Executive Summary
Executive Order 14285, Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources, which aims to ramp up offshore mineral development, is moving into active federal licensing and leasing phases. On August 19, 2026, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that The Metals Company’s deep-sea mining application has met the requirements of the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act; this will allow agency review of their exploration license and commercial recovery permit to begin. Simultaneously, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has been advancing new leasing opportunities in U.S. waters. These are among the earliest project-level implementations of EO 14285 and suggest new federal pathways for future offshore mining.
What Happened
President Trump signed EO 14285 on April 24, 2025. It was published at 90 Federal Register 17735 on April 29. This order gave federal agencies a host of new directives, including the acceleration of offshore mineral development, improvement of seabed mapping, support for domestic processing capacity and strengthening of supply chains.
Actual implementation of this is being done through two programs: the first is the NOAA administering the DSHMRA, which authorizes exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits for U.S. entities that operate outside of U.S. jurisdiction. The second program is via BOEM,…