BY JIMMY TOBIAS AND CHRIS D’ANGELO
Kathleen Sgamma, whose Senate confirmation hearing is Thursday, also contributed to Project 2025
This story was originally published by Public Domain, a Substack publication to which you can subscribe here.
When rancher Ammon Bundy and his armed posse stormed into Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January 2016 in a failed attempt to seize public land for themselves, Kathleen Sgamma, then the vice president of the Western Energy Alliance, issued a brief condemnation. She described the militants as “serious lawbreakers.” Sgamma reserved the bulk of her ire, though, not for the armed men in Oregon, many of whom were inspired in part by a fringe Mormon theology, but for the US government itself.
In a 2016 blog post that appears to have been deleted, she went on a lengthy diatribe against the land management policies of the United States that, in her view, led to the Bundy takeover. Among her chief complaints: “The situation arises from too much federal ownership of land in the West,” she wrote. “Whereas in the East and Mid-West lands were transferred as private property to individuals for farms, by the time the West was settled the government retained a vast amount of land.”
Sgamma, who thinks there is too much federal public land, is now President Trump’s choice to lead the federal government’s largest land management agency. Trump nominated her in mid-February to be the next director of the Bureau of Land Management, an agency that oversees more than 246 million acres on behalf of all Americans. In addition to enforcing bedrock environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, the BLM director oversees oil and gas drilling on federal land. The agency is also responsible for the conservation of iconic western species, including the greater sage grouse. In all of these realms, and others too, Sgamma will have to contend with a thicket of conflicts of interest.
Sgamma is best known as a passionate activist on behalf of oil and gas corporations. She is a long-time leader and current president of the Western Energy Alliance (WEA), a litigious trade group that represents drillers and other fossil fuel companies that operate on federal land. In that role, she has served as industry muscle, so to speak, attacking in court, in the media, and in the halls of power any policy, rule or regulation that hinders the oil industry’s ability to profit on public lands. Her organization’s methods have sometimes sparked controversy.
In 2014, for instance, a secret recording of the WEA’s annual meeting revealed that the trade group had invited the Washington, DC, public relations operative Richard Berman to speak to its members. Berman was there to solicit money to fund a PR campaign called Big Green Radicals that would target environmentalists opposed to the oil industry.
During his speech, Berman told the audience they should think of their fight against environmental organizations as “an endless war.” He told them that they could either “win ugly or lose pretty.” He assured the assembled oil industry operatives that if they funded his campaign he could protect their anonymity while going on the offensive against environmentalists, using emotions like “fear” and “anger” to try to turn public opinion against green groups.
In the end, Berman’s Big Green Radicals campaign did just that. Among other things, it put out a report titled “From Russia with Love” that portrayed American environmental groups as the puppets of shadowy Russian interests. Republicans in Congress quickly latched onto the report despite its thin sourcing, recycling many of its claims to argue that groups like the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club are the “useful idiots” of Russia.
The Western Energy Alliance used similar tactics to undermine greater sage grouse conservation in the American West. When the Obama administration was considering listing the greater sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act due to the species’s precipitous population decline, WEA launched a PR campaign, running ads that disparaged grouse advocates and scientists. The Obama administration ultimately declined to list the species under the ESA, instead opting to have the BLM and Forest Service issue land-use regulations that could help prop up the species. Though those regulations have not stopped the continued loss of grouse habitat across the West, they are likely to be further weakened under the new Trump administration.
WEA frequently turns to the courts to prevent new rules, regulations or fees that could inconvenience public land oil drillers. In May of last year, for instance, the group and its industry allies sued the Bureau of Land Management after the Biden administration raised royalty rates on public land drillers, from 12.5 percent to 16.7 percent.
If she is confirmed, Sgamma’s appointment will likely raise thorny questions about conflicts of interest. She will have substantial influence over sage grouse policy, royalty rate policy, public lands oil leasing, and many other issues that have been at the center of her work for the fossil fuel industry. Will she sign an ethics pledge that recuses her from these and similar policy matters? Will she be too conflicted to function?
Sgamma’s appointment to the helm of BLM also complicates Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025, the sweeping policy blueprint that MAGA operatives compiled to guide Trump in a second term. Sgamma co-authored a section of the manifesto’s chapter on the Interior Department, in which she and others accuse Biden of waging a “war on fossil fuels” and bemoan the amount of land and minerals under federal ownership.
The Project 2025 chapter that Sgamma contributed to was authored by William Perry Pendley, who served as acting director of BLM during Trump’s first term and has a long record of advocating for federal lands to be transferred to states or sold to private interests. It stops short of calling for the outright pawning off of federal lands. Instead, Pendley casts the federal government as a bad landlord and argues that a Republican president should “draw on the enormous expertise of state agency personnel” and “look for opportunities to broaden state-federal and tribal-federal cooperative agreements.”
When it comes to how federal lands are managed, Project 2025 contains a comprehensive fossil fuel industry wish list written by Sgamma and two other industry allies. The manifesto calls for opening vast swaths of the federal estate to increased drilling, rolling back already-protected landscapes, expediting permitting, slashing the royalties that oil and gas companies pay to drill on federal lands, and weakening regulations that might complicate increased development. If confirmed as BLM director, Sgamma would play a pivotal role in carrying out Trump’s pro-fossil fuel energy vision to the direct benefit of her trade group’s members.
As she prepares to lead the BLM, does Sgamma still believe there is too much federal land? Is she a partisan of the so-called land transfer movement, a movement led by Utah politicians who would like to divest the American public of their ownership stake in millions of acres of federal land? Will she seek to sell off BLM land? Given her record, how will she avoid conflicts of interest as she oversees the government’s vast onshore oil and gas leasing program? Will she manage public lands for multiple use, including conservation and recreation, or will extractive industries be her sole priority?
Sgamma did not respond to these and other questions, nor did the WEA make her available for an interview. Berman’s organization did not respond to a request for comment.
Sgamma’s confirmation hearing is scheduled for Thursday, April 10 before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
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