When it was time to outline their vision for managing Americas federal lands under a future Republican presidency, pro-Donald Trump conservatives turned to a man who has spent his career advocating for those very lands to be pawned off to states and private interests.

William Perry Pendley, who served illegally as Trumps acting director of the Bureau of Land Management for more than a year, authored the Interior Department chapter of Project 2025, a sweeping policy blueprint that the Heritage Foundation and dozens of other right-wing organizations compiled to guide Trump and his team should he win in November.

The 920-page, pro-Trump manifesto , titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, aims to dismantle the federal government, ridding it of tens of thousands of public servants and replacing them with an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One of a Republican administration.

Pendleys dream for the more than 500 million acres of federal land that the Interior Department manages is to effectively turn them into a playground for extractive industries the same interests hes spent most of his career representing in court.

In fact, when it came to the chapters section on energy production across the federal estate, Pendley simply let Kathleen Sgamma the president of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas trade association and two industry allies write it for him.

Poll after poll confirms that public support for protecting Americas public lands is broad and bipartisan. Still, the most recent Republican Party platform, adopted in 2016, calls for transferring control of federal lands to the states. In recent years, Republicans have largely abandoned brazen public calls for the outright sale and transfer of federal lands, instead focusing on gutting environmental protections and finding savvier ways to give states more of a say in how public lands are managed.

That shift is reflected in Project 2025. Rather than calling for pawning off federal lands, as he has done throughout his career, Pendley writes that states are better resource managers than the federal government, and argues that a new administration should draw on the enormous expertise of state agency personnel and look for opportunities to broaden state-federal and tribal-federal cooperative agreements.

It says a lot about the Heritage Foundations Project 2025, that they chose someone as far outside of the mainstream as William Perry Pendley to lead the recommendations for our public lands, said Dan Hartinger, senior director of policy advocacy at the Wilderness Society Action Fund. And it says a lot about Mr. Pendleys view of public lands that the first thing he did was hand the pen to the oil and gas industry to write those recommendations.