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NEWS: U.S. HOUSE PASSES BILL TO ACCELERATE DOMESTIC MINING & MINERAL PROCESSING $MP $USAR $UUUU $UAMY $AREC $UURAF The U.S. House just passed H.R. 1501: the Protecting Domestic Mining Act of 2025. The legislation would permanently add “mining” and “mineral processing” to the list of sectors eligible to become covered projects under FAST-41, the federal government’s coordinated permitting framework for major infrastructure projects. And there are some important specifics. Under FAST-41, a project can qualify through several pathways. One major pathway covers projects that: • Are located in the United States • Require federal authorization or environmental review • Are subject to NEPA • Are expected to require more than $200 million in investment • Do not already qualify for an abbreviated environmental review or authorization process But the $200 million threshold isn’t the only route. A NEPA-covered project can also qualify when its size and complexity make enhanced federal coordination appropriate… including projects likely to require approvals or environmental reviews involving more than two federal agencies, or projects expected to require a full Environmental Impact Statement. Why does FAST-41 matter? It creates a centralized federal process for coordinating the agencies responsible for reviewing a project. That includes: • Coordinated federal permitting • Established permitting schedules and milestones • Greater interagency accountability • A public federal permitting dashboard tracking environmental reviews and authorizations • A lead agency responsible for coordinating the review process It does not automatically approve a mine. It does not eliminate NEPA. The goal is to make the process more coordinated, transparent and predictable rather than allowing major projects to drift between federal agencies without a clear permitting timeline. But H.R. 1501 does something else that’s important. In 2023, the Biden administration proposed narrowing FAST-41’s mining category so that eligibility would focus on critical-mineral mining projects, while expanding coverage to certain downstream critical-mineral supply-chain activities. That proposal was never finalized. H.R. 1501 would explicitly prohibit the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council from finalizing, implementing, administering or enforcing that proposed rule. Instead, the bill puts mining AND mineral processing directly into the FAST Act itself. That distinction matters. Mining is already treated as a FAST-41 eligible sector under existing regulation. Congress is now attempting to codify it into federal law, making it considerably harder for a future administration to simply reverse the policy through another regulatory change. And Congress isn’t limiting this specifically to lithium, rare earths, antimony, tungsten or other minerals appearing on the federal critical-minerals list. The statutory language says: Mining + Mineral Processing… that’s much broader. For the critical minerals industry, however, the inclusion of mineral processing may be the most important part. America’s dependence on China doesn’t end when ore comes out of the ground. For many strategic materials, the real vulnerability exists downstream…beneficiation, refining, separation, processing and ultimately conversion into usable materials. The United States can discover all the mineral deposits it wants. If it takes years to permit the infrastructure required to turn those deposits into usable materials, the supply-chain problem remains. H.R. 1501 is an attempt to attack that bottleneck. The House has now passed it. Next stop: the Senate.