The misplaced idea that America’s mineral weakness is due to a lack of resources should be put to bed. Our resource base is remarkable and only growing.
Consider just how vast our resources are. The U.S. may well be home to the world’s largest lithium deposit in the McDermitt Caldera, which straddles the Nevada-Oregon border. The Thacker Pass mine is now under construction there. S&P Global recently estimated the U.S. has a copper endowment — the metal of electrification — comparable to Canada and Australia combined. New, extraordinary mineral discoveries and project advances are happening at an astonishing pace. The recent discovery of a major deposit of 16 critical minerals in Utah is a case in point. Even our mine wastes are emerging as invaluable resources for many of the minerals we need but aren’t yet producing.
Our great minerals challenge has never been geology. For decades, it has been policy — policies that have stymied industry, frozen capital flows into domestic mining and pushed investment and production overseas.
The Trump administration — much to its credit — is tackling our minerals crisis with the forcefulness and innovative thinking this moment requires. The momentum to break China’s chokehold on global mineral supplies and rebuild secure, responsive domestic supply chains is real. But these efforts will fail to reach their full potential unless the Senate moves with equal determination.
At the close of 2025, the House passed two deeply important bills that address key obstacles standing in the way of getting more shovels in the ground to turn our minerals promise into productive capacity. We now need the Senate to put them on the president’s desk.
The durable and lasting reforms in the bipartisan Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act are not just a significant step forward in addressing the nation’s mine-permitting challenges, but a leap.
The mine-permitting status quo is simply an outrage. It takes a stunning 29 years to bring a mine online in the U.S., longer than in all other countries but one.
An inefficient National Environmental Policy Act process is a primary contributor to the delays and uncertainty that have become such a specter for the industry. NEPA’s use as a weaponized tool for litigation has allowed this well-intentioned law to stray far from its intended purpose and underlying text. The SPEED Act addresses these challenges head-on.
In addition, the Senate should follow the House and pass the bipartisan Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, which would rectify an egregious court decision, returning land-use interpretation to what it always has been under the General Mining Law. Doing so would provide much-needed regulatory certainty and clarity to miners and cut through red tape holding back investment and production.
Together, these two bills could address some of the tallest self-imposed hurdles to realizing our mining potential and confronting the threat posed by Beijing’s weaponization of global mineral supplies.
Our muscular industrial policy to counter China — robust loans, grants, incentives and even targeted tariffs — will be handcuffed if we can’t permit mines and address glaring sources of uncertainty. As the administration works to mobilize capital, nothing will do more to get Wall Street engaged in mining and shovels in the ground than passing the permitting reform now within reach.
The resources, ingenuity and capital markets are all here. The opportunity before the Senate is tremendous. Now is the moment to turn the page on decades of inaction — on self-imposed mineral insecurity — and confront this crisis with the seriousness it demands.