A former Interior official who once oversaw the nation’s offshore energy and mineral resources says the Trump administration is rushing deep-sea mining in U.S. waters and is ill-equipped to oversee the nascent industry.
Elizabeth Klein, who directed the Biden administration’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management from 2023 to 2025, warned in a blog Monday that federal officials are moving too quickly to open U.S. waters to exploration and possible extraction of critical minerals tens of thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean. The science is still evolving, and information about rules, inspections and overall safety is scant, she said.
“The federal government is rushing into deep-sea critical mineral development, which could prove disastrous for communities, industry, and the environment,” Klein wrote in a post for the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. “Interior now instead suggests they will be streamlining what are already bare-bones, vague, decades-old rules to get to leasing faster.”
Klein penned the blog from her new perch at Penn Washington — the University of Pennsylvania’s Washington location — where she serves as the inaugural director of domestic policy programs. In addition to leading BOEM, she also served as a senior counselor to former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, and was deputy director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at New York University School of Law. She also served at Interior during the Obama and Clinton administrations.
