right to be pissed: our parks and public lands have never been worse off, after draconian DOGE firings, Trump’s historic shutdown, and Burgum’s dereliction of duty.
So far, Trump’s Republicans in Congress have given Burgum a long leash, letting him operate with no transparency and little to no oversight. But what exactly is he doing with his thousands of new “personal staff” members? Why is Burgum running our beloved national parks and public lands into the ground? Where is the transparency and accountability to taxpayers? The American people deserve to know, and if members of Congress won’t pursue accountability, the voters will.
Parks and Public Lands in the News:
Safety and Preparedness
iHeartMedia: Schumer Advocates for Restoration of National Park Funding
“Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer visited Saratoga County on Monday (November 17) to advocate for the renewal of the Legacy Restoration Fund. Standing at the historic Saratoga Battlefield, Schumer introduced the ‘America the Beautiful Act,’ which aims to restore and expand the expired fund. This fund, initially established under the Great American Outdoors Act in 2020, has provided nearly $2 billion nationwide for national park maintenance, including over $6 million to the Saratoga National Historic Park.”
Daily Kos: Guess where Trump's planning on sending cops next
“Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has been pushing to purge national parks of more federal workers, but he has a grand plan to make these treasured public spaces great again: hire a bunch of cops. On Monday, Burgum announced that the National Park Service is hiring 500 law enforcement officers.”
Privatization and Sell-Offs
SFGate: Trump's pick to manage 245M acres notoriously hellbent on selling public lands
“In a 2012 speech to Mitt Romney supporters, he criticized what he called Teddy Roosevelt's ‘big ideas of big forests and big national parks’ in the American West, and asserted that Romney's election would ‘reverse this trend of public ownership of lands.’ Later that year, he co-authored a letter to Congress that pushed for selling public lands to oil and gas drilling in order to offset an Obama-era government spending deficit. ‘Over 90% of this land is located in the western states and most of it we do not even need,’ the letter reads.”
E&E News: Trump team proposes big changes in ESA rules
“The proposals would govern how the Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries handle their most important ESA tasks, from designating critical habitat to setting protection standards for threatened species. If made final, they would reverse myriad regulations set during the Biden administration and restore rules from President Donald Trump’s first term.”
Washington Post: Opinion: New Mexico knows Trump’s BLM nominee. Back away.
“This approach will not work at the Bureau of Land Management. The agency has responsibilities managing oil leases, mineral royalties, grazing permits and wilderness areas, and it must balance the interests of ranchers, tribal nations, environmentalists and energy producers. That takes diplomacy and competence. Pearce, however, has spent his career alienating the very stakeholders he would be required to work with. In Congress, he voted against environmental protections, dismissed climate science and pushed to expand drilling in sensitive areas such as Otero Mesa.”
Los Angeles Times: The government shutdown is over. The nightmare facing public lands under Trump may have just begun
“Wilcox and other public lands advocates allege that President Trump’s administration used the shutdown to expedite an agenda that prioritizes extraction while slashing resources dedicated to conservation and education. What’s more, they fear the staffing priorities that came into sharp relief over the past 43 days offer a preview of how these lands will be managed going forward, especially in the aftermath of another potential mass layoff that could see the Interior Department cut 2,000 more jobs.”
Alaska Beacon: Inside one of Alaska’s national parks, a fight looms over a possible gold mine
“A prominent Alaska mining company is leasing the Johnson Tract from its Indigenous owners, and the property, some 125 miles southwest of Anchorage, has emerged as one of the most promising mining prospects in Southcentral Alaska. But conservationists, commercial salmon fishermen and local lodge owners fear a mine, encircled by the federal protected area, could disrupt harvests and harm wildlife, including an endangered population of beluga whales. Getting the Johnson Tract’s minerals to buyers will require trucking ore through a now-roadless corner of the national park to a future port.”
Community Impacts
Ark Valley Voice: Interior Secretary Burgum Transfers Thousand of Staff to Personal Office
“Translated, this means that one in seven employees at Interior now work directly for Burgum. He now holds direct authority over their jobs, incomes, and their futures. In addition to the outright staff transfers, at the same time, Burgum has cut almost 10,000 positions from the overall department.”
PEER: Interior Secretary Grabs Unparalleled Staff and Functions
“During Doug Burgum’s short tenure as Secretary of the Interior, his office staffing has exploded while other Interior agency workforces have shrunk, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Burgum’s acquisition of approximately 5,000 staff positions has occurred without any formal Congressional approval.”
“Today, the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) released new data showing that a strong bipartisan majority of Americans reject recent and proposed cuts to our national parks. In fact, only 16% of Americans support the Trump administration’s continued staffing cuts to the National Park Service, and only 12% back the proposed massive budget reduction for the agency.”
Forbes: Government Shutdown Ends, But Its Toll On National Parks Lingers
“However, since the government shutdown, parks have been either closed or left understaffed, so many couldn’t collect these fees. Based on the 2024 totals, the 43-day pause in fee collection could easily mean around $40 million in lost revenue. Money that would have gone directly toward improving visitor experiences and repairing infrastructure.”
Salt Lake Tribune: As the shutdown ends, a long recovery begins at Zion National Park
“The full toll of the shutdown on national parks is still being assessed. Zion lost an estimated $1.7 million in fee revenue during October alone, according to Britt. Those fees, Britt added, cover critical park operations such as the shuttle service, trail maintenance, resource protection and visitor safety.”
Stories on the Trail
MT Wildlife Federation: Despite Senator Daines already offering his support for Pearce, and calling him "a great pick," MWF calls on Montana's Senators Daines and Sheehy—who have both professed to favor keeping public lands in public hands—to reject this nomination.
@protectnps: The government is open. But for our national parks, the hard part starts now. After 43 days of “open” parks with minimal or no staffing, rangers and scientists are just beginning to uncover the damage—wildfires near unstaffed campgrounds, vandalism at Arches, a damaged wall at Gettysburg, illegal BASE jumping in Yosemite, and research projects left in limbo. All of this is happening on top of years of budget cuts and nearly 25% staff losses across the National Park Service. The shutdown didn’t create this crisis, but it deepened it.
@NPCA: What’s next for parks and rangers now that the shutdown is ending? We’re living in a moment where hypotheticals—once unbelievable—have become possible scenarios. That is, unless Americans speak up loudly.
@NRDC: The Trump administration is proposing to remove protections for lands near New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park. This area is home to culturally significant ancestral landscapes.
The Crisis Continues:
The crisis continues to escalate across America’s 640-million-acre public lands system and is poised to get worse after Trump’s spending package, passed by Congressional Republicans, slashed some $267 million of previously committed funding for national parks. The National Park Service has lost nearly a quarter of its permanent workforce since Trump took office, with some parks now operating without superintendents and at half-staff during peak visitation. Between Trump, DOGE, and Republicans’ draconian budget cuts, hiring freezes, and workforce reductions, the staffing shortages are forcing scientists, park rangers, and other safety personnel to clean toilets and pick up garbage instead of conducting critical work like ongoing maintenance and supporting visitor safety.
Save Our Parks documents and exposes conditions across America’s federal park and public lands system through monitoring reports, visitor testimonials, and accountability research. The campaign maintains comprehensive documentation through its website at SaveOurParks.us.
To speak with Save Our Parks spokesperson Jayson O’Neill, email jayson@focalpointstrategygroup.com.
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