Interior department official’s family ranch sold water rights to controversial nevada lithium mine

A top Interior Department official has significant financial ties to the contested Thacker Pass lithium mining project in Nevada, raising serious questions about potential conflicts of interest in federal decision-making.

Karen Budd-Falen, who serves as associate deputy secretary under Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, owns a stake in Home Ranch LLC, a Nevada ranching operation valued at over $1 million. In November 2018, shortly after Budd-Falen joined the first Trump administration as a senior Interior legal official, her family’s ranch sold water rights to Lithium Nevada Corporation—the company developing the $2.2 billion Thacker Pass mine—for an undisclosed sum. Her husband Frank Falen is listed as the ranch manager, and the property’s water wells are being used to monitor the mining project’s environmental impacts.

The timing and connections are particularly troubling given Budd-Falen’s role overseeing public lands policy. Her official calendar shows a 2019 lunch meeting with Lithium Nevada executives while the company was seeking fast-track approval for the massive open-pit mine on 5,700 acres of public land. The project, approved in the final days of Trump’s first term, has faced fierce opposition from Paiute Shoshone tribes and environmental groups who argue it threatens water resources, endangered species, and sacred cultural sites at Peehee Mu’huh—the site of an 1865 massacre of at least 31 Paiute people.

The Interior Department has not yet released Budd-Falen’s ethics agreement, leaving unclear whether she has recused herself from decisions affecting the lithium project that directly benefits her family’s financial interests.