Trump Executive Order Streamlines Mining Permits. Environmentalists Fear What Comes Next

President Donald Trump signed an executive order behind closed doors on Thursday that aims to fast-track mining projects across the country and prioritize mineral production on public lands with suitable resources—a decision natural resource lawyers and environmentalists say has the potential to dismantle protected landscapes like national monuments as well as threaten endangered species, waterways and local communities.

The executive order is the latest action from the Trump administration rolling back environmental regulations and public land protections. It uses emergency powers to streamline federal reviews of mineral extraction projects and set the stage for numerous proposed mines on public lands, many of which are opposed by local communities for threatening wildlife, degrading landscapes that are sacred to tribes and consuming vast amounts of water in arid regions. Mining is central to the administration’s “energy dominance” agenda, with the elements that are being pursued critical to everything from transmission lines to batteries for electric vehicles and fuel for nuclear power plants and the operations to dig them up providing coveted jobs in rural regions. Extraction of those minerals, however, can have major impacts on local communities.

“The United States was once the world’s largest producer of lucrative minerals, but overbearing Federal regulation has eroded our Nation’s mineral production,” the order reads. “Our national and economic security are now acutely threatened by our reliance upon hostile foreign powers’ mineral production.”

The order is sweeping in scope, affecting all mining projects for copper, uranium, potash, gold and any critical mineral, element, compound or material identified by the chair of the National Energy Dominance Council. Within 10 days of the signing of the order, agency heads involved in the permitting process for a mine must “identify priority projects that can be immediately approved or for which permits can be immediately issued, and take all necessary or appropriate actions within the agency’s authority to expedite and issue the relevant permits or approvals.”

It also tasks the Interior Department, which manages the majority of federal lands, with identifying all the known mineral deposits in its jurisdictions and designating mining as the primary use of those lands. Under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the law dictating how to manage federal lands, extractive industries, recreation and conservation are, in theory, put on equal footing, something natural resource lawyers say the order jeopardizes.

“Few things unite this country like the love of our public lands and the outdoors, but today, the administration opened yet another front in its efforts to sell these places off for development—this time to move mining projects forward at warp-speed for the good of international mining corporations,” said Ronni Flannery, senior staff attorney at The Wilderness Society. “This executive order represents one of the most brazen attempts to expand mining on public lands in more than a century, in line with the administration’s push to privatize our shared public lands. And it could end up posing significant risks to lands, waters, wildlife and the communities that rely on them, both in the present day and for generations to come.”

In the U.S., mining is regulated under the Mining Act of 1872, which has avoided any major overhauls during its 153-year existence. To help settle the West after the Civil War, the law declared that “all valuable mineral deposits in lands belonging to the United States” are “free and open to exploration and purchase.” To this day, all that’s needed to stake a mining claim on public lands is to plant four stakes in the ground and file the paperwork. Mining operations pay no royalties for the minerals they extract from lands owned by American taxpayers, which other extractive industries on federal lands like fossil fuel developers have to pay.

Environmentalists, natural resource attorneys and tribes have called for the law to be updated for decades, but to no avail. Since taking office, the Trump administration has also rescinded a policy from the Biden administration to notify tribes of mining exploration near their reservations or on their ancestral lands.

“They really don’t know what the hell they’re doing,” Roger Featherstone, executive director of the Arizona Mining Reform Coalition, said of the order. “The timelines are nonsensical, expecting the agencies to do all this work while their staffs are decimated and on these incredibly short timelines is just ridiculous.”

Thursday’s executive order also puts forth plans to provide financial assistance to projects and work with the mining industry to identify “bottlenecks” it faces in the regulatory process.

The order also sets the stage to rollback the Rosemont Decision, one of the rare actions in the past 150 years to regulate the mining industry’s use of public lands.

In that case, federal courts ruled that the 1872 Mining Law did not allow mining companies to dump waste rock and tailings on federal lands, effectively killing a major proposed copper mine in Arizona. Hudbay Minerals, the company behind the proposed Rosemont mine, now known as the Copper World project, moved the siting of the project from federal to state land, where the ruling no longer applies, though the company still plans to eventually mine on federal land. An opinion from the Interior Department’s Office of the Solicitor with recommendations on how to address the mine and its regulation, such as with the use of land exchanges in which a company transfers private lands of value to the federal government in exchange for the land it needs for waste storage, was also rescinded last month.

Rob Peters, executive director of Save the Scenic Santa Ritas, which has led the fight against the Copper World project, said the order could pave the way for legislation to overturn his group’s court victory in 2022, and allow Hudbay Minerals to dump its tailings on the east side of the Santa Rita mountains. “If Trump gets his way, Hudbay will be able to fill that valley with toxic mine tailings,” he said

“These are foreign companies that will not pay a penny in royalties to the U.S.,” Peters said. “The profits will all go overseas.”

And, he noted, many of the minerals dug from U.S. public lands will be sent to other countries, as well.

“In the case of our mine, every bit of the copper is going overseas for at least the first four years of the mine,” he said.