Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. It is our third day back from a 5-week recess. We have 15 days left here in Washington before the election. It should be a time that we are trying to get some real work done, but…
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
It is our third day back from a 5-week recess. We have 15 days left here in Washington before the election. It should be a time that we are trying to get some real work done, but instead of doing that, instead of doing a single thing to help our constituents who are struggling under skyrocketing costs of groceries, gas, and electricity bills, Republicans are scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with any bill that their chaotic Conference can find a way to pass, and one of the surest ways, it seems, is to find a way to do another favor for the President's friends and for foreign-owned mining conglomerates.
We could actually use some responsible, balanced mineral policy in this country to meet our needs, but, of course, that is not what we are here to do today.
We could all agree that we have been overreliant on adversaries for critical minerals for too long. As demand for these minerals grows, we should also want to strengthen our domestic and allied supply chains strategically with American security, sustainability, and human rights at the center of those efforts.
Unfortunately, this administration seems to have a different approach. They are throwing billions of taxpayers' dollars at the projects that only seem to benefit themselves. There is a lot of money flying right now in the name of strengthening the mineral supply chain, but when you look beneath the surface, it is going to projects that will not actually help the American people.
We have seen this administration make major investments and backroom deals with mining projects with no transparency about who benefits, about what the national security rationale is, or how these decisions actually reduce our dependence on foreign adversaries.
Who is actually benefiting? The President's sons, Secretary Lutnick's sons, and campaign donors are all profiting off their personal investments and business ventures.
Democrats are asking questions. Unfortunately, we are not getting any help from our friends across the aisle. We are getting stonewalled.
Handing out favors to industry and boosting your children's stock portfolios is not a mineral strategy that helps the American people.
Now this brings us to H.R. 1501. This bill would codify mining and mineral processing as covered sectors under FAST-41. FAST-41, of course, creates an alternative permitting pathway for covered infrastructure projects. It covers 18 specific sectors, including energy production, surface transportation, semiconductors, and more.
The FAST-41 permitting process includes some positive transparency provisions like a centralized public platform that tracks Federal permitting timelines and milestones. Covered projects can also receive additional coordination and resources to help agencies move them through the process more efficiently.
It also places some limits on public input, including for Tribes. It also limits judicial review, and it includes limits on court-ordered protections.
Here is the thing, Mr. Speaker: We have just heard the main rationale for this bill, that we have to make sure critical minerals mining projects and the processing projects for those critical minerals are eligible for FAST-41. They made it sound as if today's bill would finally make that possible.
Well, I have a news flash for everyone. Mining is already a covered sector under a regulation adopted during the first Trump administration. Mineral processing projects are also allowed on FAST-41 as manufacturing, so we have an advertised solution here to a problem that does not exist.
What is this bill all about? That is the other half of the bill, the part that would potentially tie the hands of this and future administrations from using FAST-41 in a smart and targeted way that would focus on actual critical minerals projects that were in our national interest, that were all about our national competitiveness.
I will explain. The Permitting Council, which implements FAST-41, has limited resources. Its job is to provide additional coordination and attention to projects that meet the statutory requirements of FAST-41 coverage. Under this bill, every single mining project could be eligible for that treatment, regardless of whether it advances our national interests, our strategic mineral needs, et cetera. FAST-41 Permitting Council is required to put all eligible projects forward even though they have limited resources.
The Biden administration began considering a regulatory change to limit coverage to just critical minerals. That is what this bill is all about. H.R. 1501 would block that change from ever taking effect. That regulation was not finalized. It is not being implemented, but this bill would preemptively block anything like that from ever taking effect.
Under this bill, a gold mine with no connection to our national security could receive FAST-41 treatment. The same would apply to a mine controlled by a foreign adversary or a mine that plans to ship its minerals straight to China for processing, with no benefit to the American supply chain.
Under this bill, the Permitting Council would be required to devote precious time and resources to expedite these projects, to the detriment of real critical minerals projects, and it may prevent a future administration from ever narrowing the scope. How does that make America more secure? The answer is it doesn't.
Democrats have offered straightforward solutions. We have proposed targeted FAST-41 coverage for projects involving critical minerals, projects that actually strengthen key supply chains essential to our national security and our economic resilience.
We also proposed preventing companies owned or controlled by our foreign adversaries from receiving this fast-track status. These amendments were rejected by Republicans in committee and blocked from consideration on the floor here today.
This should not be a partisan issue. We have the opportunity to build a mineral supply chain that is secure, resilient, and independent of our foreign adversaries. To achieve that, we should be making strategic investments, not handing out blanket favors.
Mr. Speaker, I oppose this bill, and I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
The chairman has touted the number of projects added to FAST-41 under the Trump administration. Therein lies the problem. Many of those projects are not critical minerals.
The Permitting Council only has so much budget, only so many resources
in order to administer this FAST-41 process. When you throw the door wide open to any old sand, gravel, gold mining project, when you invite in projects that might just have investments from the President's sons or Secretary Lutnick's family or your Mar-a-Lago oligarch pals, when the door is widened in that way and there is no new resources for the Permitting Council, then actual critical minerals projects and projects that are actually important to our competitiveness and our national security suffer. They go more slowly. They get less attention.
The Chair is actually making our point. We need to allow prioritization and focus so that this FAST-41 process can actually work as it was intended to work.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Arizona (Mrs. Grijalva).
Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Arizona.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, a little blinding flash of the obvious: When it comes to sand and gravel, we are not dependent on China
or any other foreign adversary or any other foreign country. We have a lot of sand and gravel in this country. This is not about critical minerals. This is not about our competitiveness.
It is about sand and gravel which we can mine, as we always have. It is not what FAST-41 was intended to do or intended to benefit. But you just heard it right here on the floor in this debate, Mr. Speaker, that my colleagues on the one hand are selling this bill as urgent to meet our competitive situation with China. On the other hand, they are opening FAST-41 wide open to anything that can be pulled from the ground including sand and gravel. It just makes no sense whatsoever.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hoyle).
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, we agree with the gentleman from Utah that we need to be taking seriously our dependence on foreign adversaries when it comes to critical minerals and processing. That is why time and again my Democratic colleagues and I have offered amendments to make sure that when it comes to opening up our public lands--and, in this case, when it comes to opening up the benefits of this fast-tracked FAST-41 process--we are not handing it over to our foreign adversaries.
We have proposed amendments time and again, and those amendments have been opposed by our Republican colleagues. We have yet to hear a good reason why they keep opposing this, nor is there one. The language we have proposed time and again comes from one of their own Republican colleagues, the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party chairman, Mr. Moolenaar. We have proposed his exact language time and again as a commonsense guardrail to make sure that our public resources and the benefits of this fast-tracking are not simply used to hand a gift to the very foreign adversary we say we are so terribly concerned about.
It keeps getting rejected time and time again, which makes you wonder what this bill is really about. It is definitely not the competitive rivalry with China.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, this argument that we need this legislation to address our dangerous dependency on foreign adversaries for critical minerals continues to ring very hollow. One of the ways that we can avoid being too dependent on foreign adversaries is to develop trading relationships with our allies, none closer to us than Canada.
Canada, for example, is one of our largest mineral trading partners. They exported about $76 billion in minerals to the United States in 2025. If making sure that we are not dependent on adversaries like China was really important to us, I should certainly hear a lot of alarm from my friends across the aisle about the fact that President Trump is starting a trade war with Canada, our neighbor, one of our closest allies and a critical minerals trading partner that makes us less dependent on foreign adversaries. Instead we hear crickets.
He is even trying to rename Lake Ontario to further antagonize this trading partner, and we hear nothing from the other side.
This bill is about many things, but it is certainly not about reducing our dependence on minerals from foreign adversaries.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, this administration has demonstrated that it is all too willing to abuse the tools at its disposal to promote projects that simply line the pockets of members of this administration, their family, and their oligarch pals.
I will give you a few examples. Not too long ago, the Trump administration announced that it would invest over a billion dollars and take an equity stake in USA Rare Earth, a mining and manufacturing company. Reporting uncovered that USA Rare Earth hired Cantor Fitzgerald, a firm chaired by Brandon Lutnick, the son of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. How about that coincidence?
Last October, the Trump administration announced equity investments in the mining company Trilogy Metals while simultaneously directing agencies to fast-track permitting for Ambler Road, the controversial project needed to access Trilogy Metals' proposed mine site.
Trilogy Metals' third-largest shareholder is John Alfred Paulson, a Trump MAGA donor and economic adviser. His Trilogy shares increased by $70 million in value after that announcement.
The administration is making a pattern out of picking winners and losers in the mining industry and a suspicious number of those winners have close ties to Donald Trump.
These deals tie taxpayer dollars to corporate balance sheets and incentivize administration officials to prioritize individual corporate interests over the broader public good. To date, there has been no public disclosure of safeguards or procedures to ensure that these ownership stakes do not influence permitting, regulatory enforcement, contracting, and other agency decisions relating to these mining and minerals projects.
Before we give this administration yet additional power to enrich themselves at the expense of everyday Americans, let's get some answers to some of these questions we have been asking about all this corruption and self-dealing.
We have been talking about whether the administration should prioritize when it comes to doling out the limited capacity of the FAST-41 Permitting Council. If everything is a priority, nothing is.
H.R. 1501 ties this and any future administration's hands from doing any prioritization to make sure that FAST-41 permitting is limited to critical minerals projects.
This does nothing to help lower prices for Americans. It just gives gold mines or even mines owned by our foreign adversaries the same access to FAST-41 streamlining as minerals projects needed for our national or economic security interests.
This ties up limited staff and resources meant to get nationally important projects built faster. It gives this corrupt administration another tool to abuse, to help their buddies get ahead. Let's be clear, even though the Permitting Council is supposed to work with any eligible project that is put forward by a sponsor, we know that that won't stop this administration from pushing to prioritize their favorite projects, which seems to be determined more and more by the President's profits than by the public interest.
This is an administration that has repeatedly put pressure on agencies to do favors for their buddies, whether that is pushing the National Park Service to give part of Yosemite to a private developer or making a call to the Department of Defense to speed up a funding deal for a mining company with ties to the President's son.
Why would this permitting be any different?
To rein in possible abuses, we did offer commonsense amendments to limit fast-track eligibility to critical minerals projects, projects that are by definition actually critical to our national and economic security, but Republicans voted it down in committee and then blocked it from even being considered here on the House floor.
Let's be clear: This legislation is not about what is best for our country. It is about giving one more of the President's favorite industries carte blanche for special treatment.
Mr. Speaker, I urge opposition to this bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.
