The Elements of Innovation Discovered
The Elements of Innovation Discovered
Critical Minerals Alliances - August 7, 2025
President Trump's activation of DPA national emergency authorities follows up on a promise to increase domestic critical minerals made during a March address to Congress.
The Trump administration views the U.S.'s reliance on China for critical minerals as a threat to national and economic security.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen encourages a united initiative to diversify critical mineral supply chains during her June 14 address at the G7 2025 Summit in Canada.
China's restrictions on tech metals such as bismuth, gallium, and germanium threaten to slow the development of AI data centers in the U.S.
A strategic stockpiling program could insulate domestic mining and refining companies from market manipulation and attract private sector funding for the burgeoning critical minerals sector in the U.S.
Gracelin Baskaran
Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes
From a flurry of executive orders focused on bolstering domestic critical minerals production to trade policies that are rerouting supply chains away from China, securing reliable supplies of minerals vital to America's economy has been high on President Trump's list of priorities since his return to the Oval Office.
During a March 4 address to Congress, Trump vowed to "take historic action to dramatically expand production of critical minerals and rare earths here in the USA," a declaration that foreshadowed the "Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production" executive order he signed later that month.
"Our national and economic security are now acutely threatened by our reliance upon hostile foreign powers' mineral production," the order states.
This reliance is not just for a handful of obscure minerals that can easily be replaced, recycled, or ignored. Instead, it is a growing list of 50 minerals and metals fundamental to America's advanced manufacturing, clean energy transition, and military readiness.
Trump's directive addresses two core challenges: streamlining the multi-decade permitting process and providing the financial backing needed to establish resilient domestic supply chains shielded from foreign market manipulation.
Even Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), an outspoken critic of Trump and many of his policies, praised the administration's minerals initiative.
"Our lack of mineral security is our nation's Achilles' heel – a vulnerability that leaves us at the mercy of politically unstable and often adversarial nations for the basic building blocks of modern society," she said. "China knows this. Russia knows this. But, importantly, so do President Trump and his team. I appreciate their recognition of this major vulnerability and their immediate steps to tackle it."
The Trump administration views the U.S.'s reliance on China for critical minerals as a threat to national and economic security.
China, which has strategically and methodically expanded its critical minerals production capacity over the past five decades, is now the world's largest and in some cases only supplier of these elements of innovation.
Unable to compete with lower labor costs, looser environmental regulations, and government-subsidized production in China, most critical mineral mines and refineries in the U.S. shut down over the same span.
As a result of exporting the U.S. mining industry overseas under the guise of globalization, American manufacturers now must rely on foreign nations, primarily China, for more than half their supply of 40 minerals deemed critical to the U.S., including 100% import-reliant for 12 of them, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
While this dependence is an issue that has been building for decades, the growing need for previously obscure metals like antimony, gallium, and rare earth elements for high-tech, clean energy, and military applications has elevated critical minerals to a top economic and national security priority for not only the U.S., but for all Western nations.
During an address at the G7 Summit 2025, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned that China's "quasi-monopoly" on rare earths and other critical minerals poses a dual threat to Western nations – the power to cut off supplies of essential minerals, as well as dump artificially low-priced minerals into the markets to undermine efforts to establish competitive supply chains.
"We are seeing a new 'China shock,'" she said. "As China's economy slows down, Beijing floods global markets with subsidized overcapacity that its own market cannot absorb."
The European Commission president's speech laid the foundation for uniting the Group of Seven nations behind the G7 Critical Minerals Action Plan aimed at breaking China's "pattern of dominance, dependency, and blackmail."
"This is why we are interested in creating a metals club," she said.
The G7 Critical Minerals Action Plan focuses on three areas:
• Roadmap to standards-based markets – Being developed by G7 ministers, this roadmap will reflect the total costs of responsible extraction, processing, and trade in order to establish a minimum threshold for standards-based critical markets.
• Mobilizing capital and investing in partnerships – The G7 is developing a united investment plan focused on helping companies in the West overcome barriers such as permitting delays, market manipulation, and price volatility that come with responsible mining. The G7 also reaffirmed its commitment to deepening cooperation with mineral-rich emerging markets and developing country partners.
• Promoting innovation – The group is also committed to intensifying collaboration to fill innovation gaps in critical minerals research and development, with a focus on processing, licensing, recycling, and substitution. The group plans to work with partner organizations to showcase new technologies and production processes.
Von der Leyen emphasized the need for a collective response to breaking China's critical minerals dominance and the threat that this quasi-monopoly poses to Western economies and security.
"A common G7 response increases our leverage – pressuring China to take more responsibility for the impact of its state-led growth model," she said.
G7 leaders are expected to present a more detailed action plan at the Conference on Critical Materials and Minerals, to be held in Chicago this September.
As G7 leaders finalize the details of a coordinated response, the Trump administration continues to lay the groundwork to break China's critical mineral dominance – either independently or part of a larger coalition.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen encourages a united initiative to diversify critical mineral supply chains during her June 14 address at the G7 2025 Summit in Canada.
For the U.S., an extremely long runway from mineral discovery to producing mine is an enormous obstacle to overcome when it comes to competing with China and meeting the imminent need for reliable domestic critical mineral supply chains.
A 2024 study by S&P Global found that it takes 29 years to develop a mine in the U.S. – second only to Zambia (34 years) for the longest time from mineral discovery to mine production.
This multi-decade timeline does not allow mining projects in the U.S. to be brought online fast enough to meet the rapidly shifting demands of dynamic critical mineral markets.
"For too long, duplicative processes and regulatory paralysis have delayed the development of the minerals America needs to power everything from national defense systems to smartphones," said Adam Seuss, acting Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management at the U.S. Department of Interior.
During a February hearing before the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee, ClearPath CEO Jeremy Harrell deemed the years companies wait to get approved to develop a mine in the U.S. as "permitting purgatory."
"Overall, a typical mining project loses more than one-third of its value, as a result of bureaucratic delays in receiving the numerous permits needed to begin production," he testified.
As a nonprofit focused on advancing policies that support clean energy and manufacturing, ClearPath is not your typical mining advocate. The Washington-based organization's interest in freeing domestic mining from permitting purgatory underscores the importance of sustainably produced critical minerals to its core mission of accelerating American innovation to reduce global energy emissions.
Trump's executive order directs federal agencies to address the permitting dilemma by immediately evaluating and expediting the permitting of all mineral projects currently in the federal process.
The order also calls on federal agencies to leverage FAST-41 – a program established under the Obama administration to improve the timeliness and transparency of federal permitting for large projects – to expedite the next generation of critical mineral projects.
By mid-year, seven critical mineral projects in Alaska, Arizona, California, and New Mexico had been approved for streamlined permitting under FAST-41. Another 25, most of which had already been permitted or were nearing permit completion under the standard federal process, were added to the dashboard to provide enhanced transparency.
"By cutting red tape and increasing accountability, we're making it clear that under President Trump, the United States is serious about being a global leader in critical minerals," said Seuss.
Federal financial support is a key piece of the domestic critical mineral supply chain puzzle. While this investment of taxpayer dollars must be large enough to help establish a critical minerals supply chain, complete with mines, refineries, and processing plants, it also must be strategically implemented to help ensure these links can survive the strains of markets dominated by China.
Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes
Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes, former U.S. Deputy Director for Batteries and Critical Materials and founder of Smoktree Resources, says Trump's minerals executive order sends a strong message that "the U.S. is serious about reshoring its critical minerals supply chain" but that Congress needs to ensure the president's vision is fully funded.
"If executed correctly, it could unlock billions in capital for projects producing copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, rare earth elements, uranium, potash, and other strategic minerals," she penned in a March 21 blog on LinkedIn.
One of the key mechanisms Trump plans to use to direct federal funding to domestic critical mineral projects is the Defense Production Act (DPA), a Korean War-era law that grants the president powers to expand supplies of materials critical to national security.
Trump's minerals executive order directs Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to leverage DPA authorities to advance domestic mineral production.
While DPA provides the commander-in-chief and his cabinet broad authority, there are some limitations to its non-emergency use – including congressional authorization requirements for critical material purchases exceeding $50 million.
Even with broad bipartisan support for the reestablishment of domestic critical mineral supply chains, the hearings and political wrangling that come with congressional approvals would slow authorizations of any significant DPA critical mineral projects brought forward by the White House.
However, DPA Title III has a built-in mechanism for waiving the need for congressional approval in times of national emergency. A memorandum published by the commander-in-chief in June activated the waivers to these DPA constraints, citing a national energy emergency declared during his first day back in the Oval Office.
China's increasing export restrictions and bans on minerals critical to America's economy, security, and energy further elevate the emergency status.
Gracelin Baskaran
"China has increased its weaponization of various minerals over the last two years, including restrictions on gallium, germanium, graphite, antimony, tungsten, and rare earths," said Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
In total, Beijing has restricted or banned the exports of 16 minerals critical to aerospace, automotive, energy, defense, and high-tech manufacturing.
The impacts of China's rare earth export restrictions quickly reverberated through American manufacturing sectors.
In May, Ford Motor Company temporarily halted Ford Explorer production at its Chicago plant due to a shortage of rare earth magnets.
This was quickly followed by suppliers for the "Magnificent Seven" tech companies – Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla – sounding the alarm over a shortage of bismuth and other tech metals out of China, threatening to stall AI data center construction.
"The richest companies on the planet are stuck, because inspectors here in China are opening boxes and jars to make sure there is no bismuth heading their way," Kevin Walmsley, host of Inside China, reported in June.
China's restrictions on tech metals such as bismuth, gallium, and germanium threaten to slow the development of AI data centers in the U.S.
Much of the financial muscle needed to establish durable supply chains that ensure America's high-tech, automotive, defense, and other industrial sectors have the critical minerals they need in both the near-term and over the long haul is being embedded in the 2025 Budget Reconciliation Bill.
Officially named "One Big Beautiful Bill," the reconciliation bill allocates $150 billion for defense – a significant portion of which directly and indirectly impacts critical mineral supply chains. This includes $2.5 billion earmarked for domestic production and stockpiling of critical minerals and $500 million in loans and technical assistance for reliable critical mineral supply chains. A much larger pool of $20 billion is allocated to bolster munitions manufacturing and the defense industrial base, which will benefit critical minerals supply chains.
In addition to critical mineral supply chain money flowing through the Pentagon, Trump's minerals order further empowers agencies such as the Department of Energy, the U.S. International Development Finance Corp., and the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) to back domestic projects with grants, loans, equity investments, and offtake agreements.
Zumwalt-Forbes says this scale of heavy, front-end financial lift by the federal government is necessary, but advises a measured strategy designed to encourage private sector investors to enter the sector.
"Early-stage projects, new technologies, and first-of-a-kind facilities often cannot attract private financing without meaningful public support," she wrote in a May article for the Atlantic Council.
A strategic stockpiling program could insulate domestic mining and refining companies from market manipulation and attract private sector funding for the burgeoning critical minerals sector in the U.S.
As projects mature, Zumwalt-Forbes advises blended financial tools that stretch public funding and provide entry points for private sector investments that ensure the long-term financial durability of the critical mineral supply chains fostered by taxpayer dollars.
"Right now, there is not yet enough private capital chasing critical minerals to worry about crowding out investments with public spending. The bigger risk is failing to attract it at all," the former Deputy Director for Batteries and Critical Materials wrote. "Structuring public funding in a way that can de-risk projects enough to make them bankable can crowd in private investment without making government funding the only path forward."
Coupling federal funding with a strategic stockpiling program could further help insulate domestic producers from market manipulation by providing a price floor on critical minerals. By protecting the bottom lines of mining and refining companies, this mechanism would make America's burgeoning critical minerals sector attractive to the private sector investments vital to its long-term success.
"The United States has a rare window to reset its critical minerals strategy. The $150 billion reconciliation bill could be the start of something transformative – but only if it is structured to create a real market pull, not just government push," said Zumwalt-Forbes. "Done right, this bill could lay the foundation for resilient, investable critical mineral supply chains that support national security long after the headlines fade."
With more than 17 years of covering mining, Shane is renowned for his insights and in-depth analysis of mining, mineral exploration, and technology metals.
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