Senate confirms Tracy Stone-Manning to lead Bureau of Land Management despite GOP objections

WASHINGTON – On a party-line vote, the Senate confirmed Tracy Stone-Manning to serve as director of the Bureau of Land Management, capping off a contentious process marked by controversy over her role in an effort to sabotage an Idaho timber sale more than three decades ago.

When President Joe Biden nominated Stone-Manning to lead the agency that manages nearly a quarter-billion acres of federal land, most of it in the West, Republicans seized on her involvement in the environmental group Earth First! when she was a graduate student at the University of Montana in 1989.

That year, members of the loosely organized group drove spikes into trees in the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho. Stone-Manning later told prosecutors, she edited and retyped an anonymous letter and mailed it to the Forest Service. She has maintained she never supported tree spiking, a tactic that divided Earth First! after a California mill worker was nearly killed in 1987 when the saw he was operating struck a spike , sending part of the blade flying through his jaw.

After she was identified as the letter’s sender, Stone-Manning agreed to testify in exchange for partial immunity in a 1993 trial in Spokane that sent two of the group’s members to prison. Earlier this year, one of the convicted men told E&E News she knew of the plan in advance, while the other confirmed Stone- Manning’s account in an interview with the Washington Post.

Idaho Sen. Jim Risch was among several Republicans who railed against Stone- Manning’s nomination on the Senate floor Thursday.

“There’s no need for this woman to be in charge of this agency,” Risch said. “Today in the Clearwater National Forest, those trees are still there. … It’s very possible one of these is going to kill somebody working in one of the mills at some point in time after all of us are dead and gone.”

Stone-Manning went on to become a prominent conservationist in Montana with a reputation for bringing together a wide range of groups. She also worked for former Gov. Steve Bullock and Sen. Jon Tester, both Montana Democrats. Tester has been Stone-Manning’s most vocal defender amid GOP attacks and spoke again in favor of her nomination Thursday, calling her “a good woman who the state of Montana knows well.”

“All these accusations have no merit,” Tester said, “and we’re gonna run her through the wringer here. Character assassination like I’ve never seen before.”

All 50 Democrats, including Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell of Washington, voted to confirm Stone-Manning. Risch and fellow Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo voted no, along with 43 other Republicans. Five GOP senators did not vote, allowing the nomination to proceed without requiring Vice President Kamala Harris to cast a tiebreaking vote.