By: Jeffrey D. Bean
Despite some drastic and highly damaging changes under the first six weeks of President Donald Trump’s second administration, there remain some unequivocal areas of bipartisan U.S. policy continuity. This includes the U.S. effort to maintain leadership in essential areas of critical and emerging technology development and manufacturing. But the U.S. government and companies face significant hurdles in sourcing irreplaceable inputs in advanced technology manufacturing for industries including semiconductors, clean energy, telecom, aerospace, and national defense. Among these crucial inputs to supply chains are critical minerals. According to the U.S. Energy Act of 2020, critical minerals are non-fuel minerals with a vulnerable supply chain that are essential due to serving a prerequisite function in the manufacturing of a product that is fundamental to the economic or national security of the United States.
At present, China dominates many aspects of critical mineral supply chains — mining, refining, and processing. The Chinese government has begun to leverage its critical mineral dominance by weaponizing the supply chain, and banning exports of gallium, germanium, and antimony to the United States, while imposing export restrictions on graphite, and more recently, tungsten, bismuth, indium, molybdenum, and tellurium. The United States must sustain its own domestic and international policy effort to ensure critical mineral supply, which will be vital for its defense, energy, and technological future.
The second Trump administration does recognize the importance of critical minerals, prominently mentioned in recent Executive Orders such as, “Declaring a National Energy Emergency,” and “Unleashing American Energy.” Although critical minerals and rare earths have featured in disjointed negotiations with Ukraine on continuing U.S. security assistance, a one-off deal with Ukraine will not be nearly enough to comprehensively address the need to open more mines; fund greater refining, processing, and recycling capability; and ensure off-takers and downstream supply connections. And the United States cannot go it alone. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the United States lacks enough domestic mineral reserves or the capacity to refine them.
Trump already has a ready-made path to supporting an international policy on critical minerals in the form of the Mineral Security Partnership (MSP). The White House already included a reference to the MSP and critical minerals cooperation in the U.S.-India Joint Statement during Trump’s meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in February. The MSP is a multilateral initiative coordinated by the U.S. State Department. Involving mineral buying countries and increasingly suppliers as well, the initiative was established by the Biden administration in 2023. The intent of the partnership is to facilitate concrete actions to coordinate investments in mining, processing, and offtaking among its partners. The MSP, according to CSIS’s Jane Nakano, now supports about 30 projects in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas on mining and mineral extraction, midstream processing, and recycling and recovery of cobalt, copper, gallium, germanium, graphite, lithium, manganese, nickel, and Rare Earth Elements.
The Trump administration, and specifically Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who understands the challenges), can sustain and shape the critical minerals efforts in five ways. It can leverage the aforementioned Executive Orders on energy and critical minerals to include assessments for potential international partnerships and to replicate additional Strategic Mineral Recovery Initiatives of the type agreed with India with other partners. Second, it can offer reasonable technology transfer and know-how to Mineral Security Partnership Forum countries as an incentive for collaboration to develop mining or refining projects. Third, it should consider adopting and implementing a mineral security framework to allow the United States Trade Representative to review petitions for Critical Mineral Agreements with the United States to facilitate additional projects. Fourth, it could expand the scope of the Supply Chains Resilience Initiative (SCRI) through the Export-Import Bank and the Development Finance Corporation to not only finance critical mineral projects, but include funds for last mile connectivity and supporting infrastructure for successful extraction or processing projects. Finally, it could continue to support the MinVest public-private partnership to facilitate investment and offtaking agreements for critical mineral projects. Implementing these and other critical mineral supply chain policy initiatives will help the United States and its allies ensure that their advanced technology manufacturing industries compete and prosper.
Jeffrey D. Bean is the Program Manager for Technology Policy and Editor at ORF America.