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🔥 Today’s Lever story: One of the carveouts in the “Big, Beautiful Bill” would sell off 225,000 acres of protected federal land to a foreign mining company with close connections to the Trump family.

👇 Spend three minutes reading this 939-word newsletter to learn about: 

  • The bitter end of a half-century of environmental review.
  • How much the Fed is running up in credit card fees.
  • Project 2025’s presidential cabinet.
  • What Abundance leadership looks like in action.
TODAY'S NUGGETS

🌍 An oil spill in the making. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled to hamstring the 55-year-old National Environmental Policy Act, which required that proposed “major federal actions” undergo a climate impact review. Now, taxpayers and regulators have even less recourse to challenge polluting projects like the endeavor at the center of the case: a fossil fuel railway in a rockslide-prone canyon just feet from a Colorado River tributary that helps supply water to more than 40 million people. The Lever previously reported on Justice Neil Gorsuch’s ties with the project, which eventually led him to recuse himself. 

  • Using language that could have come from liberal pundits’ “Abundance” anti-regulation playbook, Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued that under NEPA, “fewer projects make it to the finish line” and that law should “inform” agency decision-making, not “paralyze it.”