Nevada
Top Interior Department official has ties to Thacker Pass lithium mine – High Country News
This story was co-published with Public Domain.
Karen Budd-Falen, a top official at the Department of Interior, has financial ties to the controversial Thacker Pass lithium mine in northern Nevada — a project that the Trump administration worked to fast-track during its first term. In recent months, the administration took an equity stake in the mine and the mine’s parent company.
After an unexplained delay, Public Domain and High Country News obtained Budd-Falen’s financial disclosure earlier this month, which details her family’s extensive land holdings. Among them is Home Ranch LLC, a Nevada ranching operation valued at over $1 million. Nevada’s business search database shows a Home Ranch LLC that listed Frank Falen as the manager in February 2022. Frank Falen is also the name of Karen Budd Falen’s husband.
In November 2018, not long after Karen Budd-Falen joined the first Trump administration as a top legal official at the Interior Department, Home Ranch LLC agreed to sell water rights to Lithium Nevada Corporation, the company developing the Thacker Pass mine, for an undisclosed amount of money, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Frank Falen is listed on the document.
A Home Ranch also appears in planning documents that Lithium Nevada submitted to federal regulators during Trump’s first term. A monitoring plan for Thacker Pass, dated July 2021, notes that the company intended to use existing stock water wells owned by Home Ranch LLC to “monitor potential drawdown impacts” from its mining operations.
The water purchase agreement and other records raise questions about potential conflicts of interest. Budd-Falen was appointed in March as associate deputy secretary to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — a position that does not require Senate confirmation. She also served as a high-ranking legal official at the Interior Department during President Trump’s first term.
It was during that earlier government stint that her official calendar lists a November 6, 2019 meeting in which Budd-Falen was scheduled to have “lunch with Lithium Nevada.”

In 2019, Lithium Nevada, a subsidiary of the Canadian mining firm Lithium Americas, was seeking speedy approval for its Thacker Pass mine in northern Nevada. In the waning days of the first Trump administration it received just that. In January 2021, the Bureau of Land Management approved the mine project, which includes some 5,700 acres of public land.
The $2.2 billion, open-pit mine project has drawn fierce opposition from area tribes and environmentalists, who argue it threatens water resources, endangered species and sacred cultural sites. Thacker Pass, known as Peehee Mu’huh to the Paiute Shoshone people, was the site of an 1865 massacre of at least 31 Paiute people.
Budd-Falen was being considered to lead the BLM during Trump’s first term, but turned down the director job when she learned that she and her husband would have to sell their interests in their family ranches to avoid conflicts of interest, she told The Fence Post in 2018.
Since returning to power, Trump and his team have again worked to move the project forward, as part of a broader push to boost critical mineral mining in the U.S. In September, the Trump administration struck a deal with Lithium Americas to take a 5% equity stake in both the Thacker Pass mine and the company, in exchange for the release of loan money from the Department of Energy.
Budd-Falen has largely worked behind the scenes at the Interior Department. Little is known about what issues she has focused on since returning to the sprawling agency. Notably, Interior officials have yet to release her ethics agreement, which would detail any companies or projects that are off limits.
“Did she have any oversight of the environmental review process regarding Thacker Pass? It is a big question,” said Kyle Roerink, executive director of the Great Basin Water Network, a water conservation group in Nevada. “If she didn’t recuse herself, it would fly in the face of the impartial decisionmaking that Americans expect from government officials.”
Nevada
Southern Nevada sees string of shootings, one person killed in 24-hour span
LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — Las Vegas Metro Police are investigating multiple shootings that occurred across Southern Nevada within a 24-hour period, including one that turned deadly.
The violence began Thursday evening near Flamingo Road and Linq Lane, when officers attempted to stop a stolen vehicle. The driver sped away, driving into oncoming traffic and nearly causing crashes across the valley.
Crime
Stolen car chase leads to fatal officer-involved shooting, LVMPD investigating
The pursuit ended with 3 suspects fleeing on foot. When one armed suspect refused to drop his weapon, officers opened fire, killing him. The remaining suspects were taken into custody.
Hours later, police responded to a deadly shooting at a business in the northeast valley near Craig Road and Nellis Boulevard. Officers arrived to find a man and a woman suffering from gunshot wounds in the parking lot.
Crime
Police searching for suspect after shooting in northeast valley leaves one dead
The woman was transported to the hospital and is expected to survive. The man died at the scene.
Detectives say the victims had been arguing with another man when he opened fire and fled. Officials are asking for the public’s help in identifying and locating the suspect as the investigation continues.
About 30 minutes after that shooting, Metro officers responded to another shooting near the intersection of Rancho Drive and Lake Mead Boulevard, where they found a man with a gunshot wound to the leg.
Traffic
Police activity blocks off all lanes on eastbound Lake Mead Blvd., Rancho Dr.
He was transported to the hospital and is expected to recover. Detectives are investigating.
Overnight, a fourth shooting shut down Craig Road from Lamont Street to Nellis Boulevard. A victim was found with non-life-threatening injuries, and a suspect was detained.
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
Nevada
Caltech readies to build world’s most sensitive radio telescope in Nevada
LAS VEGAS (FOX5) — Caltech researchers are preparing to build a radio telescope that will be the most sensitive ever constructed and survey the sky 100 times faster than any other radio telescope worldwide.
Schmidt Sciences has greenlit construction of the Deep Synoptic Array after the project completed its final design review. The milestone paves the way for construction to begin on the telescope, which is planned for a remote valley in Nevada.
MORE ON FOX5: Conservation groups oppose potential sale of federal lands highlighted in land mapping tool
The array will consist of 1,650 radio dishes, each slightly more than 6 meters in diameter. The array will span an area of about 20 by 16 kilometers. The team plans to build the telescope by 2029, with science operations commencing soon after.
Survey capabilities
“The DSA will survey the entire visible sky several times in its first five years at unprecedented speeds,” said Gregg Hallinan, principal investigator of DSA, professor of astronomy at Caltech, and director of Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory. “While all other radio telescopes combined have so far found about 20 million radio sources, the DSA will match that in the first day of operations. By the end of its initial survey, it will have discovered about 1 billion new radio sources.”
The telescope will discover radio emission from millions of stars, galaxies, and other cosmic objects. It will address the mysteries of black holes, pulsars and fast radio bursts. It will also probe the physics of dark matter and gravity, and it will measure the structure and expansion of the universe.
“Radio astronomy is about to go from sketch to photograph,” said Vikram Ravi, the co-principal investigator of the DSA and a professor of astronomy at Caltech. “The DSA is looking at a far larger volume of the universe far more often than any other telescope.”
Real-time imaging
The DSA will be capable of making images in real time. The numerous radio dishes will feed into a supercomputer that creates images instantly. The images will be immediately accessible to the worldwide astronomical community.
“Without the radio camera, we would have to store 100 exabytes of data to complete our survey,” Hallinan said. “This would require 5 million hard drives in a multi-billion-dollar facility the size of multiple football fields. The radio camera solves this problem.”
The DSA’s radio camera will convert the raw data to images in real time with the help of an off-site supercomputer built from Graphics Processing Units built by Nvidia. The radio camera images will be given freely to the public with no proprietary period.
“We want the whole world to also have access to the data just as quickly as we do,” said Katie Jameson, the DSA lead project manager.
The DSA will have the ability to detect more than 100,000 intensely powerful flashes of radio light from fast radio bursts and to localize them to their home galaxies. The DSA will also reveal more than 20,000 new pulsars.
“The science that can be done is endless,” Hallinan said. “There will be enough discoveries to occupy every radio astronomer on the planet.”
The DSA is led by Caltech and funded by Schmidt Sciences. It is part of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System. Two pathfinder projects that led to the DSA, the DSA-110 and the OVRO Long Wavelength Array, were funded by the National Science Foundation.
Copyright 2026 KVVU. All rights reserved.
Nevada
Conservation groups oppose potential sale of federal lands highlighted in land mapping tool
LAS VEGAS (FOX5) — Conservation groups are pushing back against a new state mapping tool that identifies federal lands potentially available for development in Nevada.
The governor’s office, in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management Nevada, unveiled the interactive map this week to make it easier to find federal land that may be available for development throughout the state and in the Las Vegas Valley.
“It is shocking to look at the map and see how many lands could potentially be sold off,” said Olivia Tanager, executive director of the Sierra Club Toiyabe Chapter.
Tanager said she was surprised at how many federal lands were identified for disposal when she first looked at the map.
“Places like Red Rock and Sloan Canyon in Southern Nevada are what draw people to live in Southern Nevada. We cannot continue to develop right up onto the boundaries or perhaps even in these precious places,” Tanager said.
The conservation group says the mapping tool is the latest effort to treat Nevada’s public lands as a real estate inventory rather than a shared public resource.
“We know that a lot of these areas are environmentally sensitive. We know that there are endangered species on these lands,” Tanager said.
MORE ON FOX5: Nevada unveils interactive tool mapping federal lands available for possible development, other uses
Housing concerns
Lawmakers have proposed using federal lands to create more affordable housing. Several areas at the edges of the Vegas Valley have been identified for potential development on the mapping tool. Tanager said she does not see that as a viable solution.
“The areas on the outskirts or far outside of existing urban areas are wholly inappropriate for affordable housing. Housing that is located that far away from services will never be truly affordable,” Tanager said. “As folks have to live further and further away from resources like schools and grocery stores, transportation costs go up substantially.”
The conservation group says the valley should fill in open lots and build upward within the existing urban core instead of building outward.
“We know that sprawl and developing on the outskirts of the valley worsens air quality as well from increased transportation,” Tanager said. “We know that sprawl is incredibly water-intensive. The further out you build, the harder it is to recapture that water.”
The Sierra Club Toiyabe Chapter says treating federal lands as disposable assets could set a dangerous precedent that accelerates privatization efforts and undermines the principle that public lands should remain in public hands for future generations.
Approximately 85% of Nevada’s total land area is owned by the federal government.
The state says the tool is designed to bolster information sharing about federal lands. The mapping tool is available here.
Copyright 2026 KVVU. All rights reserved.
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