President Donald Trump’s pick of a New Mexico Republican and former oil and gas industry business owner to lead the Bureau of Land Management is the White House’s latest move to bolster fossil fuel development on federal land.
Steve Pearce, who served 12 years in two separate stints as a New Mexico congressman, is a staunch Trump ally. As a lawmaker during Trump’s first term in office, Pearce supported his 2017 move to dramatically cut the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah.
Former President Joe Biden restored the monuments to near their original size in 2021.
A former Air Force and commercial airline pilot, Pearce also frequently butted heads with the Obama administration over efforts to restrict oil and gas drilling on lands on the nearly 250 million acres managed by the bureau, mostly across the West, including New Mexico, where drilling in the Permian Basin remains a top issue. BLM manages roughly 700 million acres of subsurface mineral estate, which Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have vowed to open up.
