May 06, 2020 02:21 PM UTC

William Perry Pendley Is The Boil You Just Can't Pop

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Grand Junction Sentinel reports from the new home of the Bureau of Land Management, where the fossil fuel management types outnumber the regulators and that’s just the way “forever acting” BLM Director William Perry Pendley likes it:

William Perry Pendley will serve for at least another month as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, despite activist groups warning Interior Secretary David Bernhardt to expect a lawsuit should he extend Pendley’s assignment running the agency.

Bernhardt on Tuesday issued a written order giving Pendley decision-making authority over the BLM through June 5. That authority was set to expire Tuesday unless extended.

Pendley is deputy director of policy and programs at the BLM but has been running it since Bernhardt first put him in charge last summer. Bernhardt has extended that assignment several times since. That has resulted in Pendley overseeing the agency’s relocation of its national headquarters to Grand Junction, as well as the moving of many other BLM jobs based in Washington, D.C., to several states.

Pendley’s proudly toxic (pun intended) record of advocacy for polluters, climate change deniers, “sagebrush rebellion” freeloaders, and basically every other bad actor whose business could come before the Bureau of Land Management means that even if his confirmation would be assured in a Republican-controlled U.S. Senate, the confirmation hearings themselves would be a political nightmare scenario for the GOP in an election year. Sen. Michael Bennet simply wants Pendley gone, and compared to trying to confirm him ditching Pendley would be doing Republicans a favor.

The effects of the still-underway move of the BLM from Washington to the remote “company town” of Grand Junction, Colorado are difficult to quantify today, but the loss of influence and huge apparent hit to morale of career professionals do not bode well. Sen. Cory Gardner, who became the local face of the BLM’s controversial move just as it became controversial, benefits from that ambiguity for as long as it can last. Pendley’s seemingly interminable “acting” status while these sweeping changes to the agency he oversees are made is under investigation by the House, but in the present emergency no lawmaker can either truthfully or responsibly call this their highest priority.

It’ll be on the list of Trump scandals to forensically reconstruct after January 20, 2021.