Last updated on April 17, 2025
Facing scrutiny over her past remarks about the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Colorado-based oil industry advocate Kathleen Sgamma has withdrawn as President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management.
Sgamma’s decision removes a potentially key figure from Trump’s public lands team and signals one of the first controversial major nominees of the administration to run aground on the shoals of politics. Sgamma has been criticized for her support of more fossil fuel extraction and use. The BLM is an agency at the center of national debates over energy, land conservation, and climate policy.
“I would rather step aside than go through a confirmation process that would subject my family to the type of vitriol and vicious lies we’ve seen in the past,” Sgamma wrote in a letter to Trump announcing her withdrawal, according to the Associated Press.
Trump nominated Sgamma in March. She is president of the Western Energy Alliance, a Denver-based oil and gas trade group, and has long supported increased energy development on federal lands. The BLM oversees nearly 245 million acres, or about one-tenth of U.S. land, including areas used for drilling, grazing, recreation, and wildlife habitat.
In response to criticism, Sgamma “was unapologetic about her comments,” the AP reported. “I have no regrets for speaking out against the criminalization of Americans who did not engage in violence,” she wrote.
Environmental advocacy organizations did not appear less concerned about Trump’s public lands agenda in the aftermath of Sgamma’s fall. “Placing her at the top of BLM would have been a disaster, but withdrawing her nomination doesn’t change this administration’s top goal -selling off those public lands to fund tax cuts for billionaires,” Athan Manuel, Director of Sierra Club’s Lands Protection Program, said. “Donald Trump courted Big Oil CEOs during the campaign, and every action he has taken since returning to the White House has sought to hand over control of those unmatched landscapes to corporate polluters.”
A coalition of environmental advocacy organizations had written to Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, to express concerns about Sgamma’s nomination.
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