Trump Administration Moves to Kill Boundary Waters Protections, Make Way for Proposed Mine
Advocates for the protection of America's most popular wilderness area are experiencing whiplash this week, as the Trump Administration and its supporters in Congress continue to chip away at the current protections surrounding the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. On Wednesday afternoon, less than 24 hours after the Senate axed a provision that would allow mining 'in perpetuity' on national forest lands near the BWCA, the current administration put those very same lands back on the chopping block by announcing its decision to cancel a mineral withdrawal enacted by the previous presidential administration.
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum also confirmed during a House Committee of Natural Resources meeting Thursday that the administration was committed to overturning the mineral withdrawal and granting mining leases back to Twin Metals, which is owned by a Chilean corporation.
'Whiplash is certainly being felt at the moment,' executive director of Save the Boundary Waters Ingrid Lyons, who attended Thursday's committee meeting, tells Outdoor Life. Lyons is one of several advocates who has been in D.C. in recent weeks as Congress eyes a number of provisions in the Big, Beautiful Bill — including an attempt to sell off between 2 and 3 million acres of public lands across the West — that have vast implications for the future of our public lands and how they're managed. 'I think it was really poignant to hear Secretary Burgum commit [to this] directly on the record.'
Read Next: New Executive Order Aims to Make Mining the Primary Use of Public Lands at 'As Many Sites As Possible'
The move was first announced in an X post around 2 p.m. Wednesday. Agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins said in the post that the U.S. Department of Agriculture was initiating the process to cancel a 2023 mineral withdrawal established by the Biden Administration, which placed a 20-year moratorium on mining in the contested area and created the most significant protections to date for the BWCA and the surrounding watershed.
'The USDA is proud to announce that we are initiating the process to cancel the mineral withdrawal in the Rainey River [sic] watershed on the Superior National Forest,' Rollins wrote on the platform formerly known as Twitter. 'After careful review, including extensive public input, the US Forest Service has enough information to know the withdrawal was never needed.'
Lyons says she was already at the D.C. airport Wednesday afternoon and preparing to return to Minnesota to celebrate Tuesday's legislative victory for the BWCA when she read Rollins' post. She then decided to cancel her flight and stay on the Hill.
'[Rollins] didn't even know how to spell Rainy River correctly. So it's a haphazard, callous, and factually incorrect tweet,' Lyons points out. 'And just the fact that we're making policy decisions about America's most visited wilderness, and America's public lands, via X — it's abhorrent.'
Lyons says that she and others are still trying to understand the implications of Rollins' X post. She explains that to her knowledge, the Forest Service has not yet conducted any sort of 'careful review' around the lands in question or sought 'extensive public' comment as Rollins claimed Wednesday.
The last public process to take place was in 2023, Lyons says. This was after the U.S. Forest Service conducted a full environmental assessment of the mining proposal and lands in question. The agency then sought public input to determine if the mineral withdrawal should move forward.
'That was when 675,000 Americans commented, and over 98 percent of those who commented wanted the Boundary Waters permanently protected from sulfide-ore-copper mining,' Lyons says. 'So we are really eager to understand what the current administration is referencing … and we're hopeful that they engage in some modicum of public process, although that hasn't seemed a priority to date.'
The 2022 study by the USFS that preceded those comments clearly stated that hard-rock mining in the Rainy River Watershed could pose a real environmental threat to the neighboring BWCA if the mineral withdrawal was not enacted and Twin Metals' project was allowed to proceed. It pointed to water quality as being particularly vulnerable, bolstering claims from the project's critics that the copper-ore mine could pollute one of the last pristine waterways on the continent, which attracts more than 150,000 visitors per year and generates millions of dollars for the local recreation economy.
Read Next: The Wilderness War: Ice Fishing the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness
That study has now disappeared entirely from the USDA's website — something Lyons calls 'very unusual.'
As for the more recent moves around the Boundary Waters made by leaders in Washington D.C., Lyons says they fully expected the Trump Administration to take some form of action to reinstate mining in the Rainy River watershed, just as it removed protections in 2016 that were put in place during the Obama Administration. That process might look different this go-round, the Duluth News Tribune reports, since the 20-year moratorium implemented under Biden in 2023 has now been on the federal government's books for two years. But the actions to roll back protections for the Boundary Waters and surrounding public lands can only be taken one of two ways, according to Lyons: either through legislation in Congress or via executive action.
She explains that the legislative attempt clearly failed because Republican senators realized that including the mining provision in the budget bill would run afoul of Senate rules — namely the Byrd Rule, which prevents the inclusion of non-budgetary provisions in budget-related legislation. And she says that seeing the administration's reaction to this failure was revealing — the updated language in the current budget bill was officially released around the same time Rollins made the X post, Lyons points out.
'I think it demonstrates a quick moment of desperation as they see Plan A falling apart.'
Lyons says her organization will continue to pressure the Trump Administration to follow public processes and clarify the announcement that was made on X Wednesday. The USDA has yet to publish an official press release. She and other critics of the move will also be working on their own counter-actions, including potential litigation against the administration.
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