Director of the Bureau of Land Management Confirmed

On September 30, 2021, the Senate confirmed Tracy Stone-Manning to be the Director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in a party-line vote (50-45), despite intense opposition from Republicans over “her connection to a decades-old tree spiking incident.” Stone-Manning is the first Senate-confirmed Director of BLM in five years and previously served as the head of Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality as well as worked as an aide for Senator Jon Tester (D-Montana) and former Governor of Montana Steve Bullock. BLM oversees grazing, logging and drilling on 245 million acres of public land predominantly in the West, including 15 million aces in California.