they ran one problem with nepa. especially last-minute ones. all through the west, especially last-minute additions to national monuments, or wilderness areas, meaning pretty much hands off by people going in and being able to use those areas whether it's for recreation, hunting, or important things like timber management so we don't have such horrific fire zones that come from federal lands like that. and other important objectives like being able to find more energy in our vast national reserves. and the ability to continue with agriculture, new opportunities to store water for agriculture as we see pictured here, shasta dam in my district. we have an opportunity to add to that dam and bring another 600,000 acre-feet, which is desperately needed. we keep running into more and more environmental problems with the weaponization of nepa and again these last-minute rules done basically almost at the midnight hour at the last of the biden administration. the courts are finding that these are overstepping when the judge recently ruled the white hou

we know that nepa is the most litigated environmental statute.e know the lawsuit number being filed is increasing. we know it can take up to 4.5 years to make your way through the litigation process where it is resolved at the appellate level. lawsuits can stop projects that have broken ground in their tracks through the form of injunctions. studies that have been done, through an eis or ea, those decisions can be sent back to the agencies, which is delaying breaking ground. essentially, we keep having do overs, even after you have received project approval. there is really good language that congress and this committee has already passed in statute to put limits on litigation. map 21 has a 150 day statute of limitation window. we are recommending that be applied to all critical infrastructure projects. there is also great language in fast 41. that is only applicable to a small number of projects that opt into the program. that language requires challengers to raise concerns early in the process, where there is a lot of opportunity for public com

the infrastructure, we need nepa, true nepa permitting reform. we have to be more nimble. we have to be more quick than we have done. we have difficulty mining uranium. 70% to 80% of the entire supply chain for renewables is from china. that's worse than middle eastern oil in my opinion. >> it is truly, and i want to emphasize this, and i want to emphasize to my colleagues across the aisle, this is a national security issue. we will not compete with china. we're in an arms race in artificial intelligence with china, and we don't have the mineral production, the mining, the processing, the refining to be competitive. we will fall behind. they've already cut us off from gallium, germanium, antimony, uh. we're, really in a bad place. we need to, to really make it a priority to this committee to work on these, on these issues, because we don't, like i said, we don't have 78 or 9, 10 years to do this. back to ai. with china's release of their deepseek ai model, it, it was a shockwave. for us to compete, we not only have to have these other address these issues, critical mineral

environmentalists, we have to reform the nepa and ce q a. these are laws that the federal government passed 50 years ago or longer. and they have been manipulated and weaponnized by courts, judges, environmental courts. even something as nice as a national park. i would like to point out in marin. the point reyes seashore park, they came in and demanded they were going to bully these people off their land by eminent domain and struck a deal and said we will sell the land to and lease it back in perpetuity as long as it's the same family in operation there, it was supposed to be in perpetuity and struck the deal and thought they could live with that. not many years later after the weaponization of environmental laws and known as nepa, the permit process, that got weaponized by environmental groups to sue the heck out of these people when they tried to get a extension for their grazing permit and tried to get them for 20 years and said they had to settle for five or two. so doing the environmental mitigation they would be demanded of with only

so the book was written with tallulah in nepa, who's the white house bureau chief at the washington post. and we gather all our interviews and we put them all in a word document. and so many of the most of the interviews. and we did more than 400 of them. since this is an intimate crowd. i will tell you, it was more like hundred until my publisher said that. but i we we noticed we noticed we noticed something wrong. and the first time i was speaking one of his girlfriends, she had said to me, we were talking and then we kissed and he said, i love you. and i thought to myself, good game, george floyd. and then i talked to another girlfriend and he said and she said and then he told me loved me. and i thought, well, keep going. and then we realized then tolu is realizing that no matter who he spoke with, like whether or not it was intimate connection or, a semi intimate connection, or a person who he worked with at the salvation army, there was a point in which george floyd had to the person i love. and when a asked him about it, he simply that people like him didn't have enough love their