Budget Bill Hands Public Land Near Iconic Minnesota Wilderness To Foreign Mining Company
The reconciliation bill overrides federal laws and regulations to benefit one Chilean company — Antofagasta PLC — that wants to mine near the Boundary Waters wilderness area.
A little-known provision of Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill would open thousands of acres of public lands at the edge of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters wilderness to a foreign-owned mining company.
The move amounts to a giveaway “in perpetuity” to a company that has lobbied in Washington for years, environmental campaigners say, potentially opening up one of America’s most famous wilderness areas to water pollution risks.
Earlier this month, conservationists cheered when Congress withdrew from the reconciliation bill several provisions that would have sold off hundreds of thousands of acres of federal land in Nevada and Utah. Those provisions had sparked fury among public land advocates and staunch opposition even from some Republicans, including Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana, who vowed to oppose the bill if the land sell-off provisions were retained.
But despite that fury, a lesser-known public lands giveaway remained in the reconciliation bill. If approved as currently written, the provision could lease in perpetuity land near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters wilderness, an enormous complex of pristine lakes and untrammeled forests, to Twin Metals Minnesota, a subsidiary of the Chilean mining giant Antofagasta PLC.
Becky Rom, the national chair of Save the Boundary Waters, a campaign to protect the wilderness area from mining, described the provision as “a giveaway of critical and sensitive federal public land forever to a single mining company.”
“It is a giveaway. This is forever.”
First set aside by Congress in 1964, the 1.1-million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, as it is officially known, is the only large-scale protected sub-boreal forest in the lower 48. Each year, some 150,000 people visit the wilderness to partake in the all-American tradition of canoe travel and enjoy a pristine landscape where wolves, moose, loons, bears, and bald eagles thrive. Those who come to explore it help contribute to Minnesota’s $13.5 billion outdoor recreation economy. According to the U.S. Forest Service, the landscape contains “healthy forests with extremely high water quality.” It is “irreplaceable.”
But the Boundary Waters also sit atop mineral rich lands. Antofagasta PLC has for years sought to develop a copper and nickel mine on public land near the wilderness, amid the headwaters that feed its famous lakes. The company and its American subsidiary, Twin Metals Minnesota, came close to success during the first Trump administration, which overturned an Obama-era denial and renewed mining leases for the project.
The Biden administration, recognizing the threat the proposed mine poses to the environment, subsequently rescinded those discretionary leases, arguing that they were legally deficient. The Biden administration also issued an order that prohibited mining for 20 years in the portion of the Superior National Forest where Antofagasta wants to extract copper and nickel. Twin Metals Minnesota, which declined to comment for this story, filed litigation to fight the Biden policies in court. That lawsuit is ongoing.
Meanwhile, the companies went to Capitol Hill in their quest to build the mine, which they say will directly employ more than 750 people and could revitalize “the entire region.” In the last three years alone Antofagasta and Twin Metals have poured more than $1.6 million into lobbying efforts in Washington D.C., according to OpenSecrets. Among the lobbying shops they retained is Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, the powerful firm that was the long-time home of David Bernhardt, Interior Secretary during Trump’s first term. Brownstein’s employees and its political action committee, in turn, were together among the top ten donors last election cycle to the campaign committee of Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), the powerful chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee.
Last month, that lobbying apparently bore fruit. Westerman’s committee unveiled its portion of the Trump’s reconciliation bill and it contained a major win for Antofagasta and Twin Metals. The bill, which passed the House and is now being considered by the Senate, includes provisions that rescind the Biden administration’s 20-year mining prohibition in the Superior National Forest and grants Twin Metals 20-year mining leases to pursue its copper-nickel project on nearly 6,000 acres of public land near the Boundary Waters. It also grants Twin Metals rights in perpetuity to lease renewals and it prohibits judicial review of the leases, meaning that citizens cannot sue to challenge them. Only one party retains rights to judicial review per the legislation — Twin Metals. If the federal government fails to comply with the reconciliation bill, Twin Metals can sue to enforce it.
“The reconciliation bill compels the issuance of four leases forever,” Rom said. “To get there it expressly overrides four federal laws, it expressly overrides BLM regulations, so all of those rules that apply to everybody else in the world, the laws, the regulations, for Antofagasta they don’t apply.”
“There is a heavy hand in here,” she added. “The heavy hand of Antofagasta.”
Neither Antofagasta nor Congressman Westerman’s office responded to requests for comment. Twin Metals has said its mine will provide a supply of strategic minerals that are important to national security and the emerging green energy economy.
For conservationists like Rom — who grew up helping her father run an outfitting business in the Boundary Waters and has since spent decades working to protect the wilderness area — the major threat from Twin Metals’ proposed mine is water pollution. That threat was described in a 2016 letter by the U.S. Forest Service, when it initially denied its consent to the Twin Metals mine leases during the waning days of the Obama administration. There is “inherent potential risk that development of a regionally-untested copper-nickel sulfide ore mine within the same watershed as the BWCAW might cause serious and irreplaceable (sic) harm to this unique, iconic, and irreplaceable wilderness area.”
The agency’s letter particularly drew attention to the risk of acid mine drainage, a potent form of water pollution that is a well-known risk of the sort of sulfide-ore mining that Twin Metals and Antofagasta wish to undertake. Any drainage from the “mine workings and mining wastes are likely to be highly acidic,” the agency said of the Twin Metals mine. Any failure to contain such waste could have “potentially severe consequences for the BWCAW” and could “cover a very broad region.”
Twin Metals Minnesota has denied that acid mine drainage will be a potential threat, calling it a “nonissue.”
As the reconciliation bill moves through the Senate, conservationists as well as their allies in Congress are hoping it will be stripped out of the bill before it lands on Trump’s desk. They argue, among other things, that the bill’s Twin Metals provision may run afoul of Senate rules governing the reconciliation process, which disallows the body from including “extraneous provisions” in budget bills. Among the opponents of the Twin Metals provision is Minnesota’s junior Senator, though the state’s Congressional delegation is split on the issue.
“Senator Smith strongly opposes the reckless Republican provision in the U.S. House-passed Big Beautiful Bill that would give a foreign conglomerate full permission to build a copper-nickel sulfide mine right on the doorstep of the Boundary Waters watershed,” wrote a spokesperson for Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) in a statement to Public Domain. “By including this language in their massive budget bill, Republicans in Congress have made it clear they don’t care about the science or the data, which shows unequivocally that this type of mining poses an unacceptable risk and stands to irreversibly pollute this pristine wilderness.”
The Chilean company behind this is run by the man who rented Ivanka and Jared their Kalorama home during the first Trump term at a below market rate. Great investment he made, yes?