Miners Pay $0 in Royalty for Gold on Public Land. Taxpayers Pay $2.9 Billion to Clean Up After Them.

Oil, gas, and coal companies pay the U.S. Treasury a royalty for what they take from public land — a share of the value, negotiated at lease.▸ Gold, silver, and copper companies do not. Under the General Mining Law of 1872, signed by Ulysses S. Grant, a company can stake a claim on federal land, extract whatever hardrock minerals it finds, and owe the government nothing for the minerals themselves. A 2023 review by the Interagency Working Group on Mining Laws, Regulations, and Permitting — convened by Interior, USDA, Energy, EPA, and the State Department — put it plainly: the law "fails to provide the American taxpayer with any direct financial compensation for the value of hardrock minerals extracted from most publicly owned lands."

The working group's own numbers show what that costs.▸ Using the Bureau of Land Management's 2019 estimate of the gross value of gold, silver, copper, molybdenum, lead, and zinc produced on federal lands in the West — $4.9 billion — the group calculated what a royalty would have raised that year at rates comparable to those used on other federal minerals and on state-owned hardrock leases.

An 8% gross royalty — the top of the range the working group modeled, and in line with rates several states already charge on hardrock mining on their own land — would have raised $391.7 million in 2019 alone, from six metals in western states.▸ The Congressional Budget Office, estimating independently at the national level, put an 8% royalty on existing claims at an average of $394 million a year — close enough to the working group's regional number to serve as a check on it. Instead, the actual federal take from the claim system is administrative, not a share of value: location and annual maintenance fees on roughly 471,800 active mining claims, which brought in $70–79 million a year on average and just over $100 million in fiscal 2021, per BLM figures cited in the same report. Congress appropriates about $40 million a year to run the Mining Law Administration program; those claim fees offset that appropriation, and whatever the fees raise beyond it is swept into the Treasury's General Fund as ordinary revenue — not credited against the value of anything taken out of the ground. The only actual royalty the government collects on hardrock minerals comes from a separate, tiny category: 54 BLM-administered leases on land the government acquired (not the public domain claims that cover most hardrock mining), which produced $8.97 million in royalties and rent in 2021 — under a rounding error next to the $391.7 million the working group says an 8% royalty would raise on claims alone.

The 1872 law required no reclamation either, until federal rules changed in the 1970s and '80s. Everything mined before then — and plenty since, where operators went bankrupt or vanished — was simply left.▸ The result is a federal liability with no revenue stream funding it.

The Government Accountability Office counted at least 140,652 abandoned hardrock mine features on federal land as of May 2019 — old tunnels, pits, and waste piles — of which about 89,000 are confirmed or suspected to pose a physical safety or environmental hazard.▸ Agency officials told GAO there could be far more: BLM alone estimated roughly 380,000 additional features on its land that aren't yet in any database, pushing the total estimate to 533,652. Five federal agencies spent about $2.9 billion addressing these hazards from fiscal 2008 through 2017, an average of $287 million a year — 88% of it on environmental contamination, the rest on physical hazards like open shafts. About $1 billion of that was later recovered from responsible mine owners under Superfund law; the remainder was taxpayer money with no dedicated hardrock revenue stream behind it. Federal officials told GAO it would cost billions more to finish the job.

The industry generating that liability is not large by employment.▸ The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages puts nationwide metal ore mining employment at 45,074 people in 2024, earning an average of $115,321 a year, concentrated in Arizona and Nevada. For scale, all U.S. nonfuel mineral production combined — gold and copper alongside sand, gravel, and lithium — was valued at $112 billion in 2025, per USGS.

Figures span different years and geographies by necessity of the source data: the $4.9 billion production base and royalty estimates are a 2019, western-states-only snapshot; the $2.9 billion cleanup total covers fiscal 2008–2017 nationwide; employment and the $112 billion USGS production figure are 2024–2025. EPA's $2.29 billion in the cleanup chart includes Superfund spending at mixed-ownership and nonfederal hardrock sites, not federal land exclusively, per GAO's own scope note — the other four agencies' totals are federal-land spending only.