The dramatic removal of Mike Nedd, the Bureau of Land Management’s top career official who was escorted out of the Interior Department’s headquarters this week, left a crater-sized hole in BLM’s leadership team.
All three of BLM’s deputy directors positions are now vacant, through either attrition, transfer, or in Nedd’s case, placement on administrative leave under still-mysterious circumstances. Multiple people familiar with the situation, granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly, have said he is on leave.
Right now, the BLM director is also a temporary leader.
Nedd’s deputy director position is a big job, overseeing roughly 9,000 staffers who manage 245 million acres of federal rangelands, mostly in the West and Alaska.
