Historically, the mining of hardrock minerals, such as gold, lead, copper, silver, and uranium, was an economic incentive for exploring and settling the American West. However, when the ore was depleted, miners often left behind a legacy of abandoned mines, structures, safety hazards, and contaminated land and water. Even in more recent times, after cleanup became mandatory, many parties responsible for hardrock mining sites have been liquidated through bankruptcy or otherwise dissolved. Under these circumstances, some hardrock mining companies have left it to the taxpayer to clean up the mining site. BLM, the Forest Service, EPA, and OSM play a role in cleaning up these abandoned mining sites and ensuring that currently operating sites are reclaimed after operations have ceased. BLM and the Forest Service are responsible for managing more than 450 million acres of public lands in their care, including land disturbed and abandoned by past hardrock mining activities. BLM manages about 258 million acres in 12 western states, including Alaska. The Forest Service manages about 193 million acres across the nation. In 1997, BLM and the Forest Service each launched a national Abandoned Mine Lands Program to remedy the physical and environmental hazards at thousands of abandoned hardrock mines on the federal lands they manage. According to a September 2007 report by these two agencies, they had inventoried thousands of abandoned sites and, at many of them, had taken actions to clean up hazardous substances and mitigate safety hazards. BLM and the Forest Service are also responsible for managing and overseeing current hardrock operations on their lands, including the mining operators’ reclamation of the land disturbed by hardrock mining. Although reclamation can vary by location, it generally involves such activities as regrading and reshaping the disturbed land to conform with adjacent land forms and to minimize erosion; removing or stabilizing buildings and other structures to reduce safety risks; removing mining roads to prevent damage from future traffic; and establishing self- sustaining vegetation. One of the agencies’ key responsibilities is to ensure that adequate financial assurances, based on sound reclamation plans and cost estimates, are in place to guarantee reclamation costs. If a mining operator fails to complete required reclamation, BLM or the Forest Service can take steps to obtain funds from the financial assurance provider to complete the reclamation. BLM requires financial assurances for both notice-level hardrock mining operations—those disturbing 5 acres of land or less—and plan-level hardrock mining operations—those disturbing over 5 acres of land and those in certain designated areas, such as the national wild and scenic rivers system. For hardrock operations on Forest Service lands, agency regulations require reclamation of sites after operations cease, but do not require financial assurances for the reclamation. However, according to a Forest Service official, if the proposed hardrock operation is likely to cause a significant disturbance, the Forest Service requires financial assurances. Both agencies allow several types of financial assurances to guarantee estimated reclamation costs for hardrock operations on their lands. According to regulations and agency officials, BLM and the Forest Service allow cash, letters of credit, certificates of deposit or savings accounts, and negotiable U.S. securities and bonds in a trust account. BLM also allows surety bonds, state bond pools, trust funds, and property. Neither agency centrally tracks all the types of financial assurances in place for hardrock operations on its lands. BLM’s LR2000 tracks most of the types, and BLM is updating the database to include more types of financial assurances, but data are incomplete for the types of assurances currently in the system. The Forest Service does not have readily available information on the types of financial assurances in use, but it is developing a database to collect this and other information on hardrock operations by late summer 2008, according to Forest Service officials. EPA administers the Superfund program, which was established under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 to address the threats that contaminated waste sites, including those on nonfederal lands, pose to human health and the environment. The act also requires that the parties statutorily responsible for pollution bear the cost of cleaning up contaminated sites, including abandoned hardrock mining operations. Some contaminated hardrock mine sites have been listed on Superfund’s National Priorities List—a list of seriously contaminated sites. Typically, these sites are expensive to clean up and the cleanup can take many years. According to EPA’s Office of Inspector General in 2004, 63 hardrock mining sites were on the National Priorities List and another 93 sites had the potential to be added to the list. Regarding financial assurances, EPA has statutory authority under the Superfund program to require businesses handling hazardous substances on nonfederal lands to provide financial assurances, and according to agency officials, is currently exploring options for implementing this authority. OSM’s Abandoned Mine Land Program primarily focuses on cleaning up abandoned coal mine sites. However, OSM, under amendments to the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) of 1977, can provide grants to fund the cleanup and reclamation of certain hardrock mining sites either (1) after a state certifies that it has cleaned up its abandoned coal mine sites and the Secretary of the Interior approves the certification, or (2) at the request of a state or Indian tribe to address problems that could endanger life and property, constitute a hazard to the public and safety, or degrade the environment, and the Secretary of the Interior grants the request. OSM has provided more than $3 billion to clean up dangerous abandoned mine sites. Its Abandoned Mine Land Program has eliminated safety and environmental hazards on 314,108 acres since 1977, including all high-priority coal problems and non-coal problems in 27 states and on the lands of three Indian tribes. Between fiscal years 1998 and 2007, the four federal agencies we examined—BLM, the Forest Service, EPA, and OSM—spent at least $2.6 billion to reclaim abandoned hardrock mines on federal, state, private, and Indian lands. EPA has spent the most—$2.2 billion. Although the amount each agency spent annually varied considerably, the median amount spent for the public lands by BLM and the Forest Service was about $5 million and about $21 million, respectively. EPA spent substantially more—a median of about $221 million annually—to clean up mines that are generally on nonfederal lands. Finally, OSM provided grants with an annual median value of about $18 million to states and Indian tribes through its SMCRA program for hardrock mine cleanups. Table 1 summarizes information on expenditures and hardrock mine cleanup activities at BLM, the Forest Service, EPA, and OSM. See appendix II for more detailed information on agency expenditures by fiscal year. According to available data, as of September 30, 2007, BLM had spent the largest share of its funds in Montana—about $18 million; EPA had spent the largest share of its funds in Idaho—about $352 million; and Wyoming was the largest recipient of OSM grants for cleaning up hardrock mine sites—receiving about $99 million. Wyoming was eligible for OSM grants after OSM’s acceptance of the state’s certification that it had completed its cleanup of coal mine sites. The Forest Service was unable to provide this information by state. See appendix II for BLM, EPA, and OSM total funding by state. Previous state estimates of the number of abandoned hardrock mine sites vary widely in the six studies that we reviewed because, in part, there is no generally accepted definition for a hardrock mine site and the studies rely on the states’ different definitions of hardrock mine sites. In addition, we found problems with BLM’s and the Forest Service’s estimate of 100,000 abandoned hardrock mines on their lands because the agencies included non-hardrock mines and mines that may not be on their lands. Using our consistent definition, 12 western states and Alaska estimated a total of at least 161,000 abandoned hardrock mine sites in their states on state, private, or federal lands. We identified six studies conducted in the past 10 years that estimated the number of abandoned hardrock mine sites in the 12 western states and Alaska. The estimates in each of these studies were developed by asking states to provide data on the number of abandoned hardrock mine sites in their states, generally without regard to whether the mine was on federal, state, Indian, or private lands. The estimates for a particular state do, in some cases, vary widely from study to study. For example, for Nevada, the Western Governors’ Association/National Mining Association estimated that the state had 50,000 abandoned hardrock mine sites in 1998, while in 2004 EPA estimated that the state had between 200,000 to 500,000 abandoned sites. The estimates also reflect the different definitions that states used for abandoned hardrock mining sites for a given study. For example, we found that, within the same study, some states define an abandoned mine site as a mine opening or feature, while others define a site as all associated mine openings, features, or structures at a distinct location. As a result, an abandoned hardrock operation with two mine openings, a pit, and a tailings pile could be listed as one site or four sites, depending on the definitions and methodologies used. See appendix III for more information on estimates from these studies. In addition, some regional or state estimates included coal and other non- hardrock mineral sites because it was (1) not important to distinguish between the type of minerals mined or (2) difficult to determine what mineral had been mined.