William Perry Pendley is an American attorney, conservative activist, political commentator, and government official who served as the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management from 2019 to 2021.

Pendley was appointed by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt as a Deputy Director of the Bureau of Land Management in July 2019.

[11] Pendley is formerly a longtime president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a conservative Colorado-based group that advocates for selling off federal land in the West.

[3] In 2017, he wrote that the Black Lives Matter movement was based on a "terrible lie" because Michael Brown had not said "Hands up, don't shoot" before he was killed by a police officer.

[16] He released a list of nearly five dozen former clients, including oil, mining and agriculture interests, that he would recuse himself from decisions on for a year or two.

[22] In the Trump administration, Pendley oversaw the relocation of Bureau of Land Management jobs out of Washington, D.C., to Western states.

[28] On December 30, 2019, 91 groups with connections to public lands sent a letter to Secretary of the Interior Bernhardt demanding that Pendley resign or be removed from office for alleged conflict of interest.

[4] Bernhardt repeatedly issued orders extending Pendley's tenure in an acting capacity, bypassing a Senate confirmation process.

In May 2020, two activist groups, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and the Western Watersheds Project, sued over Bernhardt's ongoing appointments of Pendley to run the BLM and David Vela to lead the National Park Service.

[34] Pendley was ordered to leave his position by U.S. District Judge Brian Morris on September 25, 2020, after Governor Steve Bullock of Montana sued in federal court.