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The Government Rarely Checks Who Mines Your Land · Burn the Playbook with Michael Starr Hopkins

• 0:00
  Federal auditors examined 15 apparent businesses holding mining claims. For seven, they could not find evidence of incorporation in the United States.
• 0:09
  The agency overseeing the claims could not resolve the question either. October eighteenth, twenty twenty-six. The Government Accountability Office's finding concerned hardrock mining claims on federal land.
• 0:20
  The rule described in the report required claimants to be United States citizens or companies incorporated here.
• 0:26
  The Bureau of Land Management generally did not collect citizenship information or document whether claimants met that requirement. Its officials told auditors that the agency rarely verified citizenship.
• 0:37
  Then the auditors tried to establish eligibility themselves. They selected fifteen claimants that appeared to be businesses and searched for evidence of United States incorporation.
• 0:47
  Seven remained unresolved even after they sought the bureau's help. That result has limits. Fifteen was a small sample, and the auditors said it did not represent all claimants.
• 0:57
  Missing incorporation evidence did not prove foreign ownership. An unresolved record is not a finding that a business broke the law.
• 1:04
  It did show a basic failure to answer the question the rule required the government to ask: Who qualified to hold these claims? The second problem would survive even a complete citizenship check.
• 1:15
  A foreign company could not hold a claim directly, but its subsidiary incorporated in the United States could. Claimants did not have to report whether they were subsidiaries of another company, foreign or domestic.
• 1:26
  They also did not have to report foreign investment. Checking incorporation and identifying who ultimately controls a business are different tasks. The first would not automatically answer the second.
• 1:37
  The report's comparison with Australia and Canada sharpened that distinction.
• 1:41
  Both collected detailed foreign investor information, could block investments or impose conditions, and limited foreign state-owned control of critical minerals businesses.
• 1:50
  The administration and Congress had voiced concern about dependence on foreign critical minerals. The president had called for increased production on federal land. Washington wants more mining.
• 2:01
  Checking who holds the claims is apparently the ambitious part. Opening more land would not answer the ownership questions the auditors encountered.
• 2:08
  If the government wants to explain who benefits from public resources, it needs records that let the public follow the answer. Read the auditor's report and ask representatives why the bureau rarely checked eligibility.
• 2:20
  Seven unresolved claims are not seven proven violations. They are seven questions the agency could not answer. The next story concerned voter records.
• 2:29
  ProPublica tracked Justice Department lawsuits seeking unredacted voter rolls from thirty states and the District of Columbia. ProPublica reported final rulings in twenty-six cases and repeated dismissals.
• 2:40
  That was a pattern of repeated dismissals, not a claim that every one of the twenty-six rulings had the same outcome.
• 2:46
  For voters, the stakes were the records the department wanted states to turn over without blacked-out information. The government's demand did not settle whether its legal case justified obtaining them.
• 2:56
  Courts were making that decision. Finally, camera data and a city that had underestimated access. More Perfect Union's account described a Texas city that believed it shared camera data with eighty-three agencies.
• 3:08
  Four hundred fifty-nine had access, three hundred seventy-six more than the city believed. Police departments were also canceling flock camera contracts, the reporting said.
• 3:18
  It did not connect every cancellation to that Texas case. The access figures raise a concrete question.
• 3:24
  If the city misunderstood who could see its camera data, how could residents get a reliable explanation of who was watching? Across these stories, the missing answer is different.
• 3:33
  Eligibility to hold a mining claim, justification for obtaining voter records, access to camera data. Officials should be able to answer each before asking the public to accept their judgment.
• 3:43
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