May 6, 2025
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The Honorable Bruce Westerman |
The Honorable Jared Huffman |
Dear Chairman Westerman and Ranking Member Huffman:
I am writing to you today on behalf of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, a non-profit organization comprised of over 4,100 current, former, and retired employees and volunteers of the National Park Service. Collectively, our membership represents over 50,000 years of national park management and stewardship experience. Recognized as the Voices of Experience, the Coalition educates, speaks, and acts for the preservation and protection of the National Park System, and mission-related programs of the National Park Service (NPS).
We stand united with the 90 Tribes, First Nations, and Communities opposed to this and future legislation that would force permitting for the Ambler mining road. We urge you to oppose the provisions related to the Ambler Road in the budget reconciliation bill. Over 135,000 Americans participated in the Supplemental EIS process with nearly unanimous opposition to the project.
The Bureau of Land Management held 12 public hearings throughout the southern Brooks Range as well as in Anchorage and Fairbanks, with 82% of all public comments outright opposed to the project.
In a Record of Decision released in June 2024, the administration rejected this destructive mining road due to impacts to Alaska Native communities and subsistence food resources, including the caribou, sheefish, and salmon of Northwest Alaska. Those findings are based on science, Traditional Knowledge, and a robust consultation process that involved the input of numerous Tribes and community members that would be directly harmed by this project.
These provisions are not properly included as part of budget reconciliation. The purported revenues from the fees on the rights-of-way have been manufactured to interject this project into the budget process. Inserting this provision into a budget bill is a poorly veiled attempt to override the law to advance this destructive project, despite overwhelming opposition from Tribes and the public. This project is not going to generate any real amount of revenue. The fees on the right-of-way would bring in a scant $5 million over 10 years. It should be rejected.
The Ambler industrial mining road is also not an issue of national security. Despite misleading claims, mining reports do not show that the Ambler District contains economic amounts of critical minerals that would justify building the Ambler mining road. The most abundant mineral in the Ambler District is copper, which is plentiful among the US and trading partners. Building the road to access mining claims on state and private lands would do nothing to secure domestic supply chains or contribute to federal revenues.
This language overrides the thorough process conducted to date, which recognized the serious harms this project would have to subsistence food resources and the communities that rely on them. This provision would also override Section 810 of ANILCA, which requires Tribal consultation and prioritizes subsistence uses and resources when approving projects across public lands, including the Ambler Road. These provisions would override and ignore the input from numerous Alaska Native Tribes gathered through extensive Tribal consultation that explain how this project will have direct subsistence and cultural resource impacts to over 30 Tribes across the region.
This language also ignores the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process followed to date and fundamentally undermines NEPA’s purposes. The Bureau of Land Management was required by law to undertake the NEPA process as part of its consideration of the Ambler Road project. It selected the No Action alternative based on its findings that the proposed road would have significant adverse impacts to subsistence and other resources across the vast region. This decision was based on science and historic levels of input from Tribes and the public. This provision would also potentially override fundamental protections under the Clean Water Act that are designed to ensure destructive projects do not recklessly destroy important waterways and fish habitat. To make matters worse, it would insulate any decisions from judicial review, cutting the public even further out of the process. Congress should not set a dangerous precedent of superseding bedrock laws that govern land management and environmental protections via the budget process. We strongly urge you to reject any provisions related to the Ambler Road in this bill.
Sincerely,
Philip A. Francis Jr., Chair
Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks