A suspect and counterproductive Interior Department policy is gone at last.
President Biden was no Pharaoh, but he did order bricks without straw. As part of his “Net Zero” climate agenda, he wanted 50 percent of new vehicle sales in the U.S. to be electric cars by 2030. Yet electric car batteries require rare earth metals, and his Department of the Interior (DOI) canceled mining leases for exactly those metals, supposedly because they were in a wilderness area. Consequently, American manufacturers would be dependent on critical minerals from China.
Now, Congress has finally ended the schizophrenic policy, passing a Congressional Review Act resolution to overturn the Biden DOI’s ban on mining in northern Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. With the President’s signature a few days ago, the Biden administration’s ill-advised rule is gone, and DOI is restricted from taking similar actions in the future.
This is a clear win for the country. Critical minerals are, well, critical – not only for electric vehicles, but also for a host of modern technologies, such as broadband, computer chips, phones, medical equipment, and much more. The mines in the area would yield copper, nickel, cobalt, and platinum group metals. They account for an estimated 95 percent of U.S. nickel reserves, 88 percent of our cobalt reserves, and roughly one-third of U.S. copper reserves, along with significant shares of other mineral resources. Domestic access to these critical minerals will help the United States move away from dependence on communist China for one of the essentials of our technology and manufacturing economy.
My organization, the Functional Government Initiative (FGI), has been investigating the lease revocation and government policies obstructing access to domestic supplies of minerals since early 2022. Despite FOIA stonewalling from the Biden DOI, documents we obtained showed clear evidence that the lease cancellations were a favor to its environmental special interest allies.
FGI found DOI communications showing that Deputy Secretary Tommy Beaudreau took off-the-books meetings with representatives of The Wilderness Society, a group that was suing DOI in opposition to mining in the Boundary Waters area. The meeting, according to the Wilderness Society representative who approached Boudreau, would be “about some of the legal and policy pathways for protecting the Boundary Waters watershed.” Usually, a federal agency meeting with parties suing it must inform the Department of Justice or have Justice representatives present. FGI found no such emails or notifications to the Justice Department and no meeting listed in Beaudreau’s calendar. Neither the Biden DOI nor the Wilderness Society would say whether a meeting ever took place, but DOI soon revoked Twin Metals’ lease, and soon thereafter, the green groups dropped their suit.
These revelations spurred the House Committee on Natural Resources to launch an investigation into the meetings in November 2023, pressing then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Beaudreau had left government by then) for answers. The committee then held hearings, “Examining the Influence of Extreme Environmental Groups in the Department of the Interior,” in April 2024. The next month, at a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Senator Josh Hawley confronted Haaland about the meetings. She claimed his question was the first she had heard of the issue. “Is it common practice at your department to meet with dark money groups off the books and conceal it from the public?” Haaland refused to answer, causing Hawley to say, “we have a corruption problem in your department.”
It was obvious that the decision to block these mines was made at the behest of the previous administration’s green allies, regardless of the impact on domestic supply or how China would be enriched.
If EVs are so desirable, they need batteries, and those batteries need critical minerals. Otherwise, you are just making bricks without straw.
Roderick Law is the communications director for the Functional