It’s a natural fit for an administration as chaotic and corrupt as President Donald Trump’s that William Perry Pendley, who loathes America’s public lands, was picked last September, and reappointed in January, to manage them. The Bureau of Land Management, which Pendley now directs, oversees more acreage of the public domain than any other federal agency. Thus far, protests from outraged environmentalists—who view the move as “akin to naming a notorious arsonist as chief of the local fire department,” in the words of Jeff Ruch of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C.—have failed to disrupt his tenure.

At stake are 250 million acres of grassland, steppe, desert, and forest that BLM oversees, along with the agency’s 700 million subsurface acres, rich with oil and gas and hard-rock minerals. Pendley’s entire career has been about liberating the extractive industry from environmental laws, enabling companies to pillage the lands he is now entrusted to protect. If freed to denude the soil, poison the water, and foul the air, oil companies, gas frackers, and hard-rock mining conglomerates stand to make billions of dollars in profits from exploiting the BLM domain.

To understand Pendley’s worldview, you have to understand the Mountain States Legal Foundation, the right-wing nonprofit law firm in Colorado he honchoed for 30 years as president and chief legal counsel. The MSLF was founded in 1977 with money from Joseph Coors, the hard-right Colorado beer magnate, to counter what was perceived in the 1970s as the rising influence of public-interest environmental law firms. (Coors also provided start-up cash in 1973 for the conservative Heritage Foundation.) The MSLF’s first president, James Watt, who worked there from 1977 to 1981 and went on to become Interior Secretary under Ronald Reagan, declared that the group’s purpose was to “fight in the courts those bureaucrats and no-growth advocates who create a challenge to individual liberty and economic freedoms.”

MSLF’s real goal, as the roster of its funders reveals, is the warping of public lands policy to benefit private extractive interests. Its big-money donors have included oil, gas, timber, and mining corporations, notably ExxonMobil, Texaco, and Phillips Petroleum. A 1990 piece in the Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review observed that under Watt there were “three overlapping main themes” of the “revolution” the MSLF sought to achieve in public lands policy: “(1) federal ownership of land, if not unconstitutional or unconscionable, is at least A Bad Idea; (2) to the extent that land remains in federal ownership, valuable land should be reclassified or transferred to make them more easily accessible to resource developers; and (3) the resources of the federal lands should be made available to private developers to the maximum possible extent, at minimum cost, and with the fewest possible regulatory restrictions.” At Interior under Reagan, Watt advocated for the privatization of 35 million acres of public land. In a 1983 profile in Newsweek magazine, he compared environmental activists to Nazis.

Pendley has praised the criminal Cliven Bundy clan, whose infamous armed standoffs against federal land regulators amounted to acts of domestic terrorism.

Pendley, a 74-year-old former Marine who ran the MSLF from 1981 until his appointment last year at the BLM, pursued Watt’s vision with admirable tenacity and has continued to pursue it in his new office. This month, he greenlighted rampant expansion of oil and gas drilling on previously off-limits areas, including on one million acres in central California. On January 17, he announced the loosening of regulations for the public lands cattle industry, making it easier for livestock operators to violate federal environmental laws and not face consequences. He has sowed chaos at BLM by uprooting long-standing Washington D.C. staff with a forced move of the agency’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, where energy companies rule the roost. The goal, his critics say, is to bring BLM regulators into closer quarters with the oil and gas industry to be more easily captured. In response, staffers in the D.C. quarters have attempted to unionize: The National Treasury Employees Union filed a petition to represent BLM employees with the Federal Labor Relations Authority in December.