President Donald Trump has appointed the Colorado-based head of oil and gas industry trade group to oversee the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which manages more public lands than any other government agency.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate announced the Trump Administration had nominated Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, to head the BLM. The agency manages 240 million acres of public land, mostly in Western states, and 700 million acres of belowground mineral rights across the U.S. Approximately 11 percent of all U.S. oil and 9 percent of natural gas comes from land and mineral rights overseen by the BLM.

Last year, Western Energy Alliance was among the oil and gas associations that challenged the Biden Administration’s new BLM leasing rules that increased the royalty rates companies pay for oil and gas produced on public lands, among other changes. These royalty rates had not been increased in more than 100 years, Interior Department said at the time.

A May statement by Western Energy Alliance quoted Sgamma saying that “this is another rule by the Biden Administration meant to deliver on the president’s promise of no federal oil and natural gas.”

However, under the Biden Administration, the industry produced more oil on federal land than under the previous three presidential administrations, according to Department of the Interior data.

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