$3 billion authorized, $24.3 million appropriated, and the count keeps rising
In November 2021 the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act created a federal program to reclaim abandoned hardrock mines and authorized three billion dollars for it. Since FY22 it has been appropriated 24.3 million. The President's budget has zeroed it in each of the last three budgets and Congress has restored it each time, most recently at 4.7 million for FY27.
Meanwhile the count of mines it is meant to clean up keeps rising. Not because more mines are being abandoned, but because looking for them finds more.
An abandoned mine inventory is not a fixed pile that gets worked down. The USGS builds the federal inventory by digitizing mine and prospect symbols off historical topographic maps, and states, Tribes and federal land managers then verify those symbols in the field. Verification does not confirm a subset. It finds more. In Nevada the ratio of verified features to mapped symbols runs about ten to one, and the program expects the finished inventory to pass one million features. It currently holds about 674,000 features confirmed on the ground, out of 724,000 submitted from all sources. The Interior Department's program manager provided those figures and the appropriations history and let us cite them.
Last month we published a county-by-county index of abandoned mine records for every state. It has three separate columns: USGS map symbols, OSMRE's abandoned mine land problems with their reclamation status, and the mines MSHA's register carries as Abandoned. We never add those counts together. We also do not publish point locations, and we took down the map that did. The USGS says the detailed database it is building for Interior will not be published at all, because agencies do not want individual workings locatable. A county count shows where the problem concentrates without handing anyone a route to an open shaft.
Then we wrote to the state and federal reclamation programs that produce those records and asked what we had wrong. Three wrote back and made the same point independently. The three inventories were built by different agencies for different purposes and count different things, so adding them would not produce a national total. Utah's program put it plainly: no comprehensive abandoned mine inventory exists in this country.
They also caught a real error. OSMRE's unit is a problem area, and one problem area can hold many physical features: portals, highwalls, vertical openings, dangerous slides. West Virginia's abandoned mine lands office ran a current report and showed us we had confused problem-area counts with counts of physical features. The page was corrected that afternoon and carries both figures separately now. The USGS layer has its own limit there: several state programs contributed geodatabases to it, but West Virginia's covered coal only, with no hardrock features at all.
MSHA's column is not a physical count either. Abandoned in that register is a status an operator reports, not a condition on the ground. It catches portable crushers between jobs. A trainer who runs them told us his are marked Abandoned every time they shut down and move, with the equipment still on site.
Separately: the site now carries mining registers for fourteen Latin American countries, with public records requests running at fifteen agencies across ten of them. Most are still unanswered.
If you work on any of this and something here is wrong or thin, reply and tell us. Everything corrected above came from someone who did.
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