The Bureau of Land Management BLM

The BLM descends from the General Land Office, created in 1812 to survey and sell the public domain as the country moved west. For a century the office's job was to dispose of land, through homesteads, railroad grants, and sales. By the 1930s the land nobody had claimed, mostly arid rangeland, was being destroyed by uncontrolled grazing, and the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 created a Grazing Service to regulate it. In 1946 Harry Truman merged the two into the Bureau of Land Management. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 finally declared that the remaining public lands would stay in federal hands and be managed, not sold.

The bureau administers about 245 million acres of surface land, more than any other agency, nearly all of it in twelve western states and Alaska, and about 700 million acres of subsurface mineral estate, including land where the surface belongs to someone else. Its mandate is multiple use and sustained yield, which means the same land may be leased for cattle grazing, oil and gas drilling, hardrock mining, solar and wind farms, and timber while also being managed for wildlife, wild horses, recreation, and wilderness. The BLM also runs the National Conservation Lands, a system of monuments and wilderness areas within its holdings.

Energy is the bureau's financial engine. Oil and gas leases on BLM land and the mineral estate it manages generate billions of dollars in royalties each year, split with the states where the resources lie. The bureau decides when and where to hold lease sales, a power that swings hard with each administration. It also fights wildfires alongside the Forest Service, manages tens of thousands of wild horses and burros under a 1971 law, and issues the permits that govern everything from a weekend off-road rally to a thousand-mile transmission line.

With roughly ten thousand employees spread across the West, the BLM has long been the least visible of the land agencies and the most argued over. Ranchers, miners, and energy companies see a regulator. Conservationists see an agency too close to the industries it leases to. Western states and counties periodically demand the land be turned over to them. The bureau's headquarters moved from Washington to Grand Junction, Colorado, in 2019 and back to Washington in 2021, a round trip that captured the dispute over who the agency should answer to.