In another House oversight hearing considering the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, California’s Maxine Waters expressed concern over President Trump’s mere contact with mineral producing countries in Africa, asking simply, “What is he doing?” The President of EXIM responded by reminding Waters of the bank’s charter to engage in sub-Saharan Africa.
In both cases, distrust of the administration and Republican lawmakers seems to have blinded Democrats to a larger strategic goal: building a secure critical mineral supply chain. Democrats who want to strengthen U.S. economic competitiveness and cultivate domestic clean technology sectors cannot afford to engage in partisan posturing at the expense of real policymaking. Nor can they afford to waste time — America’s vulnerabilities loom too large to wait until Trump leaves the White House.
Doing so will require Democrats to embrace certain positions that are at odds with recent party orthodoxy. First, they must accept the basic math that both the U.S. and the world will need new mine production and support incentives and regulatory reform for new critical minerals projects, not just recycling, re-mining, and substitution. And second, they must admit that mining projects in the U.S. and in democratically-governed partner countries offer a far better foundation for achieving high environmental and social standards than the currently dominant production routes for many raw materials today.
Yes, we need new mines
A recent hearing question from Texas Representative Christian Menefee hints at the risks of overly narrow minerals policy: “Should byproduct recovery be the first priority before we open up a single new mine?" While advocacy organizations and academic researchers have lately argued that operating mines dig up enough minerals to meet U.S. needs yet are currently neglecting to recover them, such analyses only consider the theoretical potential of extracting every element present in mined rock, not technical feasibility. Feasible recovery will be the exception, not the rule. Efforts to produce lithium as a byproduct from a copper-gold deposit might confront concentrations of under 20 parts per million, relative to concentrations at U.S. lithium mines currently under development that range from around 850 to 2,000 parts per million. Compared to cobalt concentrations of 2,400 parts per million at the Jervois Idaho Cobalt mine, Alaska’s large Red Dog zinc mine might boast 39 to 149 parts per million. For many elements, recovery would require new, first-of-a-kind extraction equipment consuming added water, energy, and chemical reagents — akin to burning a barn to fry an egg.
Recycling, too, is a meaningful category of solutions but ultimately limited. For instance, improved batteries and solar panels with longer service lives delay the point at which significant flows of materials become available for recycling. An increasing number of batteries and solar modules may also be redirected towards second-life use markets — electric vehicle batteries repurposed as electric grid storage assets, for example — diverting even more materials from recycling facilities.
To put such constraints into numbers, growing grid storage battery cell manufacturing capacity in the U.S. may surpass 96 gigawatt-hours by the end of this year, requiring over 17,000 tons of lithium content — alone equivalent to half of all worldwide lithium consumption in 2015. China’s tightening of rare earth export restrictions last year forced one of Ford’s auto plants to pause operations, and the shift to electric vehicles will only drive U.S. rare earths demand higher. The U.S. alone produced around 1 million EVs last year, relative to total auto manufacturing of 12 million to 14 million vehicles per year.
Even modest domestic manufacturing goals of 10 gigawatts of wind turbines and 2 million electric vehicles per year would require at least 100 tons of dysprosium and praseodymium, heavy rare earth elements that the U.S. is only just beginning to produce from recycling efforts and its sole operating mine. Globally, the International Energy Agency estimates that successful recycling expansion could avert around 5% to 30% of new mining activity, depending on the commodity.
The math is unforgiving. We need more minerals, and we need them soon.
For years, progressives have critiqued current U.S. mining regulations as antiquated and inadequate, insisting that standards governing existing mines expose marginalized communities to unacceptable impacts. While understandably reflecting past harms inflicted by mining prior to the enactment of stronger laws and regulations in the 1970s and 1980s, such a position exposes lawmakers to an uncomfortable contradiction: If modern mining and refining are structurally problematic industries, then not only must U.S. lawmakers advocate for improved industry standards domestically, logic dictates that they also use trade policies and international frameworks to penalize the unjust economic advantages benefiting irresponsible producers globally. The sum total of such actions might well slow the country’s transition to clean energy as opposed to speeding it.
Activist narratives that U.S. mining regulations offer the mining industry a smash-and-grab free-for-all obviously conflict with the reality that domestic mining has long been viewed as borderline uninvestible, with the U.S. seeing a 70% decrease in the number of active metal mines over the last 40 years. Insisting that more public engagement, extracting higher royalties to fund community projects, and quartering off certain areas with mineral potential for conservation will speed U.S. mining projects by neutralizing community opposition must consider how such high-cost projects can survive in a global market. China produces 10 times more graphite, rare earths, and polysilicon than the next largest producing country — and not by excelling at public engagement and community benefits-sharing. Continuing to indulge such domestic-only remonstrations will solve none of the nation’s supply challenges.
Meanwhile, efforts by both the Trump and Biden administrations are already driving progress towards improved recycling and utilization of unconventional wastes and resources. Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funded numerous programs to produce new critical minerals without new mining, including Department of Energy grants to equip operating facilities with byproduct recovery systems, new mapping programs from the United States Geological Survey to locate historic mines with viable levels of critical minerals in abandoned wastes, and a Rare Earth Elements Demonstration Facility program at the Department of Energy to prioritize the use of waste as a feedstock. The Trump administration has continued to issue notices for IIJA-funded, waste resource, and recycling-focused opportunities into 2026. In short, maximization of byproduct potential, recycling, and remining is already established bipartisan policy.
Now is the time
Above all, Democrats must capitalize on the chance to start alleviating national critical mineral constraints now, in the middle of a Trump presidency, to position the U.S. industrial base to produce impressive economic and technological results in 2028 and beyond. Trump will depart the Oval Office in less than three years, whereas U.S. critical minerals strategy must play out over the next five to 10. Passing up promising opportunities today in the name of scoring short-term political points serves neither the nation’s best interests nor those of the Democratic Party.
Over the next two years, critical minerals policy offers rare bipartisan opportunities to supercharge innovation and build projects that will not only produce strategic materials but also solutions for cleaner industrial processes. In most cases, new U.S. production will already be less carbon-intensive than the global average. Meanwhile, federal policy support will foster U.S. process engineering know-how that might ultimately drive long-term breakthroughs in transformative cleaner solutions.
All of that said, policymakers must also balance environmental and innovation ambitions against realistic expectations and resist the temptation to chase only fully clean projects. For now, truly zero-carbon metals produced using green hydrogen or other novel techniques remain dramatically more expensive than metals produced with the most cost-efficient mix of energy inputs and feedstocks. Depending on the sector, domestic industries that have first achieved scale and rebuilt domestic expertise may position America better for catalyzing such shifts.
Cost competitive industries, after all, are also key for advancing Democratic priorities. More favorable costs for U.S.-produced critical materials and increasingly secure upstream secure supply chains will help make U.S.-manufactured technologies such as electric vehicles, solar modules, and electrolyzers more competitive. Responsible production capacity that is operating at scale will increase bargaining power for pressuring irresponsible producers overseas to reform, while creating new markets for American raw materials among principled partners and corporate offtakers.
Miners and metallurgists deserve an equal place of honor in the energy transition economy alongside rooftop solar installers and electricians, and such heavy industry workers can help rebuild a stronger U.S. labor movement.
But the risk of squandering such long-term opportunities is real. During the Biden administration, progressives reflexively fielded proposals that would add regulatory burdens and make mining more difficult — proposals which largely went nowhere. Meanwhile, the bipartisan Mining Regulatory Clarity Act — one of the few specific regulatory reforms proposed for the mining sector to date — still has not passed since its introduction in 2023. The current version is stalled over the inclusion of provisions that would redirect mining administrative fees to cleaning up abandoned mines. Remediating legacy sites is an important federal government obligation, but the quid pro quo calculus of extracting concessions for simple regulatory reforms both complicates their passage while also procrastinating standalone measures to address abandoned mines.
Certainly, the current political moment could not be more charged. Another recent House Natural Resources hearing on oversight ended abruptly after Oregon Representative Maxine Dexter moved to subpoena Donald Trump, Jr. over concerns that administration financial support favored mineral companies in which he was invested. This episode highlights the challenge for Democrats — holding the federal government accountable to the U.S. public while simultaneously working to address the country’s critical mineral priorities.
This is less complicated than it sounds. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle can agree on strong oversight provisions to ensure that programs prioritize the nation’s interests and achieve political longevity. Democrats should therefore lean in to their desired guardrails, be they mandatory public transparency, reviews of company history and project feasibility, or conflict-of-interest restrictions. Stronger congressional oversight and robust environmental and human rights safeguards are worthy Democratic goals, but advancing them requires that Congress do its job and legislate.
A rendering of a future Blykalla power plant in a quintessential Nordic landscape.Blykalla
The debut nuclear station in 2023. Abdul GONI / AFP via Getty Images
