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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

The latest order would also subsidize mining companies while reducing public input to reopen past projects [outdoorlife.com]:

The Trump Administration issued yet another executive order [whitehouse.gov] on Thursday [March 20, 2025]. This one directs the federal government to mine federal public lands "to the maximum possible extent," and to prioritize mining over all other uses on federal lands that contain critical mineral deposits.

This should be alarming to conservationists and wilderness advocates. Because in addition to putting critical areas like the Boundary Waters [outdoorlife.com] and Bristol Bay [outdoorlife.com] back in the crosshairs, the administration's extraction-first approach could dramatically shift what our public lands look like and how we use them.

"There are really three main thrusts to this executive order," Dan Hartinger, senior director of agency policy for the Wilderness Society [wilderness.org], tells Outdoor Life. "Job one is to open new places to mining. Job two is to subsidize mining in those places. And job three is to ram through individual projects regardless of public input or what the science says."

The executive order, Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production, invokes wartime powers granted by the Defense Production Act [fema.gov]. It allows Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to expand the country's list of critical minerals [usgs.gov]. It also directs Burgum to make a priority list of all federal lands with mineral deposits, and to take whatever actions necessary to expedite and issue mining permits there. This includes rolling back environmental regulations and finding ways to fund and subsidize private mining companies with taxpayer dollars.

[...] By invoking its wartime powers with the executive order, the Trump administration claims that taking a mining-first approach is vital to shore up national security and compete with foreign hostile nations. But its actions via executive order stand to benefit the international mining conglomerates that are already operating on U.S. federal lands and which, Hartinger says, are not required to pay royalties or other fees for the value of minerals they extract.

"This would use taxpayer funding to issue loans and capital assistance, and essentially subsidize these operations. So not only are these companies getting the land for free, and the minerals for free, and the ability to dump their waste basically wherever they want. We're going to pay them with taxpayer money to do that."

[...] "I think it's helpful to think about this as part of a pattern. And, you know, it's very concerning to us to hear Secretary Burgum saying our federal lands are assets on the nation's balance sheet," Hartinger says. "But I think it's very instructive, too. Because this administration sees our public lands not as things that provide inherent and intrinsic benefits to us, in the form of clean water and air, recreation, wildlife habitat, or any of these myriad uses. It is purely a matter of: How can we extract the maximum short-term dollars from these places?"

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