Amid a wave of opposition in the Senate, the Trump administration says it will withdraw the nomination of William Perry Pendley to head the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, in September. But Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who named Pendley to the role of acting BLM director in 2019, says he will stay in the acting job.
That’s another in the Trump administration’s illegal use of “acting” appointments in positions that require Senate confirmation, which Pendley would not have received. The president says he likes having “actings” in place, because it insulates him from federal laws about who can serve under what terms. It’s called the 1998 Federal Vacancies Reform Act.
It’s time for either the courts or, better yet, Congress to uphold the law and oust Perry from the BLM.
Perry’s out-of-the-mainstream views on public lands issues are well-known and documented. His potential conflicts of interest are also known, as he provided Congress with a 17-page list of 57 potential conflicts that would force him to avoid through recusal during his government service.
Less known is that Ronald Reagan fired Pendley from an important Interior Department job in the mid-1980s. He was found to be complicit in a scheme led by then Interior Secretary James Watt to low-ball the prices the government was seeking in competitive coal leases from the most important coal deposit in the U.S., Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. Interior, under Pendley’s direction, set the minimum acceptable bids much lower than a true competition would entail and then allegedly leaked the bid minimums to industry officials.
When the bids came in, they were all at the Interior minimums and the coal companies walked away with a fortune in future revenues. The Powder River Basin coal sale resulted in a giant controversy, the reluctant appointment of an investigative commission headed by David Linowes, and, ultimately, Watt’s departure from Washington.
When asked at a public breakfast meeting with energy lobbyists soon after the appointment of the five-member commission in September 1983 about the diversity of the group (they were all prominent Republicans and conservatives), Watt said the group had great diversity: “I have a black, I have a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.”
It was cringe-worthy. Watt was fired within a month.
During the commission’s considerations, information surfaced that Pendley and an aide had enjoyed several $400 meals with coal industry Washington lobbyists. Both Pendley and his aide were ultimately fired.
The coal leasing commission concluded in early 1984 that Interior’s rules for the lease sale were improper. The General Accounting Office (now known as the Government Accountability Office), the congressional watchdog agency, found the sale probably cost the U.S. government some $95 million in lost revenue. One of the Linowes commissioners, former Internal Revenue Service chief Donald Alexander, said he saw “A desire to lease as much as possible as quickly as possible because you are only going to be in office a short time. I have seen nothing whatever from the witnesses that have testified recently suggest that that is not the truth.”
The White House was right to sink Pendley’s BLM nomination. But the decision to keep him in place at the BLM, which he and Bernhardt have hollowed out by moving most of the jobs in the public lands agency from Washington to the sagebrush West, is wrong. It’s also illegal.
The Washington Post editorialized in early August, “Mr. Pendley’s first turn in government, during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, was ignominious — and he has done nothing since to suggest he belongs in a position of public trust.”
William Perry Pendley has no place in government service, as proven by his current record, his clearly stated policy and personal views, and by his past.
— Kennedy Maize and Geoff Webb. Kennedy Maize, the proprietor of The Quad Report, was a reporter for the Energy Daily who covered the coal leasing controversy and first reported on the damning internal Interior report on Pendley’s ethical lapses. Geoff Webb was a special assistant for lands and river conservation in the Interior Department’s Office of the Secretary in the Clinton administration and a former assistant land commissioner in New Mexico. He helped uncover the misdeeds of the Interior Department during the Linowes Commission inquiry.