Trump’s Tariffs Just Killed the Last Hope of a U.S. Mining Boom

It took Donald Trump just over two months to potentially tank his own American mineral supply chain renaissance.

At the time Trump entered office, it looked like the stars could align for an American mining boom. Mining jobs had finally recovered to pre-COVID levels, thanks in part to demand for the metals required to engineer the transition away from fossil fuels (and, paradoxically, continued demand for coal). A lot of the gains in mining stocks were thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which offered a huge tax break to mining and metal processing companies and mandated that the consumer EV credit apply only to cars with a certain percentage of domestically-sourced material.

Trump 2.0 was poised to capitalize on that progress and unleash permits for U.S. mines under pared-back environmental regulations. In March, he issued an executive order to boost production of minerals in the U.S. — a maneuver that, combined with trade actions targeting China specifically, could have been the final step to bring about a mining and mineral processing resurgence in the U.S. and wrest some global market control away from China and other countries under its sphere of influence. In 2024, more than half of the mineral commodities consumed by the U.S. were imported from foreign sources, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Trump’s new global tariffs, however, sent the broader stock market into freefall, mining stocks very much included. He exempted many metals from the tariffs in their rawest form, but that was all the relief miners got. There were few exceptions for refined metal products or the inputs used for mining and mineral exploration. At the same time, metals prices — including commodities integral to battery production such as copper and lithium — are falling, with producers warning that now may be the high point for prices this year.

Part of this pricing issue is because the market appears to expect lower demand for new products that require those metals, such as EVs. Another part, as U.S. officials have said previously, is that China has been flooding the globe with minerals sold at a loss to win market influence. For this reason, D.C. policy wonks had been lobbying for legislation to address this pricing issue.

Now Trump has piled onto the industry's problems. This period could be especially painful for American mining companies, as it is exceedingly possible that a combination of lower commodity prices and higher costs for machinery and parts shatters whatever tailwinds were buoying many U.S. mining and metals projects. We may not see projects canceled yet, but a sense of extreme anxiety is sweeping the minds of many in the mining sector.

“If you look at the carrot of the pro-domestic mining policy versus the stick of the recessionary impacts from the demand side and the availability of capital impact from the supply side, the carrot is a raindrop and the stick is an ocean,” Emily Hersh, a veteran of the mining industry, told me.

Al Gore III, head of the D.C.-based electric vehicle and battery mineral supply chain association ZETA, said he agreed with Hersh’s assessment: “She’s right. We’ve been waging war against a raindrop for the last year, and now we’re in the ocean.”

Hersh has worked on mining projects across the world and taught me almost everything I know about the mining business, a sector I covered for years as a beat reporter for S&P Global and E&E News. Over the weekend, she explained to me the basic math behind why these tariffs will be bad for U.S. mining: It’ll be more expensive to buy the things abroad that companies need to build a mine, she said, from the drill rigs used in exploration to the parts required for extraction and ore storage. We don’t make a lot of those devices in the U.S., and building factories to do so will now be more expensive, too, making it more difficult to scale up what would be required to avoid higher project costs. Whatever benefits there are from trade pressure to choose U.S. mines for sourcing is outweighed by, well, everything else.

It’s important to remember how integral longstanding U.S. trade partners are to the global mining industry. Canada is one of the world’s largest producers of hardrock minerals, and at least 40% of the world’s mining companies are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Japan — now hit with a 24% tariff — was positioned to be an ally in U.S. efforts to wean off China-linked minerals and signed a minerals trade agreement under Biden. Even the Democratic Republic of Congo, which produces most of the world’s cobalt for batteries, was hit with a 10% tariff, leading Trump officials to try and appease the Congolese government by offering billions of dollars in investment.

Mining capacity is not the only constraint. We don’t process the ore we mine here, either. Take copper, a crucial industrial metal that many companies mine in America but then ship to Mexico or Canada to be refined for use in everything from cars to transmission lines and consumer electronics. This is why news of the tariffs has already led to record shipments of processed copper products into the U.S. as companies try to get ahead of the tariffs.

The final, crucial pain point: Recessions, like low metals prices, are usually horrible for mining projects and the companies developing them.

The 2008 recession was infamous for being the moment when the U.S. lost to China on battery metals; mining companies already hurting under sagging metals prices chose to sell assets and stakes in developers in Africa and elsewhere to Chinese companies, paving the way for the global resource power imbalance Trump likes to bemoan. The 2020 Covid-19 market shock also did little to help mining projects — metals prices went up because mines had to shut down, but demand and investment also decreased. That moment translated into a short-term boon for metals trading, with excess material already floating about in commerce. But little more than that.

“You have an administration here who is trying to torpedo international financial order with a misguided idea that some phoenix is going to magically rise from the ashes,” Hersh said. “That’s not how markets work, and that’s not what history has demonstrated happens in any scenario that parallels what the Trump administration is doing now.”

Ben Steinberg, a D.C. lobbyist who helps run an ad hoc advocacy group of mining and battery material companies, put it to me more succinctly: “These projects take a long time to develop. Capital can be somewhat patient, but we know it is generally impatient. The uncertainty is incredibly destabilizing,” said Steinberg, whose coalition of companies includes ones with mining projects that have offtake agreements with Tesla and other EV manufacturers. “The tariffs aren’t what I think about when I think about more mining in the U.S. I’m thinking of permitting.”

Gore, who also represents Tesla through his trade association, told me the tariffs will mean “everything is going to move a bit slower,” including the “momentum towards onshoring a lot of the supply chain.”

“I think that in general, capitalism works when you are using signals very judiciously — using carrots far more than you use sticks,” he told me.

The National Mining Association is also carefully signaling concern about the tariffs. NMA represents more than just the interests of battery metals — it also includes coal companies and gold miners that are rare beneficiaries of the market’s tailspin. But in a statement provided exclusively to Heatmap, NMA spokesperson Conor Bernstein offered a cautious note about interpreting these restrictionist trade actions as potentially good for mining.

“Targeted tariffs can be a part of an effective policy response,” Bernstein said. “At the same time, this is an incredibly complex time for any company to be operating, and we are working closely with our members to gather information on actual and potential impacts, are engaged with the administration to provide that information, and are committed to working with the administration to rebuild American supply chain security from the mine up.”

Ian Lange, an academic at the Colorado School of Mines, offered a blunt assessment of the tariffs: They’re an opportunity for a small group of domestic producers who have successfully argued to “reshape the supply chain away from their competitors.”

For years, individual mining companies have been seeking tariffs and trade protections on specific minerals they claim are unfairly subsidized and cheaply distributed by China and other nations. These efforts, which rose to prominence in Trump 1.0 Washington over uranium and fertilizers, have become more popular and bipartisan in D.C. as part of a tit-for-tat with China over minerals used in batteries, including graphite.

If there’s any silver lining in this moment, Lange said, it is the fact that this “bunch of people who’ve been complaining get their shot.”

“You wanted this!” Lange exclaimed. “So you better take advantage of it.”