Critical Mineral Consistency Act of 2025

Floor Speech

Congress codified the critical minerals list in the Energy Act of 2020 to identify which minerals are most important to our economic and national security and at risk of supply chain disruption.

The United States Geological Survey was required to create and update that list, following a transparent, science-based process.

At the same time, Congress directed the Department of Energy to create its own list focusing on critical minerals and materials for energy needs.

Both lists provide crucial strategic direction for Federal decisionmakers to secure our most critical and vulnerable supply chains.

H.R. 755 provides administrative clarity by creating a unified critical minerals and materials list, which incorporates the lists from both USGS and DOE, while allowing the agencies to maintain the scientific integrity of their individual processes.

I thank the bill's sponsors and my colleagues across the aisle for working with committee Democrats to incorporate changes to the original bill to better coordinate agency analyses without fully losing the individual purposes of the two lists.

Unfortunately, a lot of careful policymaking and scientific work to identify critical minerals and materials is actively being undone.

First, these lists are only useful if they are unbiased, and the current administration has blatantly violated the law by including metallurgical coal and uranium in the 2025 USGS critical minerals list, despite the Energy Act of 2020 explicitly prohibiting the inclusion of fuel minerals on the list.

They provide no public data or analysis to justify these inclusions or prove whether they meet the Energy Act of 2020's criteria for critical minerals.

Political interference in the critical minerals list undermines the United States' economic and national security. We should target Federal investments and interventions toward the most important at-risk minerals and materials and supply chains.

Additionally, designating minerals and materials as critical only matters if we can actually use these lists and designations.

Much of the latest critical minerals legislation that has passed on a partisan basis this Congress actually makes no distinction at all about prioritizing critical minerals. These bills have often provided deregulation across the board to every industry, from gold to coal.

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