Last week, President Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to reduce America’s dependence on foreign mineral suppliers. The military must now map vulnerable supply chains and shift them toward domestic and allied sources.
The next day, the Interior Department acknowledged a critical problem jeopardizing that strategy: Much of the country still lacks the data needed to locate critical mineral resources. That is a basic contradiction in the administration’s strategy. Washington cannot expect itself to prioritize domestic mineral production without first knowing what domestic minerals exist.
The government’s failure to know its own hand is especially striking on federal land — the roughly 28% of the country owned and managed by the federal government.
New research from the Pacific Legal Foundation reveals that federal agencies do not maintain a comprehensive, current, and publicly accessible inventory of the natural resources beneath those lands. The government owns more than a quarter of our land, yet it is largely ignorant about the resources it contains.
Regardless, Washington continues to blindly declare some federal lands off-limits for development. Such decrees are often issued for conservation purposes.
Conservation may be the best use of some federal lands. Americans are right to value wilderness, wildlife habitat, and spectacular landscapes. But that conclusion should follow from an informed comparison of the alternatives.
Every major land-use decision involves a trade-off. Is a particular area most valuable as protected habitat, as a source of minerals and energy, or through some combination of conservation and responsible development? A landscape may be pristine, ecologically important, and valued by local communities, yet also contain a major copper deposit essential to homes, hospitals, and the electric grid. Making that decision is difficult, so it should be made with as much information as possible.
Without such knowledge, restricting development indefinitely is not a considered judgment that conservation outweighs other uses. Instead, it is akin to betting the house without looking at the cards. Washington may be unwittingly locking away strategically important resources, deepening the same foreign dependence the president is trying to reduce.
Recognizing the need for federal resource inventories is no revelation. Congress identified the problem decades ago. The Wilderness Act of 1964 required mineral surveys of national forest wilderness areas, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 later required the Interior Department to maintain a continuing inventory of its lands and their resource values.
Congress understood that conservation decisions should be informed by what the soon-to-be-locked-away land contains. The Wilderness Act protected vast areas from development, but it also directed federal geologists to investigate their mineral value and report the results to Congress and the president.
That survey program ran for roughly two decades and culminated in a major 1984 assessment. It identified more than 3,000 individual areas with potential deposits of critical resources, including 469 areas with silver, 415 with copper, 67 with uranium, and 63 with nickel. In other words, the surveys did not merely confirm that some protected lands had abstract “resource potential.” They revealed thousands of specific places where conservation decisions involved real mineral trade-offs.
In some cases, the surveys went further, quantifying major deposits before the land was protected. Scientists identified a nickel deposit in Glacier Bay — nickel is crucial for batteries, steelmaking, and aerospace technology — that was 56 times larger than all U.S. production of the mineral in 2023. They also documented a cobalt deposit in the North Fork Smith River Roadless Area — cobalt is used in batteries and engines — estimated at between 15 and 41.5 times 2023 U.S. production of the metal. In those cases, policymakers at least knew which mineral resources they were forgoing development of when they designated the land as wilderness.
But Washington never replaced that time-limited effort with a comprehensive, recurring program capable of keeping its knowledge current as mineral-surveying technology improves. Nor have federal agencies produced the current, accessible inventory contemplated by FLPMA. The available information remains scattered among aging reports, disconnected agency databases, and resource-specific assessments. With technological advances over the past four decades, it’s likely that these are underestimated deposits given our improved ability to detect resources.
Theoretically, the prescription is straightforward. Congress and the administration should require federal agencies to complete and regularly update a comprehensive inventory of natural resources on federal lands. The results should be searchable, publicly accessible, and detailed enough to inform decisions about withdrawals, monument designations, leasing restrictions, and other long-term limits on development.
But the method of administering the prescription is less clear. Congress and executive agencies have already shown that statutory language alone is insufficient. Thus, Congress should establish firm deadlines, require annual progress reports, and mandate independent audits of agency compliance. If federal land-managing agencies refuse to study their lands, Congress must make them.
But surveying federal land does not commit the government to mining it. Nor does finding a valuable deposit mean extraction will outweigh environmental or cultural concerns. Better information does not predetermine the choice. It makes an intelligent choice possible.
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Trump is right that America must reduce its dependence on unreliable mineral suppliers. But a credible domestic mineral strategy begins with basic knowledge. Before Washington decides which lands to develop and which to protect, it should determine what those lands contain.
The nation’s largest landowner should stop pushing its chips to the middle of the table without knowing what hand it is holding.
Tobias Russell is the strategic research manager for the environment and natural resources practice group at Pacific Legal Foundation. Mitchell Scacchi is the strategic research manager for the separation of powers at PLF.