The comprehensive legislative fix for the exposures documented in this series would extend CFIUS jurisdiction to cover service contracts in federally-involved critical mineral extraction, reinstate and strengthen the Corporate Transparency Act's beneficial ownership reporting, and create a dedicated foreign-ownership screening pathway for all federally-permitted remediation and produced water operations. That fix is real, it is necessary, and this series argues for it without apology.

It will also take two to three Congresses to fully enact, if it happens at all. And the commercial development of the feedstocks described in Part 3 is happening right now.

What follows is not a counsel of despair. It is a recognition that the most important thing the right fix can do in 2026 is not solve the whole problem — it is to get something on the books, get the issue into the public record, and establish the standard that makes the comprehensive fix easier to argue in the next Congress. A good small fix does not compete with the comprehensive solution. It creates the political momentum for it.

Two fixes. Both achievable. One amends a law that was signed eleven weeks ago. The other rides a vehicle that passes every single year. Neither requires rewiring CFIUS. Neither kills the programs they are designed to protect. And together, they close the most acute of the three zones documented in Part 3 — the one where the door opened seventeen days after the lock was removed.

Series Context — Part 3 The Open Door: three American zones of exposure, the regulatory gap map, and the seventeen-day confluence

The Political Moment Is Aligned

Before proposing the fixes, it is worth being precise about the political environment — because the series' argument is not swimming against it. It is swimming with it.

The Trump administration has been more aggressive on critical mineral supply chain security than any administration before it. The March 2025 executive order on mineral production expanded Defense Production Act authorities for domestic mineral development. The One Big Beautiful Act, signed July 4, 2025, appropriated $2 billion to expand the National Defense Stockpile and $5 billion to the Industrial Base Fund, with the Department of Defense explicitly authorized to take equity positions in critical mineral companies. In July 2025, the Pentagon took a $400 million equity stake in MP Materials and established a price floor for neodymium-praseodymium oxide. The FY2026 NDAA, signed December 18, 2025, added materials to the DoD covered materials sourcing restrictions, tightened FEOC-linked battery procurement timelines, and reauthorized the Development Finance Corporation to counter Chinese Belt and Road mineral investments globally.

The administration's stated policy is "America First" supply chain security. The April 2025 Section 232 executive order on processed critical minerals cited exactly the concern this series documents: that Chinese dominance of mineral processing represents a national security threat that requires both domestic development and protection against circumvention.

This series is not arguing with that posture. It is pointing out a specific gap in it. The administration is defending the front door — manufacturing, processing, battery cell production — while the back door, the remediation and extraction services market, remains unwatched. The two fixes proposed below are not additions to the administration's agenda. They are completions of it.

The Administration's Stated Direction — What Already Exists
→
$7B+ in critical mineral appropriations through One Big Beautiful Act — National Defense Stockpile ($2B), Industrial Base Fund ($5B), DPA financing ($1B). DOD now authorized to take equity positions in mineral companies.
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FY2026 NDAA tightened sourcing restrictions — added new covered materials subject to restrictions from China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Phased FEOC prohibition on DoD battery procurement 2028–2031. DFC reauthorized and expanded to counter BRI mineral investments.
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Section 232 executive order on processed critical minerals, April 2025 — framing China's processing dominance as a national security threat warranting both tariffs and domestic investment.
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America First Investment Policy memo, February 2025 — heightened CFIUS scrutiny for foreign adversary investments, streamlined review for allied investors. Signals awareness that the investment vector requires active management.
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What all of this misses: every instrument listed above operates at the manufacturing and processing level, or at the level of direct corporate acquisitions. None of it covers the remediation services market, the produced water treatment contracting market, or the Good Samaritan permit application process. The back door remains open while the administration aggressively defends the front.

Fix One — The Good Samaritan National Security Amendment

Fix 1 · Amend P.L. 118-155
Vehicle: Standalone Amendment or FY2027 NDAA
Add a beneficial ownership certification requirement and a foreign-threshold referral pathway to the Good Samaritan Remediation of Abandoned Hardrock Mines Act — without touching the program's core liability relief framework or adding burden to domestic nonprofits, state agencies, or universities.

The Good Samaritan Act already requires permit applicants to provide "a description of all parties proposed to be involved in the remediation project, including any cooperating person and each member of any applicable corporation, association, partnership, consortium, joint venture, or commercial entity." The requirement exists. What does not exist is any mechanism to independently verify that the parties listed accurately represent the beneficial ownership of the applying entity — or any pathway to flag applications with material foreign beneficial ownership to a national security reviewer.

The fix does not require rewriting the Act. It requires adding three elements to the existing application process.

Specific Mechanics
01
Beneficial ownership certification. All Good Samaritan permit applicants must certify, under penalty of law, that the disclosed party list accurately and completely represents all individuals or entities with 10% or more beneficial ownership interest in the applicant entity, including through intermediary holding structures. The certification standard matches the Corporate Transparency Act's beneficial ownership definition — which already applies to most of these entities in principle, even if enforcement is currently suspended.
02
Foreign threshold referral. Any application in which a disclosed beneficial owner is a citizen or entity of a covered nation — as defined under existing FEOC statute: China, Russia, North Korea, Iran — triggers a mandatory 30-day hold and referral to Treasury's Office of Investment Security. Treasury reviews under its existing national security framework and returns one of three outcomes: clear, clear with conditions, or deny. EPA issues or denies the permit based on Treasury's determination for the national security component; EPA retains independent authority on the environmental and technical components.
03
Domestic entity carve-out. The certification requirement and foreign threshold referral mechanism explicitly do not apply to: U.S. state agencies, U.S. tribal governments, U.S. accredited universities and their affiliated research institutes, U.S.-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations, or entities where all beneficial owners are U.S. citizens or permanent residents. This carve-out ensures that Trout Unlimited, WVU, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, and every other intended beneficiary of the Good Samaritan Act can continue to use it exactly as designed, without a single additional step.

The carve-out is the difference between a fix and a burden. The entities the Good Samaritan Act was designed to help — conservation groups, state agencies, universities, tribal governments — are all covered by the carve-out. The foreign referral mechanism applies only to the class of applicant that was not the Act's intended beneficiary: commercial entities with material foreign beneficial ownership. It does not slow the program for anyone the program was built for.

Political Feasibility Assessment
High. The Good Samaritan Act passed the Senate unanimously and the House with overwhelming bipartisan support. Its sponsors — Heinrich (D-NM), Risch (R-ID), Kelly (D-AZ), Maloy (R-UT), Peltola (D-AK) — span the partisan spectrum and the geographic range of the affected states. None of them intended to create a foreign acquisition pathway. A targeted amendment that explicitly protects the program's core beneficiaries while closing the foreign ownership gap is directly within the spirit of the legislation's stated purpose. The FEOC threshold language mirrors definitions already in statute, reducing drafting complexity. The Treasury referral mechanism mirrors the CFIUS process the administration has already endorsed as a national security tool. Attachment to the FY2027 NDAA is the natural vehicle — the NDAA already carries critical mineral supply chain provisions as a matter of routine.

Fix Two — The Critical Mineral Extraction Disclosure Requirement

Fix 2 · New Provision — Annual NDAA
Vehicle: FY2027 NDAA — Section in Critical Minerals Supply Chain
Require beneficial ownership certification for all entities receiving federal grants, loans, or contracts for critical mineral extraction from non-traditional domestic sources — including AMD treatment, produced water DLE, and mine tailings reprocessing.

The administration is already investing at scale in the development of the feedstocks documented in this series. The DOE has funded WVU's AMD extraction research. The DOD's Industrial Base Fund is authorized to support critical mineral supply chains. The One Big Beautiful Act's $5 billion Industrial Base Fund allocation and the $2 billion National Defense Stockpile expansion represent capital that will flow toward the exact AMD treatment and produced water operations this series has identified as vulnerable.

The federal government is about to become a major funder of the sector it has left unscreened for foreign ownership. The fix is to attach the screening to the funding.

Specific Mechanics
01
Covered activities. Any entity receiving more than $500,000 in federal grants, loans, contracts, or equity investments from DOE, DOD, EPA, or DFC for: (a) rare earth element or critical mineral extraction from acid mine drainage or coal mine waste; (b) direct lithium extraction from produced water; or (c) critical mineral reprocessing from mine tailings — must complete beneficial ownership disclosure as a condition of award and annually thereafter for the duration of the federal relationship.
02
Disclosure standard. Disclosure goes to FinCEN using the existing Corporate Transparency Act beneficial ownership reporting format. This is not a new system. The CTA infrastructure exists. The disclosure requirement for this sector does not depend on general CTA enforcement being reinstated — it is a sector-specific condition of federal funding, which agencies already have statutory authority to impose as a grant condition. If a recipient's CTA exemption previously excluded them from filing, that exemption does not apply to the sector-specific federal funding condition.
03
Covered nation disqualification. Any entity in which a citizen or entity of a covered nation holds 10% or more beneficial ownership interest is ineligible for covered federal funding. The definition of covered nation and FEOC threshold matches existing statute. Entities that receive funding and subsequently acquire covered-nation beneficial ownership above the threshold must report within 30 days and are subject to funding clawback.
04
Pass-through coverage. The requirement applies to subcontractors and partners receiving $250,000 or more from a primary awardee under a covered federal grant or contract. This prevents the Singapore-fund structure from operating one step removed from the federal relationship — a primary domestic entity fronting for a foreign-beneficial-ownership subcontractor that performs the actual extraction.

This fix does not screen the private produced water market where there is no federal nexus. It does not cover AMD treatment contracts funded entirely from state sources or private capital with no federal involvement. Those gaps remain, and this series does not pretend otherwise. What it covers is the federally-visible segment of these industries — the portion that is about to receive hundreds of millions in DOD and DOE funding, the portion most likely to generate the commercially successful proof points that attract additional capital, and the portion that establishes the industry standard. Getting beneficial ownership disclosure right for the federally-funded segment creates the norm that eventually extends to the private segment.

Political Feasibility Assessment
High within the NDAA context. The FY2026 NDAA already contains provisions restricting FEOC sourcing for defense materials procurement. The FY2024 NDAA required DOD to brief Congress on FOCI risks in the defense industrial base. The administration's own America First Investment Policy memo calls for heightened scrutiny of adversary-linked investments in strategic sectors. Attaching a beneficial ownership disclosure requirement to federal funding for non-traditional critical mineral extraction is a natural extension of all three — it is not a new principle, it is the existing principle applied to a specific funding category that currently lacks it. The $500,000 threshold keeps the administrative burden proportionate and excludes small academic grants. The FinCEN filing format avoids creating new compliance infrastructure. DOD staff with visibility into the critical mineral supply chain are already aware that the non-traditional extraction sector is growing faster than its security framework. This provision gives them a tool they would use.

What These Two Fixes Don't Cover — The Honest Accounting

A series that has spent three parts diagnosing with precision owes its readers the same precision about the limits of what it is proposing.

Coverage Comparison — Two Proposed Fixes vs. Three Zones of Exposure
Exposure
Fix 1 — GS Amendment
Fix 2 — NDAA Disclosure
Good Samaritan permit applications — all 15 slots in the federal pilot program
Covered. Foreign beneficial ownership certification and Treasury referral required for all non-domestic applicants.
Partial. Covers only GS permit holders who subsequently receive federal funding for extraction. Permit-only operations without federal funding remain under Fix 1 only.
Federally-funded AMD treatment and REE extraction — DOE grants, DOD contracts, IBF investments
Partial. AMD sites that also hold GS permits are covered. AMD treatment operations without GS permits are not touched by Fix 1.
Covered. Beneficial ownership disclosure required for any entity receiving $500K+ in covered federal funding for AMD-derived critical mineral extraction, regardless of GS permit status.
Produced water DLE with federal funding nexus — DOE loans, DOD contracts, DFC financing
Not covered. Fix 1 is specific to GS program.
Covered. $500K+ federal funding threshold captures the major DLE operators receiving DOE and DOD support.
Private-land produced water DLE with no federal nexus — Permian operators on private leases with no federal funding
Not covered.
Not covered. This is the gap these two fixes do not close. The Texas Supreme Court ruling reinforces that this is a private commercial market. Extending federal beneficial ownership requirements here requires either a CFIUS expansion or a dedicated statute — the larger legislative project this series argues for in parallel.
AMD treatment on non-federal land with no federal funding — state-funded or purely private AMD treatment contracts
Not covered.
Not covered. State-level action is the recourse here. West Virginia and Pennsylvania are the states with the most at stake and the most political motivation to act. The federal precedent these two fixes establish accelerates state-level adoption.
Existing contracts already in place before legislation takes effect
Partial. GS program is so new that no permits have been issued. Forward-looking coverage is complete for all 15 slots.
Partial. Applies to new awards and renewals. Does not reach existing private contracts with no federal relationship. Grandfathering is the cost of avoiding retroactivity challenges.

Why Getting Something Done Matters More Than Getting Everything Done

The two fixes proposed above do not close all three zones of exposure documented in Part 3. A reader who wanted to characterize them as insufficient could do so accurately. That characterization would also be a mistake in strategic judgment, for reasons that the legislative history of supply chain security itself documents.

FEOC restrictions did not spring fully formed into law. They began as narrow provisions attached to IIJA grant programs in 2021, extended to semiconductor manufacturing in the CHIPS Act, tightened through the Inflation Reduction Act's battery component rules, and were further expanded in the FY2026 NDAA's sourcing restrictions and the One Big Beautiful Act's prohibited foreign entity provisions. Each iteration built on the last. Each legislative vehicle that carried FEOC language made the next FEOC expansion easier to argue, because the standard already existed. The question for each subsequent Congress was not "should we have foreign adversary restrictions in this sector" — that question was settled the first time — but "should we extend the standard we already have to this adjacent area."

The same logic applies here. Fix 1 and Fix 2 establish that beneficial ownership disclosure is an accepted condition of participation in federally-connected critical mineral remediation. Once that standard exists for the Good Samaritan program and federal grant recipients, extending it to the private produced water market is an extension of an existing standard, not the creation of a new one. Extending CFIUS jurisdiction to service contracts in this sector becomes an extension of a principle already on the books, not a doctrinal innovation. The political cost of each subsequent step is lower because the first step has already been taken.

There is also the question of attention. The threat documented in this series — Chinese-beneficial-ownership entities acquiring positions in American critical mineral waste streams through the environmental services market — is not currently on the radar of the congressional committees with jurisdiction over these programs. It is not on the radar of the EPA program managers who will be reviewing Good Samaritan applications. It is not in the briefing materials for the DOD officials allocating Industrial Base Fund investments.

A passed amendment changes that. A provision in the FY2027 NDAA creates a committee record, a floor debate, agency implementation guidance, and a public accounting of who is applying for what. It puts the question into the bureaucratic system in a way that an op-ed, a series of articles, or a Senate hearing alone cannot. Government does not move on threats it has not institutionalized a process for seeing. These two fixes create that process.

The perfect fix is the enemy of the first fix. And the first fix is what puts the threat on the record.

The Longer Legislative Project

This series argues for the two targeted fixes above as the achievable near-term action. It also argues, without equivocation, for the comprehensive solution in parallel — not as a substitute for the targeted fixes, but as the destination toward which they are the first step.

The comprehensive solution has three components. A CFIUS service contract extension covering critical mineral extraction services performed under any federally-permitted or federally-connected remediation, treatment, or produced water operation — closing the AMD and produced water gaps for the private market. Reinstatement and sectoral strengthening of CTA beneficial ownership enforcement — restoring the tracing tool that Australia used, with priority enforcement for entities participating in critical mineral extraction activities. And a produced water domestic nexus requirement — any entity extracting critical minerals from produced water on any land whose operator receives a federal tax benefit, depletion allowance, or environmental compliance waiver must certify beneficial ownership and is subject to the foreign threshold disqualification.

These three components are heavier lifts. They will face opposition from energy industry groups who prefer private contracting markets without additional disclosure requirements, from foreign investment advocates who worry about CFIUS expansion precedent, and from the administration's deregulatory instinct on the clean energy side of these industries. That opposition is real and it matters.

It matters less after Fix 1 and Fix 2 are law. Because at that point, the argument is not "we should have foreign ownership screening in the critical mineral extraction sector" — it is "we should extend the standard we already enacted." The standard-extension argument wins in Congress more often than the standard-creation argument does. That is why the two small fixes are not a concession to political reality. They are the political strategy.

Part 5 — The Counter — addresses the other half of the equation. Legislation is one track. The other track is speed: American entities occupying the three zones of exposure documented in Part 3 fast enough that by the time any foreign-backed actor identifies and acts on the opportunity, there is no room left to enter. The legislative and commercial tracks are not sequential. They run simultaneously, and the race is closer than most people in Washington understand.