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'Foreign Billionaires First, America Last': Critics Slam GOP Over Mining Approval Near Minnesota Boundary Waters
"We don’t allow mining in Yellowstone, Yosemite, Zion, Acadia, Glacier, or any of our nation’s revered national parks—and we shouldn’t allow it in the watershed of the Boundary Waters, either," said one congresswoman.
Apr 16, 2026
Democratic lawmakers and environmental protection groups condemned Senate Republicans on Thursday for their "heartbreaking" passage of a House resolution to overturn a 20-year moratorium on mining in the watershed of Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, the nation's most visited wilderness area—a vote that critics said was the result of years of lobbying by a foreign-owned mining firm.
House Joint Resolution 140 now heads to President Donald Trump's desk, nearly a decade after Chilean conglomerate Antofagasta, the owner of Twin Metals Minnesota, began discussing with Trump's first administration its desire to build a copper mine over the pristine area.
"Because of this extremely short-sighted vote, our nation’s most-visited wilderness area faces the threat of permanent toxic pollution," said Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.). "Why? So Antofagasta, a Chilean corporation that owns Twin Metals, can mine American copper and ship it to China to be smelted and sold on the global market. Twin Metals has been lobbying President Trump and Republicans in Congress for over ten years to remove the protections from this watershed and renew their mine plans to extract American minerals at the expense of freshwater for future generations."
The 50-49 vote in the Senate, said Environment America, puts the 1.1 million-acre wilderness area for heavy metals leaching into the soil and water through acid mine drainage.
Toxic runoff from copper mining, said the group, "ultimately poisons the land and water surrounding a mine, making the ecosystem unlivable for wildlife."
Leda Huta, vice president of government relations for American Rivers, called the vote "a betrayal of the public trust."
“We share in the deep disappointment of millions of Americans who expect our elected leaders to protect our clean water, our abundant wildlife, and access for all to unmatched outdoor recreation spaces," said Huta. "This is a heartbreaking moment.”
Amanda Hefner, manager of Save the Boundary Waters Action Fund, wrote in a column in Minnesota Reformer last October that "in a water-rich environment like the Boundary Waters, with its low buffering capacity, pollution would spread quickly through interconnected lakes and streams." She also wrote that it was "reckless" to risk the preserve's 17,000 jobs and over $1 billion in annual revenue "for a foreign-owned mine that would pollute and leave toxic waste for generations."
According to Jacobin, Antofagasta spent $200,000 on lobbying in the final quarter of 2024 and $230,000 in the first quarter of 2025 "on issues including federal leases for Twin Metals." The Chilean company is owned by billionaire Andrónico Luksic, who rented out his $5.5 million mansion in Washington, DC to Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband, then-White House adviser Jared Kushner, from 2017-21.
The Sierra Club noted that to pass the mining ban reversal, Senate Republicans "utilized a baseless interpretation of the Congressional Review Act (CRA)."
"The CRA only allows Congress to disapprove of administrative rules," said the group. "No previous administration has considered mineral withdrawals to be 'rules' that are subject to the CRA."
Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club's Lands Protection Program, said that "allowing a foreign company to open a toxic mine on its doorstep puts a fragile ecosystem at risk and shows the Trump Administration will always act to benefit corporations over the American people.”
“The Boundary Waters is one of the country’s most iconic wilderness areas, visited by thousands every year. It should be a place for recreation and conservation, not for pollution and exploitation," said Manuel.
Despite Trump's refrain, "America First," Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said the vote made clear that "for the GOP, it’s foreign billionaires first, America last."
McCollum warned that the mining moratorium was "the only way to protect this wilderness, which is home to some of the cleanest water in the entire world.
"We don’t allow mining in Yellowstone, Yosemite, Zion, Acadia, Glacier, or any of our nation’s revered national parks—and we shouldn’t allow it in the watershed of the Boundary Waters, either," said the congresswoman. "One hundred percent of copper mines have failed, leading to polluted waters. This case will be no different."
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‘Disgusting’: Trump’s Top Economic Adviser Brags About Killing 300,000 ‘High-Paying’ American Jobs
"Everybody is hurt by what he's celebrating," one public employee union official told Common Dreams. "I guess it's just par for the course from this administration, but it's still a disgusting thing to hear."
Apr 10, 2026
President Donald Trump's top economic adviser boasted on Fox Business Thursday that the government had slashed more than 300,000 "high-paying" jobs from the federal payroll during the president's first year back in office.
Asked by anchor Maria Bartiromo about the administration's efforts to cut government spending, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said it had made "a huge amount of progress."
"I think the biggest thing that we can point to is that we've cut government employment by 300,000 workers," he said. "Those are jobs that are very high-paying that are gone forever."
He claimed the cuts reduced government spending by "an unthinkable amount of money," perhaps $1 trillion over the next ten years.
He also said that the administration "reduced the deficit last year by $600 billion" through a combination of higher-than-expected economic growth, tariff revenues, and "supply side effects" of Trump's massive tax cut, which mostly benefited the wealthiest Americans while gutting the social safety net.
Dean Baker, a longtime collaborator of Hassett’s despite their opposing political beliefs, wrote on social media that Trump’s economic adviser was dramatically exaggerating the deficit reduction that occurred during the administration's first year.
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the deficit was about $1.8 trillion for fiscal year 2025, just $41 billion less than the previous year and $56 billion lower than the $1.9 trillion deficit CBO projected in its most recent baseline.
"In the real world, the deficit fell... less than one-tenth of what Kevin claims," Baker said.
Trump has touted the layoffs of hundreds of thousands of government employees from their "boring federal jobs" as one of his crowning achievements.
Among the agencies hit by mass layoffs were the Department of Veterans Affairs, where more than 12,700 employees got the axe; the Department of Health and Human Services, which lost more than 14,400 workers; the Social Security Administration, whose staff shrank by more than 6,600; and the Environmental Protection Agency, which lost more than 4,000 employees.
Jacqueline Simon, policy director at the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest labor union representing federal workers, told Common Dreams that even if slashing jobs did reduce the deficit as Hassett claimed, the harm far outweighs any such benefit—not only for the fired employees, but for the millions of Americans who depend on services they provide.
"When you say 300,000 jobs, it is a nice round number, and you link it to deficit reduction, which he was lying about," Simon said. "The fact of the matter is, the disappearance of those 300,000 jobs means degraded healthcare for our veterans; slower or nonexistent service at the Social Security Administration for the elderly and disabled who rely on Social Security for their income; and the elimination of huge swaths of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that help ensure we have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink."
"You have federal prisons absolutely overwhelmed by too many inmates and too few corrections officers, endangering public safety," she continued. "Consumer product safety has been eviscerated. There are also serious public health concerns involving substance abuse, childhood nutrition, and vaccinations."
She decried Hassett's comments as "ignorant" in light of his false claims about deficit reduction, but also "just demonstrably pretty cruel and disdainful" given the impact these job losses have on individuals, families, communities, and society as a whole.
"It's cruel," Simon said, "not only on the people who held those jobs—about a 100,000 of whom are military veterans—but the impact of the disappearance of those jobs also falls on children, the elderly, anybody who consumes agricultural products, breathes air, or relies on clean water."
"Everybody is hurt by what he's celebrating," she added. "I guess it's just par for the course from this administration, but it's still a disgusting thing to hear."
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The AI Industry Must Take Responsibility for the Communities It’s Destroying
If AI is to fulfill its transformative potential, its benefits must be more equitably distributed, and its environmental costs more transparently accounted for.
Apr 04, 2026
Critics are buzzing about Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s estimated $5 million Met Gala sponsorship, noting that while framed as philanthropy, it also serves as elite branding and may deliver limited benefit to the broader arts. A similar pattern appears in tech, where highly publicized giving, grants, and initiatives build brand visibility while directing relatively little to wider communities.
As an anthropologist who studies US corporations, I have seen firsthand how technology firms including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft frequently present their companies as a catalyst for economic development and employment opportunity. Large-scale initiatives are framed as serving the public interest, yet evidence reveals a persistent gap between these narratives and their material outcomes. Promised benefits such as job creation, regional development, and infrastructure investment tend to be unevenly distributed or shorter in duration than initially suggested.
Research on data centers underscores these concerns. Although construction phases generate temporary employment, long-term job creation is modest—often fewer than 200 permanent positions per facility. At the same time, AI infrastructure development places significant demands on land, energy, and water resources, and depends on extractive supply chains for minerals such as cobalt and lithium. The result is an extractive industry in which financial gains accrue primarily to tech investors, while the environmental and economic burdens are borne by local communities.
Recent projects across the United States make these dynamics visible. In Indiana, Bezos’s Amazon company cleared 1,200 acres of farmland to build an $11 billion data farm for training artificial intelligence models. In Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, Amazon bought land near a nuclear power plant by the Susquehanna River that used to be zoned for agriculture. Across the country, Gates’ Microsoft has advanced controversial data center projects despite local opposition over environmental strain, including in Michigan and Wisconsin.
Designating data centers as critical infrastructure should not exempt companies from regulatory oversight or fair contributions to the communities in which they operate.
Taken together, these cases point to the broader policy challenge of how to evaluate and govern technology infrastructure projects that are framed as public goods but function within extractive economic models.
Philanthropic initiatives often accompany these developments, shaping public perception of investors’ generosity, but leaving underlying dynamics unchanged. Bezos’ Earth Fund, for example, has directed billions toward climate-related efforts, but much of that funding supports technology that benefits his companies. Similarly, Bill Gates’ climate philanthropy has prioritized large-scale technological interventions, including proposals such as spraying sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to dim sunlight and lower global temperatures—but scientists warn that such approaches carry significant risks for both public health and ecological systems.
Federal policy is accelerating the problem. President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency related to energy production and encouraged private investments in energy industries. Within this framework, data centers are now designated as critical to national security, given the role of AI in military and defense systems.
However, while federal policy actively courts investment, the communities hosting this infrastructure are often excluded from meaningful participation in its benefits.
At the state level, data center developers aggressively pursue and often secure substantial tax incentives as jurisdictions compete to attract investment. Indiana alone could forego up to $1 billion in tax revenue. Pennsylvania has yet to fully assess the fiscal impact of similar agreements. In Virginia and other states, data center operators are exempt from sales taxes on equipment and electricity, further reducing public returns.
The concentration of wealth and environmental burden extends beyond US borders. KoBold Metals, an AI-driven mineral exploration company backed by both Bill Gates and jeff Bezos, is expanding operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Using laser technology, the company seeks deposits of cobalt, copper, nickel, and lithium—materials essential to batteries and AI infrastructure. The Congo currently supplies about 76% of the world’s cobalt, placing it at the center of the global technology economy.
While such projects may generate economic opportunities, they also reproduce familiar patterns. As with data center development in the United States, claims of job creation and regional development warrant careful scrutiny, particularly in contexts marked by historical inequality and resource extraction.
Artificial intelligence and data infrastructure are now central to economic competitiveness and national security, and these priorities are legitimate. However, if AI is to fulfill its transformative potential, its benefits must be more equitably distributed, and its environmental costs more transparently accounted for. Designating data centers as critical infrastructure should not exempt companies from regulatory oversight or fair contributions to the communities in which they operate. Nor can philanthropic initiatives cloud scientists’ knowledge and recommendations.
Policy interventions are needed to rebalance these dynamics. To make the AI boom work for the public rather than just private investors, companies must fully disclose their water and energy consumption, so that communities can understand what they are giving up to big data centers. State and local governments should condition tax incentives on measurable public benefits, including a pre-set number of durable jobs and investments in local infrastructure. And voters must hold elected officials accountable—at the ballot box—for these agreements.
Additionally, mechanisms such as royalties or revenue-generating agreements—long applied in extractive industries like oil and natural gas—could ensure that communities hosting data centers receive a meaningful share of the wealth generated. While the federal government captures significant revenue tied to AI economic activity, state and local governments should, too.
If the AI sector is to gain any public legitimacy, it must take responsibility both for the technologies it develops and for the social environmental consequences of their deployment.
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