Washington • A conservative lawyer and writer who argues for selling off the nation’s public lands is now in charge of a nearly quarter-billion acres in federally held rangeland and other wilderness.
Interior Secretary David Bernhardt on Monday signed an order making Wyoming native William Perry Pendley acting head of the Bureau of Land Management. The bureau manages nearly 250 million acres of largely wild public lands and their minerals and other resources in vast holdings across the U.S. West.
Pendley, a former midlevel Interior appointee in the Reagan administration, for decades has championed ranchers and others in standoffs with the federal government over grazing and other uses of public lands.