The United States does not know the full extent of foreign investment in mining on its own federal lands, the Government Accountability Office reported, because the law that governs those mines never asks. As of February 2026 there were 632 approved hardrock mining plans of operation on federal land under the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. The 1872 Mining Law generally requires claimants to be United States citizens or entities incorporated in the United States, and a foreign business can meet that test through a United States subsidiary.
GAO reviewed ownership for 43 claimants and operators tied to critical mineral mines on federal lands and could determine ownership for 32. Fourteen of those were subsidiaries of foreign entities. None of the 14 had a Chinese owned parent, GAO found, but in at least two cases Chinese entities held a financial interest in the foreign parent company. The remaining 11 could not be resolved from available information, which is itself the finding.
Nothing in the 1872 law requires BLM or the Forest Service to collect information on foreign parent companies, or requires claimants to submit it. Other parts of the government can see pieces of the picture: the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States can review foreign investment in mining for national security concerns, but it reviews transactions brought to it, not the standing ownership of every claim. GAO’s related report covers BLM’s collection of citizenship information from claimants, the one data point the current system does gather.
The gap matters because critical minerals, copper, lithium and zinc among them, now sit at the centre of industrial policy, and the United States exports large quantities of domestically extracted ore to Canada, Mexico and China for processing. A policy aimed at adversary involvement in the supply chain is being built without a register of who owns the first link of it.