Undersea Cable Protection Act of 2025

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I think we have figured out the rhythm, the prime directive here for Republican governance these days.

First, they slashed the services that working families actually depend on. Then they turn around and hand the savings over to their billionaire friends. They do it time and again. It is rinse, lather, repeat.

What do we have on the floor this week? We have all guessed it. It is another corporate handout, this time to the biggest technical oligarchs in the world. These folks have shown that if a person has enough money and if they are willing to bend the knee, they can pretty much get anything they want these days under MAGA Republican governance.

Every time we have tried to add protections and regulations to their platforms that would keep users and children safe, they stop it. Every time we try to do something about the disinformation they allow to run rampant in order to appease the White House and cater to extremists, they stop it.

Now they have schmoozed their way into getting Republicans to add another huge giveaway to this long, favored list of theirs. That means millions of dollars in savings so that they can run cables through our national marine sanctuaries for free.

I have to ask: What is the endgame here? Where does it stop? Are we systematically privatizing every piece of America's national heritage for the richest and most powerful corporations in the world? That is exactly where H.R. 261 seems to be taking us.

It rigs the game so that, for example, family fishing operations, dive boat captains, whale watching guides, and the other businesses that operate in marine sanctuaries have to navigate regulations. They have to play by the rules and pay fees but not the Big Tech oligarchs. These conglomerates, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, get special treatment and exemptions.

Our national marine sanctuaries encompass over half a million square miles of America's most precious underwater ecosystems. They are economic engines generating billions in tourism revenue, sustaining entire coastal economies. They are living laboratories also where families snorkel with sea turtles, divers explore historic shipwrecks, and scientists unlock climate secrets.

This legislation would let tech moguls bulldoze right through these waters with industrial-scale operations--massive drill rigs, heavy machinery, and construction fleets--all without the environmental review that everyone else would have to undergo.

The sponsors insist that these undersea cables are just little needles in a haystack, and they will probably hold up a little segment of one of these cables to try to suggest these are just needles in a haystack. It is true that the fiber-optic lines themselves are thin, but the installation process is anything but delicate.

We are talking about seafloor excavation projects that can obliterate coral reefs and hurt marine mammals across vast swaths of the ocean. What could go wrong when these projects are happening on the seafloor?

We can look at what Meta tried to do off the Pacific Northwest coast. Their drilling operation collapsed, scattering pipes, toxic fluids, and heavy equipment across the seafloor like an underwater junkyard. Then the company just wrote a tiny check and left town. It was nowhere near the cost of the actual damage that was incurred, and the marine habitat there is still trashed.

My district is home to one of our Nation's iconic marine sanctuaries. I can say without hesitation that my constituents don't want to see these industrial activities rip through our sensitive kelp forests that support fisheries and tourism. No project in these places should happen without very careful study, without mitigation and, most importantly, without paying their fair share.

This bill would let tech executives treat these national treasures off our coasts like some kind of an industrial sacrifice zone without even paying a cent for the use of these resources.

The National Marine Sanctuaries Act is the only statute requiring compatibility with the conservation objectives of each sanctuary. If we strip that away, as this bill would do, we have created a regulatory sacrifice zone.

House Republicans can't even identify which licenses and permits would qualify in this bill in lieu of the special use permit process that would ordinarily apply.

Mr. Speaker, how can we look the American people in the eye and assure them that no environmental safeguards are going away when we don't even have that very basic information? For many in the majority, the truth is, the details just don't matter.

Meta and Amazon are what matter, and they want this legislation. The majority is willing to take it at face value and just pass this along, no questions asked. They will give the oligarchs what they want.

Democrats have proposed amendments to this legislation, commonsense protections. They have proposed a mandatory insurance coverage requirement, for example. They have also offered off-limits zones for very sensitive habitats and standard user fees like these oligarchs pay when they run one of these on land.

Our amendment would have allowed the basics of H.R. 261 to move forward, allowing an alternate process to the current special use permit, while preserving some of these basic operational guardrails to ensure the protection of these very special and fragile places.

The majority shot down every one of these proposals. This is not about efficiency. It is about preferential treatment for oligarchs like Meta and Amazon.

Consider this: When telecom companies want to access our national forests for one of these projects, they pay rent. When they cross national parks, they pay fees, but somehow marine sanctuaries are supposed to be free. That is nothing more than a corporate giveaway and a terrible precedent that won't stop with our marine sanctuaries.

The sponsors wrapped this handout in national security rhetoric. We have already heard some of it from the chairman. They claim that there is an urgent telecommunications crisis.

Mr. Speaker, it is important to remember that these are multibillion- dollar projects spanning years and thousands of miles. They make their maps public. Everyone knows where these projects are taking place. The cost of environmental assessments is pocket change for these operations, but it could mean the difference between healthy habitats and destroyed resources in our national marine sanctuaries.

Here is what really stinks about this bill: While working American families are facing an affordability crisis, our Republican friends prioritize special favors like this for the wealthiest corporations on the planet. These are companies that could easily afford to just follow the rules and just pay a fair market rate for access to these places.

This sets a terrible precedent. We are witnessing the wholesale commercialization of America's natural inheritance, one sweetheart deal at a time. Today, it is cables and sanctuaries. Tomorrow, it will be mining in a national monument. Next week, it will be drilling in national seashores. Where does this corporate favoritism end?

If my colleagues want to modernize telecommunications, we can do that the right way. Let's invest in broadband infrastructure. Let's address transmission issues. We can incentivize clean, local, renewable energy. We can end President Trump's crazy war on clean energy.

Sure, maybe we can have a few fiber optic cables running through marine sanctuaries, but let's do it through proper analysis and siting. Let's be careful in these very special places. We don't need this bill to enable any of these shared objectives to move forward. Let us not create sacrifice zones in America's national marine sanctuaries.

Mr. Speaker, it is a little bit rich to suggest that if this became law, we would lose no environmental protections. This bill eliminates the special use permit, under which the folks who protect our national marine sanctuaries make sure that there is proper siting, proper environmental review, proper mitigation, and proper accountability for when things go wrong, and things do go wrong.

The one example I can hold out is in Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary because that is something that went through the special use permit process. It was for one of these undersea cable landings. Things got very complicated.

Thankfully, the National Park Service was able to charge market rent for the rights to go through this area, and it turns out that that was a good thing because there were all sorts of complications. In fact, there are still all types of ongoing repair and monitoring areas where things weren't installed properly and where there was all sorts of damage that wasn't foreseen on the front end.

Having that fair market value paid in the first place and then retained by the Federal agency that may need to follow up and make sure that these special places are protected is very important.

Mr. Westerman has suggested that the existing special use permit sets a fair market value that is just so prohibitive that none of these landings will ever happen in marine sanctuaries. The estimates from lobbyists are that without this bill, two 20-mile segments through a California sanctuary would cost these huge tech companies between $2.8 million and $7 million per year.

To put that in perspective, in the time that we have been arguing, these companies have made more than that. This is pocket change to these companies. They can afford to pay fair market value in order to go through our national marine sanctuaries.

As Mr. Westerman I am sure would not disagree, if they were proposing to run these things through a national park in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for example, it is a good thing they would have to get a special permit to do that, that they would have to pay fair market value, and that the funds they pay would be available to that unit of the National Park System to make sure things were done right and to make sure that there was accountability and mitigation going forward. We are just asking for the same thing for our national marine sanctuaries.

Mr. Speaker, it is a very selective concern about national security, apparently, because right now, every one of these landings has a publicly available map. The whole world knows where everything is. If my friends were concerned about the national security exposure that that presents, you would think we would be working on some way to make that less of a publicly obvious piece of information. No, we are not hearing about that. We are hearing it raised as a bit of a pretext here to try to run these projects through national marine sanctuaries rent- free and environmental review-free. One of the speakers across the aisle actually said a few moments ago that there is no need for a special use permit, that it is ridiculous to require one because there is no environmental impact to these projects.

We have heard about what happened off the Oregon coast. Certainly, the people of the Oregon coast would differ mightily with the notion that there is no environmental impact. They are still cleaning up the mess, and taxpayers ultimately had to do it.

We also have the example from the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary that I referred to earlier. This, of course, is a tough place to work on the seafloor. It is mud. It is sensitive habitat. Fishermen are active in the area. There are national security assets there. There is the Northwest Training and Testing Range, so it is a complicated place to do a project like this.

It is a good thing that NOAA was able to charge market fees when they approved a special use permit that took into account all of these complexities, because those fees ended up being very necessary.

This project had huge issues over the last 25 years. The sea plow that was used to trench across the sanctuary left a 3-meter wide gash across the sea floor that is still recovering. Tell me about no environmental impacts.

The installation company never did post-project monitoring. They left the project without checking that the cables were even buried to the correct depths. NOAA had to come back in with submersible equipment to monitor the cables. It is a good thing they had the resources to do that from those market fees because they found numerous locations where the cable was exposed, floating above the sea floor, putting the fiberoptic infrastructure itself at risk--if we care about national security and telecommunications integrity--and posing a danger to other sanctuary users and their gear. A fishing boat, for example, could have easily gotten snagged on some of these exposed, loose cables, taking down the entire network, destroying equipment, that a small business fishermen had invested in.

To this day the fiberoptic company has to enter that sanctuary regularly in order to repair and rebury the cables that were improperly installed. All of this would have been an even greater mess had this bill been law at the time, had NOAA been unable to put some conditions and some guardrails into the special use permit, had NOAA been unable to charge that fair market fee that has enabled it to follow up and clean up some of this mess.

That is what at risk if we pass a thoughtless corporate giveaway like this.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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