Reducing reliance on imports from adversary nations for critical minerals powering the defense sector's supply chain will require a more comprehensive approach than just ramping up domestic mining activity, lawmakers and experts said during a House hearing last week.
Increased domestic refining, recycling and manufacturing should join domestic mining activity as vital components to securing U.S. mineral -- and therefore national -- security, while partnerships with international allies would also create a more resilient supply chain, witnesses and lawmakers said during a House Natural Resources energy and mineral resources subcommittee hearing Thursday.
A ‘circular economy’ approach
“Looking beyond mining,” Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ), ranking member on the subcommittee said in her opening statement, “the federal government should work to support a circular economy, recycling the precious resources we already have so they don’t end up in landfills.”
Such an approach would include increased extraction of critical minerals from mine waste streams and end-of-life product, according to witness Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San Jose State University.
With insufficient recovery and recycling efforts for electronics and electrical equipment, the U.S. is missing out on key supply chain components right under its nose, Mulvaney said.
“These are critical mineral resources in our hands that we let slip through our fingers,” he told lawmakers.
It’s similar to what Theresa Leland, deputy administrator for the Defense Logistic Agency’s strategic minerals office, said her team discovered.
“We’ve been able to identify a few key materials that are fairly accessible to remove from end-of-life products,” Leland said during a January event hosted by the Naval War College.
One such material Leland’s team has been able to recycle is germanium -- a rare mineral possessing a wide array of military applications. Those applications include but are not limited to semiconductor devices and infrared sensors for ships, aircraft, missiles, tanks and anti-tank units, according to the abstract of a 1991 Institute for Defense Analyses report.
Germanium is also one of many critical minerals the Chinese Commerce Ministry banned the export of to the United States in a December announcement.
That effort and discovery on the part of Leland’s team signals an opportunity -- however small -- for an improved domestic germanium supply, considering Mulvaney told the House panel that 0% of the United States’s germanium is recycled.
Additionally, more than 50% of the U.S. germanium supply comes from Chinese imports, according to a 2024 report from the United States Geological Survey.
The circular economy approach would also enable a reduced demand on critical minerals through “resource efficiency and material substitution,” Mulvaney told lawmakers.
The U.S. entrepreneurial spirit presents an opportunity to enable those components of the strategy, Jeremy Harrell, chief executive officer of conservative clean energy group ClearPath, told the panel.
“We need to use the world class innovators here in the United States to ultimately make products that aren’t going to need some of these things, as well,” he said.
From 2011 to 2013, Harrell served as legislative director for Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who introduced the ClearPath CEO as a hearing witness.
“We need to innovate on batteries and energy storage that use Earth-abundant resources, because in the end, there’s a wide variety of defense applications that are going to need these critical minerals,” Harrell said.
Processing, refining, manufacturing
While China controls approximately 60% of global production of critical minerals, it also controls “90% of processing and 75% of manufacturing” for those minerals, Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN), the subcommittee’s chair, said in his opening statement.
Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) expanded on the chair’s remarks later in the hearing.
“Let’s say we had every mineral that we wanted. Mining in America doesn’t mean that these minerals stay here,” Huffman said.
The California Democrat referenced Resolution Copper, a proposed mine in Arizona, as an example. Two “multinational, multibillion dollar conglomerates,” Rio Tinto and BHP, own the proposed mining project. Huffman alleged Rio Tinto’s largest shareholder is a Chinese state-owned company.
“Resolution Copper has not committed to keeping the copper in the U.S. Most of what BHP and Rio Tinto mines ends up in China for processing,” he said.
Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) also pointed to the gap between domestic mining and international processing and remarked that the U.S. could be its “own worst enemy” in a lot of ways.
“The majority of our critical minerals are processed by China,” Collins said. “Why? Because we’re down to three smelters here in the United States and we had to send over 80% of what we do process in the United States to China so that they can process it and send it back here from what we are mining.”
Partnership with allies
Despite the meeting’s advertised focus on domestic mining, viewing the approach as the sole solution to ensuring U.S. mineral security would be a folly, Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) told hearing attendees.
“The fact remains that the vast majority of reserves of critical minerals lie outside the United States, and no amount of domestic mining can change that,” Magaziner said.
Magaziner’s comments echoed points made in the written testimony from witness Morgan Bazilian, professor and director of the Payne Institute for Public Policy at Colorado School of Mines.
“We certainly need to develop our own mines and refineries -- but working with allies will be indispensable to success in creating robust, secure and resilient supply chains,” Bazilian wrote.
The critical minerals that have become vital to the U.S. supply chain and domestic manufacturing efforts appear in most abundance outside the U.S. -- in Central Asia and Africa, Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) told colleagues and witnesses.
“And so, to that point, which I think Mr. Magaziner was touching on,” Stansbury said, “we will have to continue to engage in international relationships. Europe is also very much struggling with these issues, especially since China has been stockpiling minerals that are not only on the Asian continent but also using their diplomatic pressures to buy up mines throughout the world and to create partnerships.”
Urgency of critical minerals
The United States relies largely on Chinese imports for its supply of critical minerals, but that is not where the concern ends.
The very definition of critical minerals, per Title 30 of the U.S. Code, Section 1606, requires that the mineral commodity must be considered essential to the national or economic security of the United States, its supply chain must be “vulnerable to disruption” and it must be essential to the manufacturing of a product -- “the absence of which would have significant consequences” for U.S. national or economic security.
Critical minerals have been increasingly subject to Chinese export bans and restrictions, the latest of which came early last week.
The Chinese Commerce Ministry announced last Tuesday that it would restrict the exports of five metals used in the defense and technology sectors -- tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum and indium -- and certain metallic compounds including those minerals.
The export restrictions came after a 10% tariff hike mandated by an executive order from President Trump took effect.