In a series of moves that can teach Americans a great deal about how omnivorous and all-controlling the federal government has become, the Trump Administration just flipped the Obama-Biden narrative, and fast-tracked the “permitting process” for domestic mineral mining projects.
Trump supporters herald the move as a bold counterpunch to China’s government tightening critical mineral exports, but the US move also shines a spotlight on two deeper issues.
The first key issue is the fact that of Mr. Trump’s inspiration to act comes in part from the fact that Chinese rare-earth imports have become more expensive and less available, due to his wildly unstable, clearly unconstitutional tariff edicts (only the House and Senate can pass tariff taxes). Second, there is nothing in the US Constitution that grants any “power” to this or previous administrations to control land inside states or claim the authority to “permit” mining on that land.
As Thomas Catenacci reports for the Washington Free Beacon, the White House has added ten mining projects—covering coal, copper, lithium, silver, phosphate, potash, molybdenum, and antimony—to the federal permitting dashboard, a policy change that the Trump Administration telegraphed in March to streamline approvals and prioritize projects that the government sees as important.
And, as MRCTV has worked hard to expose the Obama administration and Biden Administration clamped down on U.S. domestic mineral mining and use for energy.
The Obama administration piled on regulations like the Clean Power Plan, which slapped coal producers with crushing compliance costs and emissions standards designed to choke the industry. These weren’t just bureaucratic hurdles; they were deliberate moves to tilt the energy market toward politically favored “green” alternatives, all while ignoring the economic fallout for coal-dependent communities. MRCTV highlighted the human cost—lost jobs, shuttered plants, and skyrocketing energy prices—as Obama’s EPA wielded its regulatory sledgehammer, claiming authority it was never granted under the Constitution.
The Biden administration doubled down, escalating the attack on coal with policies that further restricted mining access. As the Free Beacon notes, Biden’s team locked up resources that could have powered homes and industries when it:
“…created new national monuments and regulations blocking large swaths of federal lands from mining leases.”
Biden’s Interior Department also pushed for stricter leasing rules and higher royalty rates, making it harder for coal companies to operate on federal lands—lands that the US Constitution does not even permit the federal government to own or “regulate.”
Now, enter Trump’s change, a response to both the previous administrations, and, sadly, to Trump, himself, making minerals even scarcer due to his crushing tariffs against imports.
As Catenacci notes, not only have the Trump tariffs added billions in costs to domestic users of imported minerals, they have pushed those costs onto the line-end consumers, and, to make economic matters worse, the Chinese government has started to restrict exports as leverage to push back against the Trump tariff attack:
“Beijing’s new controls on the exports of rare-earth minerals may have been strategically chosen because China is the dominant global supplier.”
China’s retaliation, including curbs on coal and other minerals, has sent shockwaves through global markets, and the Free Beacon warns that “this period during which US coal industries try to find and mine more coal will increase prices, because the Chinese sources will be restricted and have Trump’s tariffs applied to them.”
The ripple effect is clear: higher costs for energy and goods as the U.S. scrambles to ramp up domestic production. But this moment also exposes the folly of past administrations’ anti-coal crusades, and indicates how unconstitutional the US central planning has been.
It is important to stress the fact that the Constitution grants no enumerated power to the federal government to regulate coal production or shut down mines, nor does it have the authority to own vast swaths of land. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution is explicit: Congress can regulate commerce between “States” as political entities, but it cannot dictate what private companies produce or even how they operate within state boundaries. The Tenth Amendment reserves those powers to the states or the people. Yet, the federal government claims to own 640 million acres, roughly 30%, of U.S. land, and that doesn’t include the regulatory burdens it places on virtually every business and home in America.
It also doesn’t include the utter waste of central planners steering tax cash into non-marketable schemes such as electric school buses and windfarms.
Related: 23 States Challenge Latest Biden Attack on Coal Energy Industry
A whopping 92 percent of the land the feds claim is in the mineral-rich states west of the Mississippi River, a 24-state zone (including Hawaii) where the D.C. goons say they own nearly HALF (47 percent), and coal, oil, and many other minerals lie dormant under the weight of Uncle Sam.
As Lawrence M. Vance wrote in 2020, for the Future of Freedom Foundation, one gigantic, Constitution-insulting agency, the onerous Department of the Interior (DOI), runs most of it:
“The DOI ‘manages the Nation’s public lands and minerals, including providing access to more than 480 million acres of public lands, 700 million acres of subsurface minerals, and 1.7 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf.’ It ‘is the steward of 20 percent of the Nation’s lands, including national parks, national wildlife refuges, and other public lands; manages resources that supply 30 percent of the Nation’s energy; supplies and manages water in the 17 Western States and supplies 15 percent of the Nation’s hydropower energy.’”
Which is a central-planning system straight out of Stalin’s Holodomor or Mao’s Great Leap Forward.
This US land grab, rooted in the constitutionally dubious 1906 Antiquities Act and other overreaches, is a direct violation of the Constitution’s property clause (Article IV, Section 3), which limits federal land ownership to a ten-square-mile area for a national capitol, territories, and military garrisons.
The Obama and Biden administrations leaned hard into this unconstitutional framework, using federal land control to stifle coal mining and other resource extraction. Their regulations, often enforced through the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), treated private companies as pawns in a grand climate chess game, ignoring the economic devastation we have tried to expose and ignoring the fact that the feds had no rightful claim to dictate terms.
Trump’s push to unlock these resources is a partial corrective, but it doesn’t go far enough. Streamlining permits is one thing – but the feds have no constitutional “power” to claim that people have to come to them to get “permits” in the first place.
The real solution lies in returning land to the states and letting markets, not bureaucrats, decide how resources are used.
China’s export curbs are a wake-up call, but they’re also a symptom of a larger problem: decades of federal policies that weakened America’s energy independence. The Free Beacon’s reporting underscores the urgency, noting that projects like Perpetua’s antimony mine in Idaho have been stalled for 14 years by federal permitting delays. This isn’t just inefficiency; it’s sabotage, rooted in an ideology that prioritizes control over freedom.
Coal, like other critical minerals, is a cornerstone of economic growth, and no president—whether Obama, Biden, or Trump—has the authority to play czar over its fate. Trump’s tariffs have sparked Chinese retaliation, and it will take time before Trump’s new plan sees productive results.
As a baseline, Trump’s move to accelerate the “permit process” is a positive move, but it demands American attention, allowing us to see the long lineage of unsupportable, unconstitutional, immoral, anti-economic power grabs that numerous US presidents have committed – all of which have undermined the ability to mine, and our ability to be free.