Lankford Calls Out Regulations Blocking US Mineral Supply Chains

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OKLAHOMA CITY, OK — Senator James Lankford (R-OK) participated in a Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing entitled, “Oversight of the Permitting Council: Improving Transparency and Coordination,” to sound the alarm on bureaucratic red tape limiting federal projects, including broadband infrastructure and mineral mining. Eric Beightel, Executive Director of the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council, was the witness for the hearing.

Lankford has continued to push for securing US access to critical mineral supply chains and countering Chinese industry dominance. He also led the Quad Critical Minerals Partnership Act and introduced legislation last year to reduce US reliance on China for critical minerals.

Excerpts

Lankford: …Why the narrowing? Because you seem to narrow it on the on the mining portion to critical minerals, which excludes rare earths, excludes gravel, excludes nickel and lots of copper, lots of other minerals that are obviously very important to our national security and to our economy, were excluded from that initially in the proposed rule. My question from November 2023 and still my question now is why the narrowing there—not looking at national significant or economically significant or national security significant minerals—why that narrowing and is that a part of the dialogue at this point?

Beightel: It is definitely the part of the dialogue now and the reasoning behind the proposed rulemaking when it was put out was the Administration has really put a laser focus on domestic sourcing of critical minerals because of all the benefits that you’ve identified: economic competitiveness, national security, and as part of an all–of–government approach to really uplift the domestic sourcing of critical minerals. The rule was seen as a way to prioritize the effort of the agencies towards those projects. Obviously, we received comments back from a number of stakeholders who work and shared similar concerns. Many of the concerns were around the narrowing, and we are still considering those comments. As I mentioned, we do not have a timeline at this point for finalizing.

Lankford:…If we don’t have more copper, we’re not going to do electrification. And so I know that’s not on the critical minerals list but if we’re talking about electrification, we have to have more copper to be able to do that. And we have to have more rare earth minerals as well to be able to do almost anything in national security or in electrification. So I do get the critical minerals side but as far as for our economy and our national security, there’s a broader swath of minerals that will be important as well.

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