William Perry Pendley  William Perry Pendley is an American conservative activist, commentator, and government official, currently serving as the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, an agency within the United States Department of the Interior responsible for administering public lands. Pendley was appointed by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt as a deputy director of the Bureau of Land Management in July 2019. He was elevated to acting director less than a month afterward. Pendley is one of a number of high-ranking acting officials carrying out official duties in the Trump administration who have not been confirmed by the Senate. No BLM director has been confirmed by the Senate during Trump's presidency. Pendley is a native of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Pendley received Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in economics and political science from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He received a Juris Doctor from the University of Wyoming College of Law. He was a captain in the United States Marine Corps. During the Reagan administration, Pendley was a deputy interior secretary for energy and minerals under James G. Watt. Pendley was reassigned in 1984 when a federal commission faulted him, along with other high-ranking officials, in the underpricing of coal-mining leases in the Powder River Basin, the largest such federal sale in history. Prior to joining the Department of the Interior, Pendley worked as a Legislative Assistant to former Wyoming Senator Clifford Hansen, and as Minority Counsel to the United States House Committee on Mines and Mining of the United States House Committee on Insular Affairs. Pendley is formerly a longtime president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a conservative Colorado-based group that advocates for selling off federal land in the West. He has written several books opposing government regulation of Western lands. He has "publicly sympathized with Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy," the sovereign citizen movement leader who has said to his supporters that "We definitely don't recognize [the BLM director's] jurisdiction or authority, his arresting power or policing power in any way," and in interviews used the language of that movement, thereby gaining the support of members of the Oath Keepers, the White Mountain Militia and the Praetorian Guard militias. Pendley has sued against the Endangered Species Act of 1973, has called the science of climate change "junk science", and has written that climate change believers are "kooks". He falsely claimed in 1992 that there was no credible evidence of a hole in the ozone layer. In a July 2017 speech to conservative activists, he joked about the killing of endangered species.