Hill Heat

On Tuesday, February 24, 2026, at 10:30 a.m., in room 1334 Longworth House Office Building, the Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, will hold a legislative hearing on the following bills:

• H.R. 1501 (Rep. Shreve), “Protecting Domestic Mining Act of 2025”
• H.R. 2969 (Rep. Wittman), “Finding Opportunities for Resource Exploration Act” or the “Finding ORE Act”
• H.R. 4781 (Rep. Barr), “Rare Earth Solutions and Carbon Utilization Enhancement Act of 2025” or the “RESCUE Act of 2025”
• H.R. 5929 (Rep. Barr), “Critical Minerals Supply Chain Resiliency Act”
• H.R. 7126 (Rep. Wittman), “Securing Essential and Critical U.S. Resources and Elements Minerals Act of 2026” or the “SECURE Minerals Act of 2026”
• H.R. 7458 (Rep. Hageman), “Domestic Opportunities for Resource Exploration Act” or the “Domestic ORE Act”

H.R. 1501, the Protecting Domestic Mining Act of 2025, amends the FAST Act to formally include mining projects within the federal expedited permitting process. It further prohibits the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council from implementing 2023 regulations that would have restricted which mining projects qualify for these accelerated, “fast-track” reviews.

H.R. 2969, the Finding ORE Act, is bipartisan legislation that allows the U.S. government to send geologists and technology to other countries to help them find buried mineral deposits, provided those countries give U.S. companies first dibs on mining them.

H.R. 4781, the RESCUE Act of 2025, grants “fast-track” status to projects that extract or process minerals from toxic waste sources, specifically acid mine drainage, mine tailings, and coal byproducts.

H.R. 5929 empowers the President to fast-track mining projects by legally linking a Presidential Determination under the Defense Production Act to the federal permitting process. After such a designation, the bill compels federal agencies to adopt a synchronized, accelerated schedule for environmental and land-use reviews under the FAST-41 system.

H.R. 7126, the bipartisan SECURE Minerals Act of 2025, would establish a $2.5 billion government-owned corporation, the Strategic Resilience Reserve Corporation, to increase the domestic supply of raw materials for technology through investments in private mining and processing projects, including ownership stakes, loans, and purchase guarantees.

H.R. 7458 accelerates the U.S. mining permit process by imposing strict, short deadlines for environmental reviews and making approval the default if agencies fail to meet them. The bill limits long-term scientific analysis, narrows the scope of environmental impact studies, and drastically reduces the timeframe for public legal challenges to mining projects.