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The White House’s new critical minerals investments advance the goal of building a durable, commercially viable domestic supply chain by supporting workforce development, a wider range of minerals, emerging technologies, and a shift toward more transparent benchmark pricing.
However, the policy remains predominantly focused on individual project awards, with limited transparency around project selection and due diligence. This approach does not address the deeper reasons private capital has avoided the sector and leaves the investments vulnerable to charges of favoritism under a future administration.
The policy is also mostly supply-focused, and reliable demand signals have yet to be restored following the elimination of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
The White House has just announced over $2 billion in new critical minerals, magnets, and battery investments. The critical minerals supported through these investments include bauxite, boron, graphite, niobium, rare earths, scandium, and tantalum. In this Q&A, CGEP scholars Tom Moerenhout and Kevin Brunelli discuss the strengths and shortcomings of the new policy. They suggest that the gap between the two reveals the challenges that the United States still faces in building a durable, commercially viable domestic supply chain.
What are some of the policy’s strongest elements?
First, a new focus on workforce development. For years, the United States has faced a structural mismatch between the number of mining engineers, geologists, and metallurgists it produces and the number an ambitious US critical minerals strategy requires. Exacerbating matters, more than 50 percent of the current mining workforce in the United States is expected to retire by 2029, and the number of graduates from mining-focused engineering programs is at a decade low. Committing $180 million to expand the training pipeline, with an explicit graduate target, addresses a bottleneck that additional project capital cannot.
Second, the breadth of minerals supported. Bauxite, scandium, boron, tantalum, and niobium do not dominate the public conversation the way lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earths do. Yet each is part of a defense or industrial supply chain exposed to the same concentration risk. Extending public attention beyond the usual critical mineral suspects signals Washington’s commitment to addressing gaps across the full supply chain that a narrower strategy would leave exposed.
Third, extending bipartisan support for several emerging technology developers—namely, Sila Nanotechnologies and Niron Magnetics—seeking to reduce exposure to Chinese market concentration or export restrictions. Sila Nanotechnologies is developing silicon-anode lithium-ion batteries as an alternative to the graphite-anode batteries currently in use. China controls approximately 90 percent of global graphite production and has used it to impose import restrictions. Silicon anodes reduce the amount of graphite required per anode while offering higher energy density than current technologies. Sila has now received funding under three administrations of both parties: early R&D support under President Obama, manufacturing-scale support from the Department of Energy under President Biden, and a $1.4 billion Department of Defense loan under President Trump for anode production and a battery cell facility.
Niron Magnetics is developing rare-earth-free permanent magnets based on technology originally spun out of a University of Minnesota research program backed by the Department of Energy under the Obama administration. It then received ARPA-E and Department of Defense support under the Biden administration, and now $150 million from the Trump administration. Taken together, these examples show that bipartisan industrial policy is still possible and that public support for minerals, battery, and magnet supply chains need not reset each election cycle.
What are some of the shortcomings?
First, structurally, the policy remains largely focused on individual project awards rather than a sector-wide approach to capital allocation. While this can help specific projects reach completion, the recurring risk is that it treats the symptom rather than the binding constraint: public money is flowing into specific deals without first establishing what is preventing private capital from entering the sector on its own. This style of intervention risks conditioning private capital on government support rather than crowding it in. When government becomes the default backstop, investors have less incentive to underwrite the riskiest, most capital-intensive stages themselves and may instead wait for a federal check.
That said, the Administration did help lay the groundwork for a shift toward a market-wide approach. On the same day as the funding announcements, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer released a statement welcoming S&P Global’s release of Critical Minerals pricing benchmarks. S&P Global, in collaboration with Rovjok and Project Blue, published market reports on tungsten, antimony, gallium, germanium, and neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr) oxides that establish benchmark prices for each commodity, providing a reference for projects assessing the price levels needed to sustain operations. These benchmarks could represent a next step in the Trump administration’s negotiations with key partners on an Agreement on Trade in Critical Minerals, where they could be used to support projects across the market through potential tariff-based price support, rather than providing capital to individual projects. However, it is too early to tell whether the agreement will move forward, as substantial questions remain about which potential price support instruments will be used for projects and which allies are willing to join the agreement.
Second, the selection criteria for these awards remain nontransparent, creating political risk regardless of a project’s fundamentals. If resilience is the goal, some degree of redundancy in supporting minerals projects is defensible. Not every award will pay off, and accepting some failures may be more realistic in a still-developing technical-diligence ecosystem than expecting every investment to succeed. But redundancy and tolerance for some failure do not, by themselves, constitute an investment strategy, and it remains difficult to identify one in the administration’s selection of projects to support. Without transparency around why a given project was selected and how due diligence was conducted, these investments could be recast by a future administration as favoritism, inviting the kind of investigation that followed the failure of federally backed Solyndra, which became shorthand for picking winners without sufficient due diligence. Long-term supply chain security requires a critical minerals policy that can survive across multiple administrations. That durability requires bipartisan buy-in, which in turn requires a published rationale, not an announcement. Without that durability, the policy is less a policy than a series of bets.
Third, and least discussed, the policy does not address demand beyond some pull from Sila’s battery cell facility, which is framed around defense applications. However, the largest source of future demand for many critical minerals is next-generation energy technologies, not defense procurement. Manufacturing investment in these technologies has declined under the Trump administration following its rescission of key supporting policies, including the outright removal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s Clean Vehicle Tax Credits. Rather than reforming the credits based on feedback from the industries they support, the administration removed one of the few policy levers that could generate a predictable, market-scale demand signal for many of these minerals. The administration is following China’s critical minerals playbook by using government policy to establish and support key minerals industries. But China has also supported the downstream industries that consume these minerals, helping sustain its dominance in critical minerals. Continuing to ignore the demand side of the supply chain risks reproducing an inefficient US industrial policy.
Critical minerals were once again near the top of the agenda for G7 leaders as they met in Évian, France, this week, a year after the G7 launched the Critical Minerals Action Plan.
In March 2026, the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) announced it was investigating "structural excess capacity and production in manufacturing sectors" in 16 economies.
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.
