Conflicts of Interest Rampant, Foreign Companies Profit as Trump Sinks Taxpayer Dollars Into Mining on U.S. Public Lands
13 mining companies targeting public lands have spent $8.4 million to lobby over the past two years
Washington — Thirteen companies seeking to mine the nation’s public lands—including several Australian and Canadian corporations—spent more than $8.4 million to lobby federal agencies and Congress over the past two years alone, a Public Citizen analysis finds.
The new report, “Critical Conflicts,” provides a comprehensive analysis of how Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and other top Trump officials have promoted the sell-off of public lands for a new gold and minerals rush, often led by large foreign corporations and billionaires.
The federal government has made sizable investments in six mining and minerals processing projects since the beginning of the second Trump administration, essentially jumpstarting a nationalization of the mining industry. The latest investment, a $1.6 billion loan and investment in mining firm USA Rare Earth Inc., was announced just this week.
The report examines how the use of taxpayer money to buy ownership stakes in mining projects creates a fundamental conflict of interest that provides an incentive for the government to push mining without proper environmental, ethical and community input standards and puts public lands at risk.
Wealthy beneficiaries of Trump’s mining push include:
- Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest person and a staunch Trump supporter who attended a Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago in fall of 2025. Rinehart’s company, Hancock Prospecting, is the largest private shareholder in MP Materials, a rare-earth mining company that received a $400 million investment from the U.S. Department of Defense.
- John Paulson, a billionaire and longtime Trump ally who is a major investor in mining projects in both Alaska and Idaho, including Trilogy Metals, a Vancouver-based mining company planning to extract copper, zinc, and other minerals from remote Alaska wilderness, requiring the construction of a 211-mile road approved by the Interior Department. Last year, the Pentagon took a 10% ownership stake in Trilogy.
- The Luksic family of Chile, which through Antofagasta PLC, controls the proposed Twin Metals copper and nickel mine in northern Minnesota just outside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness—a project that could contaminate one of the country’s most pristine and heavily used wilderness areas. In 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner rented a six-bedroom home in an elite Washington, D.C., neighborhood from a company controlled by Chilean billionaire Andrónico Luksic, a member of the family behind Antofagasta and related companies.
“To an extraordinary extent, global mining companies are working with the second Trump administration to threaten iconic American national parks, forests, and monuments in the service of private profit,” said Alan Zibel, a researcher with Public Citizen and the report’s author. “Under Trump’s sweeping deregulatory agenda, the mining industry is getting taxpayer-funded investments to prop up mining companies themselves, getting a free pass to pollute public lands without paying a dime in royalties to taxpayers.”