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The Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia University SIPA today announced three new distinguished visiting fellows, Rania Al-Mashat, Jonathan Black, and Dan Brouillette, who will bring...
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Reports by Tom Moerenhout, Cina Vazir & Irina Patrahau • July 09, 2025
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The United States is at a pivotal moment to modernize its approach to critical mineral stockpiling. Minerals are increasingly central to American strategic interests, yet the US remains heavily reliant on foreign suppliers, particularly China, for processed materials. This dependency exposes the US to major vulnerabilities in national, economic, and climate security. The National Defense Stockpile (NDS) can be a key policy lever to reduce these vulnerabilities. At present, however, the NDS is underfunded, covering only a fraction of projected needs in a national emergency. It also may not be realizing its potential to address underlying market failures that threaten US economic interests in addition to its historical defense role.
This report, part of the Critical Materials Initiative at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University SIPA, finds that an economic stockpile with market-shaping quantities of material may cost more than six times the amount of a defense-oriented stockpile. It is therefore important to integrate stockpiling choices into the wider array of policy options, analyzing whether a stockpile is the most efficient tool to address the specific market failure at hand for each material and transaction.
The report outlines five foundational choices if a stockpiling strategy is adopted, as bipartisan support suggests is possible, and offers related recommendations for US policymakers designing such a system:
The US would need to ensure that the NDS is properly funded to meet its current mandate before considering expanding its scope to industrial resilience and economic security, which would require additional sustained investment over decades rather than a one-off appropriation. But the country does face an important window to align mineral stockpiles with the strategic landscape of the 21st century. A well-designed system can reduce supply chain vulnerabilities, support domestic and allied industries, and enhance America’s geopolitical leverage.
This paper proposes a de-risking framework of policy interventions to provide the risk allocation, revenue certainty and delivery confidence required by mainstream private finance.
This paper examines the trade dimensions of the policy instruments employed by the United States to secure critical minerals supply chains. Drawing on policy statements, executive orders, tariff schedules, and six bilateral critical minerals agreements announced in 2025, it assesses how US trade policy has been repurposed to advance supply-chain security objectives. The paper finds that recent US initiatives reflect bipartisan trends in reconfiguring trade policy that predate the Trump administration, even as they introduce new and consequential trade coordination mechanisms that operate outside the World Trade Organization and beyond conventional free trade agreements. Specifically, US critical minerals security strategy now relies on a differentiated set of sector-specific arrangements that combine familiar elements of US international economic engagement with more novel features that increasingly utilize trade policy instruments. What distinguishes these six minerals deals is their systematic coupling with parallel reciprocal trade negotiations, their incorporation of an explicitly ‘America First’ approach to reciprocity, the absence of a clear ideological hierarchy among partner countries, an emphasis on domestic processing and industrialization, and the growing use of exclusion mechanisms targeting third-party actors. The recurrence of these novel elements across diverse minerals deals suggests deliberate design rather than ad hoc experimentation that may have durable restructuring effects across global mineral supply chains. The paper concludes by outlining implications for US policy makers, for partner countries—particularly mineral-producing low- and middle-income economies—and for the architecture of the global trading system.
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Reports by Tom Moerenhout, Cina Vazir & Irina Patrahau • July 09, 2025