President Donald Trump may have delivered a victory for Alaska’s delegation Monday by moving to scrap a Biden-era ban on the Ambler mining road, but environmental groups and local tribes say the divisive project’s fate is far from certain.
Trump, flanked by top energy officials in the Oval Office, signed an order directing agencies to approve Ambler Road, a proposed 211-mile gravel mining road that would cut through Alaskan wilderness to open up access to a remote mining district in northwestern Alaska.
The president noted that he approved the project during his first stint in office, which the Biden administration last year reversed with a record of decision that barred the project’s developer and a state-owned investment bank — the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, or AIDEA — from securing a right of way to cross federally managed lands.
“I signed this years ago, and Biden unsigned it for me,” Trump told reporters. “This was something that should have been long operating and making billions of dollars for our country and supplying a lot of energy and minerals. They undid it and wasted a lot of money and time … and now we’re starting again … it’s going to be done properly.”
