Biden’s own policies blocking effort to boost critical mineral production

President Biden’s recent decision to use the Defense Production Act to increase domestic production of critical minerals is an empty gesture unless his administration removes the permitting roadblocks that delay critical minerals projects.

The administration is sending mixed signals about whether it is really serious about extracting critical minerals from U.S. mines. On the same day that the president made his Defense Production Act announcement, the Department of the Interior published a Federal Register notice to begin a process to change mining laws and regulations in ways that could make it harder and more expensive to develop critical minerals and put lands off-limits to mining.

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm appears to be the only top administration official who understands that permitting is a problem. At a recent energy conference, she linked our foreign mineral dependency to the lengthy permitting process and said that the administration needs to streamline this process with a-whole-of-government effort to collapse bureaucratic and time-consuming permitting timelines. Describing China’s critical minerals hegemony as a threat to national and energy security and American economic wellbeing, Granholm stressed the need to re-shore the entire critical-minerals supply chain – from extraction to processing.

Deploying the Defense Production Act to increase critical mineral production, or spending the money for the clean-energy initiatives in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, can’t happen quickly due to the protracted permitting process. We’ve been down this path before. The “shovel-ready” infrastructure construction projects in the 2009 stimulus bill took years to build – if built at all – due to permitting barriers. – READ MORE