The Interior Lives of Project 2025: The Western States’ Sheriffs Association Rises

July 10, 2024

William Perry Pendley. You know he’s serious because of the bolo tie.

For the past few years, I’ve been mystified by the Western States’ Sheriffs’ Association, which appears to have popped out of nowhere and started to dominate the conversation about guns, federal lands, and more guns. My interest was further piqued when I discovered Project 2025 – the project of dozens of far-right organizations that purports to set forth a template for a MAGA Country – only mentions sheriffs once in nearly 1,000 pages, to cite the Western States’ Sheriff Association as a source in its chapter on the Department of the Interior.

The author of this section is William Perry Pendley, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management.  Pendley was never confirmed by the Senate but served as the “acting director.”

It’s worth taking a moment to talk about Pendley and his distinctly anti-environmental beliefs. Lest you think I am exaggerating, here’s the title and subtitle of Pendley’s 2013 book.

The Department of the Interior has long been a bête noir for many far-right sheriffs and their various constituents in the Western United States. Readers likely remember the 2014 standoff in Nevada that occurred between rancher Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management when the federal agencies tried to recoup some of the over $1 million in grazing fees that Bundy owed. (Note: He’s still not paid a dime.) The same readers will also remember the 2016 standoff in Oregon when Ammon Bundy and various far-right militia-types took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, also owned by the federal government.

Both of these events are outgrowths of the “Sagebrush Rebellion,” a Western populist movement during the 70s and 80s that vigorously fought a losing battle against the federal ownership of land. For most people not in the West it’s hard to imagine, but the Federal government owns about 640 million acres (between ¼ and 1/3 of the land in the United States). Around 80% of the land in Nevada is federal land. The Sagebrush Rebels had a variety of anti-government views, but their strongest beliefs centered around resistance to environmental regulation and opposition to federal  ownership of land. The Sagebrushers thought ownership should revert to the states, probably because rural communities’ overrepresentation in state legislatures would give them disproportionate influence over the use of the lands

Pendley seems himself to be a descendent of the Sagebrush Rebels. Before he was a twinkle in the Trump administration’s eye, he was a columnist and belonged to the Western States Legal Foundation (MLF), an anti-environmentalist group that, at the time of Pendley’s appointment, was involved in at least six active lawsuits against the Department of the Interior.  His organization also intervened in the lawsuits to reduce the size of Grand Staircase Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments, as well as one lawsuit to allow the hunting of grizzly bears. Since Pendley was never “officially” nominated, no one got to hear about all of the racist, anti-environmental, anti-science, homophobic things he’s done and said in his career. (Pendley also wanted to move the BLM to Colorado, which did not go well.) In a 2006 book, he wrote that Native Americans will cease to exist: “The day may come sooner than many expect given that, with ever-declining blood quantum per tribal member, recognized tribes may soon be little more than associations of financial convenience.”

The Western States Sheriffs Association has similarly adopted a plainly Sagebrush-friendly platform, opposing, for example, the expansion of federal policing powers into federal lands because the job (and money) should stay with the sheriff. From Project 2025: “[A]ll BLM law enforcement officers (LEOs), that is, its 212 Law Enforcement Rangers and 76 Special Agents [should be] in an exclusively law enforcement chain of command.” (Emphasis added.) The point here is that sheriffs want to run the show and take over policing federal lands, a move that would change the nature of federal policy in which non-LEO experts in environmental affairs, etc., run command. The BLM isn’t a police agency, but sheriffs would sure like it to be! (Always more cops, is the theme.)

Pendley’s ideas for the Department of the Interior are antithetical to all the policies environmentalists and Native American activists have been trying to pursue. Particularly offensive in light of Biden’s appointment of Deb Haaland – the first Native woman to run the Bureau of Indian Affairs – is Pendley’s disdain for Native tribes and their claims to land sovereignty. (The Department of the Interior has the worst track record on these issues, to be fair.)

I’m not an expert on these issues, so I hesitate to opine too freely. I will say that having written a book about sheriffs and studied their role in the myth of the Western frontier, I am deeply troubled – nay, deeply offended to my core – over the ways in which the GOP and MAGA rely so heavily on fantastical myths of the frontier. Such ideas are a familiar part of American history and the shared imagination on all sides of the political spectrum. It is easy for those on the left to reject MAGA as “un-American” and “not what this country is about,” but such critiques are wrong-headed. MAGA relies heavily on exactly what the myth of America is about. Examining Project 2025 and rejecting its tenets should not be a project that seeks to reinstate the status quo. Rather, it provides us an opportunity to engage with the racist, nay genocidal, ideas behind the country’s Western mythology, to understand why they have been used in this terrible project of oppression, and to build a better future free of toxic “Manifest Destiny” archetypes.