Long before Steve Pearce was nominated to lead the country’s largest land management agency, he was an intensely shy son of a Texas sharecropper who used an eastern New Mexico oilfield job and an irrigated 5-acre farm to pull Steve and his five siblings out of poverty. Other aspects of Pearce’s early life — a blistering work ethic, devout upbringing and ties to agricultural groups — appear to have remained intact.
But some components of Pearce’s earlier convictions seem to have faded, or at least diminished, and that’s confounded Diana MacArthur. The 92-year-old philanthropist and science and technology professional lived in Washington, D.C. when Pearce made his first trip to the nation’s capital for the Beautify America initiative led by “Lady Bird” Johnson, First Lady to President Lyndon B. Johnson.
MacArthur, Lady Bird’s niece, helped lead hundreds of young people to the White House in 1966 to advance the Johnsons’ vision of a cleaner and more vibrant country. Pearce was active in highway clean-up efforts and in 4-H, the agricultural network where young people learn the basics of raising livestock. He fit the bill for Beautify America. In fact, his organization selected him to attend a related conference for youth and his peers elected him to be the conference co-chair.
MacArthur remembers Pearce being a well-spoken young man. She was impressed with his commitment to the 4-H club his mother had started. (Like his five siblings, Pearce had sold hogs through the program to help afford school clothes.) MacArthur recalls that he was a “leader type” and expected the 18-year-old to go on to do good things for the country.
Pearce recounted the trip in his 2013 memoir, Just Fly the Plane, Stupid!
“Everyone in the nation knew of Lady Bird’s Beautify America projects, and though many made fun of her, it resonated,” he wrote. “I routinely saw litter barrels in the corners of streets in New Mexico that were full of trash, indicators that people bought into the concept of cleaning up our country. The nation began to clean up rivers and chemical dumps. It fostered a new generation of awareness.”
In his memoir, Pearce also described how the 4-H commitment to “pledge my head to clearer thinking, my heart to greater loyalty, my hands to larger service and my health to better living for my club, my community and my country” became part of his “internal gravity.”
Onlookers who have followed Pearce’s political ascendancy, unshakeable commitment to the oil and gas industry, and Jan. 9, 2021 proclamation that Trump “will be our president FOREVER” question what, exactly, the country’s prospective BLM director is pledging himself to now. At stake are 245 million acres of land across the West that anchor a variety of uses ranging from recreation and wildlife habitat to livestock grazing and mineral development.
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Pearce is a familiar political figure in New Mexico, but lesser known outside of it. A resident of the New Mexico-Texas border community of Hobbs, Pearce flew airplanes in the Vietnam War and spent much of his 20s working as a crop duster and commercial pilot before pursuing a lucrative career in the oilfields of the southwest.
In 1989, Pearce purchased and greatly expanded an oil and gas service company with his wife, Cynthia. He has said the business helped him overcome his shyness and introversion — he’s described himself as a “10 out of 10” on both scales — and aided his transition into politics. In 2003, he was elected to represent southern New Mexico in the U.S. House of Representatives and spent the better part of the following two decades steeped in Tea Party, then MAGA, political culture.
During that time, Pearce developed a reputation as a conservative Republican with a suspicion of federal agencies — including the one he’s now positioned to oversee. In 2016, he backed Dwight and Steven Hammond, the Oregon ranchers charged with arson following a larger, yearslong Bundy-esque dispute that also involved allegations of poaching and death threats against federal employees. Pearce spent considerable energy opposing the reintroduction of the Mexican wolf, sometimes getting crosswise with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the process. And he co-sponsored the HEARD Act of 2016, which would have authorized the Interior and Agriculture departments to part with federal land through sale or exchange to local governments.
“Mr. Pearce being in control of so much public land should scare anyone … Senators should do more homework and give Mr. Pearce a closer look. And they should scrutinize his record before giving Mr. Pearce a rubber stamp.”
Patrick M. Brenner, President, Southwest Public Policy Institute
The BLM declined to make Pearce available for an interview and also declined to answer emailed questions pertaining to Pearce’s political record and priorities. Instead, it produced a statement highlighting Pearce’s ability to “advance responsible energy development, public land stewardship and economic growth.” To better understand Pearce and his priorities, Mountain Journal parsed his autobiographical writings, Congressional statements and prior media appearances.
Pearce has secured support from a variety of prominent agricultural and industrial groups, including the National Public Lands Council, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and Western Energy Alliance.
“Mr. Pearce brings a rare combination of public service, practical experience, and deep understanding of the lands and communities the BLM serves,” New Mexico Cattle Growers Association President Tom Paterson wrote in an email to Mountain Journal. “He knows firsthand the challenges facing those who live and work on and around public lands — ranchers, rural families, and local communities whose livelihoods depend on sound, balanced land management.”
In particular, Paterson emphasized Pearce’s commitment to the agency’s directive for “multiple-use” management — BLM-specific marching orders to consider natural resource development alongside the conservation of resources for future generations.
Montana Sen. Steve Daines, a Republican, is expected to vote in favor of Pearce on the Senate floor, as he did last month when the Senate Energy Committee took up Pearce’s nomination; a spokesperson for Tim Sheehy, Montana’s other Republican U.S. Senator, did not respond to MoJo’s questions regarding Sheehy’s stance on Pearce. The Trump administration’s directive for Pearce, should he be confirmed, is unambiguous.
“President Trump was elected with an overwhelming mandate to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ and unleash America’s energy potential,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers wrote in an email to MoJo. “Steve Pearce is highly qualified to lead the Bureau of Land Management and aligns with the President’s popular and commonsense energy dominance agenda.”
But skepticism surrounding Pearce’s nomination is mounting among conservation, hunting and public-land access groups. Pearce critics are wary of how that “energy dominance agenda” will shape BLM-administered land across the West.
In January, more than 80 environmental and conservation groups signed a letter urging Senate Energy Committee leaders to reject Pearce’s nomination on the grounds that his “persistent calls for the privatization of public lands are alarming.” He’s demonstrated a willingness to play an “unwavering part in President Trump’s anti-environmental and anti-democratic agenda by heeding unpopular directives, propping up polluters, and selling off and selling out our public lands,” argue the Center for Biological Diversity, Montana Conservation Voters, WildEarth Guardians and other groups.
Among other bills and missives, Pearce opponents point to a letter he and Utah Republican Rob Bishop penned to then-House Speaker John Boehner in 2012 calling for the sale of federal land to pay down the deficit and reduce spending. Pearce and Bishop argued that “we do not even need” most of the 650 million acres of land the federal government owns, a statement that conservation groups have latched onto in their critiques of Pearce, whom they’ve dubbed “selloff Steve.”
Congressional negotiations from the Trump budget bill that narrowly passed last summer have shown that selling federal land is a politically risky stance with limited support (which public polling confirms). Pearce continued to take heat for his position in the March confirmation hearing before the Senate Energy Committee.
When Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, asked Pearce in the hearing if he still believes there is too much land under public ownership in the West, Pearce rationalized his past statements and referenced the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.
“I’m not so sure that I’ve changed,” he told Wyden and his fellow committee members. “I’m not sure that I was not speaking out of sheer frustration with an agency on behalf of people that were being overwhelmed. I do not believe that we’re going to go out and wholesale land from the federal government. That, again, has been stated by the [Interior] Secretary, and federal law says that we can’t do that.”
Other Pearce critics, including Republican-turned-independent Patrick M. Brenner, have questioned the 78-year-old’s political efficacy, describing him as a “divisive loyalist” whose chairmanship of the New Mexico Republican Party between 2019 and 2024 spawned “ugly partisan electioneering.”
“Mr. Pearce brings a rare combination of public service, practical experience, and deep understanding of the lands and communities the BLM serves. He knows firsthand the challenges facing those who live and work on and around public lands — ranchers, rural families, and local communities whose livelihoods depend on sound, balanced land management.”
Tom Paterson, President, New Mexico Cattle Growers Association
Brenner directs the Southwest Public Policy Institute in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. He described Pearce as a “yes man” with a lackluster policymaking record and a narrow view of the New Mexico constituency he was elected to serve. Brenner contends that Pearce has failed to recognize and welcome Hispanic voters into the party’s fold, for example, and all but driven young Republicans out of it.
“He would do whatever his Freedom Caucus wanted him to do during his time in Congress. So far as I know, he never introduced any meaningful legislation and his time in Congress was marked by a lot of inactivity,” Brenner said. “He’s absolutely indebted to whoever funds his campaigns, which tends to be a lot of oil and gas people [and] men who built their business empires on extractive industry.”
According to Open Secrets, a government and political transparency database, the oil and gas sector directed more than $2 million into Pearce campaigns over the course of his career. But between his own work history and his father’s long career as an oilfield roustabout, Pearce’s allegiance to the fossil fuel industry goes deeper than financial backing. In his memoir, he recounted how he joined the “throngs of people” who had traveled to Anchorage in 1969 to begin work on the Alaska Pipeline, only to find it stymied by a lawsuit. It was a “testament to the way the environmental groups hurt the poor,” he concluded.
Brenner said he left the New Mexico Republican party in 2022 after it — led at the time by Pearce — disseminated conspiracy theories about President Biden’s election to the White House. Some political and energy speculators have surmised that Pearce’s enduring fealty to Trump helps explain his nomination for the BLM post. Kathleen Sgamma, former president of the Western Energy Alliance and Trump’s original pick for the position appears to have failed that test after a 2021 memo saying she was “disgusted” by Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol resurfaced. In February, the Western Energy Alliance, now led by Melissa Simpson, endorsed Pearce’s nomination.
According to Brenner, Pearce’s poor stewardship of the New Mexico Republican Party is at least partially to blame for the party’s failure to field candidates for a number of statewide positions such as Treasurer and Secretary of State. Brenner also alleges that Pearce “squandered” Republican National Committee money that could have helped send a Republican to D.C.
“Mr. Pearce being in control of so much public land should scare anyone, should terrify anyone,” Brenner said. “Senators should do more homework and give Mr. Pearce a closer look. And they should scrutinize his record before giving Mr. Pearce a rubber stamp.”
Brookings Institution fellow Gabriel Sanchez also underscored Pearce’s chairmanship of the New Mexico Republican Party coinciding with a changing and increasingly polarized electorate.
“Pearce did not look to build bridges with the Democrats in the state, sticking to conservative stances on the policy issue agenda and in line with the Trump administration’s priorities,” Sanchez wrote in an email to MoJo. “I would anticipate that he will take this approach [as] BLM director.”
Brenner expects Pearce to narrowly clear the Senate confirmation vote expected later this month. But the margin of that vote would be wider if Pearce had proven himself to be a more effective leader, Brenner argues, pointing to the 2023 shift to an all-Democratic makeup in New Mexico’s federal delegation as evidence of Pearce’s insularity.
“They would have more power and more margin for error if Mr. Pearce was doing his job and getting more Republicans elected in New Mexico.”
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Diana MacArthur, the New Mexico woman who first met Pearce in D.C. nearly 60 years ago at the Beautify America initiative, has questions about Pearce’s priorities and legacy, too. MacArthur has been asking herself what changed in Pearce’s orientation to the natural world in the last half-century.
She’s tracked Pearce’s record in Congress and is confounded by his unwillingness to break party ranks on environmental issues. Yet she also recalls a different side of the current BLM director nominee, one she witnessed 20-some years ago at a philanthropic event in Santa Fe, and more recently during a happenstance airport encounter.
Pearce is articulate and funny, she says. “He doesn’t shout like some of these MAGA people do.” His extensive travel and the round-the-world 2016 flight for veterans indicate that he harbors a curiosity and an eagerness to explore, she added.
MacArthur wonders if Pearce is looking to fortify his identity and recapture some of his political capital after losing a prominent election and stepping down from the New Mexico Republican Party chairmanship.
“This could be a chance for him to come back,” she said. “That would be important for someone of his age who’s lost his base – the opportunity to come back, to be listened to and be respected. That’s meaningful … I can only hope he can remember what the 4-H taught him.”
