The problem boiled down to the Chinese government buying out and shutting down any competitors anywhere in the world, plus Congress requiring the DoD to go with the lowest cost, which was always China. We knew what the problem was, we made the problem clear, no one did anything about it.
Maybe this administration blowing up the government is good, actually.
My house was so difficult to walk through with the years of stuff piled up. Much easier now that it's all been burned to the ground!
For anyone who's dealt with a hoarder house that's not the reducto ad absurdum you think it is, just the tragic reality.
To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable.
Those in the general public who thinks that government budgets should increase monotonically are a linear combination between total idiots and outright politically malicious.
Just wanting something that requires a significant overhaul of how you do things, is not enough.
I know this seems so abstract it sounds like a truism and not actionable. Considering that incentive structures come in many guises (laws, morals, money etc.) the first thing we need to figure out which incentive structure is dominant in a given situation. An employee of a bureaucracy, for example, might share the presented moral disapproval about inefficiency but is it the dominant incentive structure? Probably not.
For example, DOGE toppled existing incentive structures, emphasising cost reduction vs. effectivity and privacy. People were (maybe are, nobody is reporting anything on this anymore) up in arms because they had to abandon incentive structures they knew to navigate. DOGE was a colossal failure because emphasising efficiency over effectivity is always like polishing a turd and many people said as much "back then" but look at the incentive structure of those who didn't and don't. Many of them have not prospered in the previous structures, so they support the new ones, even if they are insane to you and me. They act rationally.
This followed a 2021 deal with General Motors to insure GM's magnet supply.[2] That resulted in building a modest magnet plant in an industrial park in Texas, using MP Minerals ore.
This deal expanded in 2025, with DoD taking a majority stake in MP Minerals.[3]
The history here is that the price goes up and down so much that the Mountain Pass mine has been shut down twice since the 1990s. There were two bankruptcies. The most recent glut and price crash was in 2015.[4]
The process has four steps: 1) mining, 2) beneficiation, where mixed rare earth ores are separated out, 3) chemical separation, where the individual rare earths are separated, and 4) magnet metal making. For years, 3) wasn't done in the US, and MP Minerals was shipping ore to China for processing.
[1] https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...
[2] https://investor.gm.com/news-releases/news-release-details/g...
[3] https://mpmaterials.com/news/mp-materials-announces-transfor...
Many heavy rare earth, i.e. the strategic stuff, is actually rare in terms of economic extractable sources we know of, mostly ionic clays found in China and parts of south east Asia I think also Brazil. It's the same reason PRC is the largest oil importer even though on paper PRC has the largest shale reserve in the world (more than the US), their deposits are just very deep in the desert, technically extractable but not remotely economically to the point where it doesn't even make strategically (not for lack of trying). This without even mentioning behind behind in extraction tech.
Yes, you _can_ try to regulate your way out of that. It'll result in a giant thicket of rulebooks, laws, procedures and processes. Exactly what a "slim" state would not want to see ...
(I am not sure there is a perfect way out; "extremely strong" gating criteria though tend to always favour the incumbents, and a prescription of "100% domestic all the way through" is a strong gating criterion if I've ever seen one)
That's what Europe has done when it comes to most of its industry, and that is a big reason why now we (I'm from Europe myself) have to buy stuff like weapons from the Americans.
it's the same shit with high fructose corn syrup! everyone hates that shit, why did it take the Great Orange Menace (not to be confused with this website, the other Great Orange Menace) to get companies to realize that?
I know that bringing up HFCS here is a big digression; there are probably better examples. It's just another "broken clock is right twice a day" issue from the current admin that is so obviously popular that I don't understand why it was never an issue before.
In fact you could very easily argue that the reliance on HFCS which is native grown and keeps a huge amount of tillable land in production is a national security asset. It keeps farmers (and thus the institutional knowledge that can easily be switched to other crops in dire emergency) in business vs. importing a product from overseas to replace it.
If the argument was removing sugar from most products - sure! But it's not like "banning" HFCS is going to change anything when you simply switch it out for beet or cane sugar instead. It's the sugar, not the slight difference in molecules, that cause the health problems. The only real health argument against HFCS is that it's so cheap it ends up in everything. But that likely has more to do with the war on fats from past eras than much else.
I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole on this topic, but in the context of national security HFCS vs. Cane Sugar is a clear win.
The only way to avoid fructose is to avoid natural sugars. HFCS is created by taking a low-fructose sugar and modifying it to have fructose levels more similar to natural sugars.
I’m beginning to believe the best path forward is a new constitution, which is absolutely crazy because I used to believe we had an extraordinary system designed with incredible foresight. It turns out it was full of holes and we mostly got by on the honor system. Sure, there have been lousy and corrupt politicians, but we never had a truly bad actor determined to sidestep every rule until now.
The problem is the citizens, which are chronically disengaged (a fact which has ample evidence behind it), not the legal framework. If you disagree, then feel free to point to a functioning democratic system at the same scale as the US that can survive 99% of its voters not caring enough to do anything more than spend 15 minutes voting once every two years, which is where we're at now.
The only way to keep a democratic government is to keep Huxley at bay.
Maybe previous administrations have been economically incentivized to not fix those problems. Perhaps those previous administrations didn't have our best interests in mind.
Well... In 2024 there were things like that.
That said, much like smuggled GPUs - it is difficult to transship an export controlled material at scale.
America was great when the pocket books of the government were open to public spending and funded primarily by high taxes on the rich. In the 1950s the top marginal tax rate was 90%.
What made america great was taxing the hell out of the rich and big business to the point where they'd rather invest in their employees and companies. That's what drove the innovation and quality of life improvements throughout the 50s and 60s. We abandoned that in the late 70s onwards because of an economic downturn that hit everyone. Rather than just powering through it we went with "Let's just tear down everything" and now we are dealing with what the government was like in the gilded age of the 1920s. Stories of corruption, corporate capture, and scandal are nearly identical to what we see today.
We need a new deal.
No, it wasn't. The american dream was the reality of huge swaths of the middle class. Who do you think all those pre-1950 single family homes were built for? And of those that didn't live in a single family dwelling, the other inhabitants of a multi-family was often related to them.
The subsidy just made it a little more accessible down-market.
>What made america great was taxing the hell out of the rich
Um, what? Look at tax receipts relative to GDP. We've never taxed harder than we do now. Even if you assume we took it all from the rich back then it was still less.
The only way this comment only holds if you look at fed income tax only and you look at the nominal rate, which is farcical.
Can anyone recommend a resource that comes to a definitive, non-partisan conclusion (even if the answer is: "it's complicated," or "neither")?
(Separately, it's interesting to ask LLMs questions like this: https://chatgpt.com/share/68cc9e37-8a2c-800e-aeef-dc88977f56...)
(Though this doesn’t capture top end federal income tax rate.)
U.S. Corporate Tax Revenue as a Percentage of GDP (1900–2020s)
Decade Corporate Tax Revenue as % of GDP
1900s ~0.1%
1910s ~0.5%
1920s ~0.8%
1930s ~1.0%
1940s ~4.0%
1950s ~4.3%
1960s ~3.5%
1970s ~3.0%
1980s ~2.5%
1990s ~2.5%
2000s ~1.3%
2010s ~1.0%
2020s (est.) ~1.0% (varies slightly)
U.S. Individual Income Tax Revenue as a Percentage of GDP (1900-2020s)
Decade Income Tax Revenue as % of GDP
1900s ~0.0%
1910s ~0.5%
1920s ~1.5%
1930s ~3.5%
1940s ~7.5%
1950s ~8.0%
1960s ~8.0%
1970s ~8.5%
1980s ~8.0%
1990s ~8.0%
2000s ~8.5%
2010s ~8.0%
2020s (est.) ~8.0% (varies slightly)Unclear how we recover as a country given the reach of the Fox News propaganda. Maybe a huge recession?
This, but an actual depression that will likely make the Great Depression look like a good time - largely due to folks being a lot more self-sustaining back then due to common skillsets and lived experiences.
The current admin has made it rocky, but the rest of the countries are still participating in it.
A September 2025 executive order authorized the usage of "Department of War" as a secondary name. Department of Defense remains the legal name.
Of course it's not. Imagine how difficult it will be to rebuild things to function half as well after all the corruption and disruption with less money
It's going to be a rough couple of decades.
Americans get sympathetic when they hear about the Air Force $1280 coffee mug. They don't forget that, even half a decade later, when they hear the word "waste." Apple's monitor stand has better build quality than what it's known for.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/23...
DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem.
They got shut down and the Trump-Musk thing flared up more or less the nanosecond they looked at the DOD. Sad, but they never had the political capital to win that fight. They probably could've done some good slashing around in there.
What "good slashing" did they actually do anywhere to assume they would have done good there?
My point is that voters know that if a mere coffee mug costs that much, who knows what else stupid is going on. It's a smoke signal saying there's waste of unprecedented amounts everywhere.
So as with most political challenges, it all comes down to trust, and a failure to garner it.
The lack of trust then creates the vaccuum into which silly notions of thinking a coffee cup is worth a grand, or an ashtray is tens of thousands of dollars, or the magic hammer that is the same as a normal hammer but costs 100x, or whatever.
I bet there isn't a single person in this country that can't pick a subject they care a lot about on which the government actively gaslit them in the last ~5yr.
That kind of tarnishes what the .gov has to say on every other subject.
I'm saying that lack of trust, and lack of the ability of people and government to meet in a way that develops trust, is the issue that underlies people holding up a "$1280 coffee mug" as an example of government waste.
The ideal is that representatives you do trust would be evaluating the government for you, and so you would be building trust by experiencing trust with one or more of your representatives. But the scale of the federal government has resulted in few people actually trusting their representatives, and the experience of having a trust test with a representative doesn't scale. This is the fundamental issue.
To be totally clear, I am implying that a change to the system needs to proceed towards improvements in accountability and visibility, so that people can experience more legitimate trust in their government.
On top of that, the premise was based on defying congressional appropriations. Congress decides how money is spent. When the Clinton administration undertook this, they went through Congress to enact legitimate and lasting reform. [1]
The federal government has a much lower employee to citizen ratio than it used to have, it's quite efficient.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/1237991516/planet-money-doge-...
1. fire people who don't automatically support Trump regardless of the law/constitution/good of the nation 2. Fire people who Trump or maga dislike for some reason (LGBTQ, minorities, people who have ever criticized Trump) 3. Destroy government in general (from people on the ideological right who are willing to set aside any principles to work for Trump)
Reducing waste or making government efficient was never one of the goals. Otherwise they wouldn't have gotten rid of people doing actual oversight work for the government. They also wouldn't have fired so many people on whims (that they had to take back in many cases)
Under some accounting systems if you have a financial obligation and that obligation is forgiven, then it's an expense (e.g. bad debt expense) for the forgiving party and income for the party that is forgiven.
A big tax cut like this is forgiving the dues everyone owes for living in a society. It's only really a pure loss of revenue if you believe that taxes aren't an inherent part of the social contract.
At least empirically I agree with Hobbes that life in the state of nature is nasty brutish and short and that there are no, for example, big tech companies in anarchies. So in both theory and practice taxes are conceptually subscription fees that arise with the social contract in exchange for protection, public services, and the protection of rights. In this sense they are debt and cancelling the debt is an expense.
Of course I recognize that in practice the government does not treat future tax revenue as receivables in terms of accounting. But there are sufficiently many games and white lies in the bill to make it appear budget neutral that I don't think anybody really believes the actual budget accounting is what's driving the bill. It's a political bill and politically I think it's reasonable to consider it an expense.
So increasing taxes can be said to reduce government spending? Do you think anyone really buys that argument?
It's always the same problem: They write "requirements" that end up being total nonsense, they have an unlimited budget, and they're terrified that they'll get "in trouble" for some slight oversight. This is a recipe for overspending, and is the bane of all such organisations everywhere.
The reason that DOGE had a snowball's chance in hell of fixing government overspend is that this can't possibly be achieved by merely cancelling a few hundred contracts out of millions!
The dynamic has to change, by realigning incentives and changing the rules, but DOGE did not have that power.
Not to mention that nobody knows how to do this at the scale of the US government! Nobody. I don't have the answers, Elon doesn't, neither does anyone else like Peter Thiel.
They keep talking about how the government is bad, but they don't have an alternative that wouldn't be subject to the exact same forces and produce an equally bad (or even identical) outcome.
Once that happens, if the system lasts more than a year, they have to start sourcing Dell 1234ABCs with the same specs. However, that's an item that's no longer sold. So then they switch to maintaining the ones they have, which means a support contractor is hired to staff locations to handle these repairs (because the local IT staff is already responsible for a lot of things, and maintaining obsolete hardware is not their priority). When what's needed is any computer with X GB of RAM, X GB (or TB these days) of storage, and so on. Set the minimum specs, go acquire it from whatever vendor, and move on. It'd cost a fraction of the amount of that multi-million support contract whose entire job is to maintain obsolete computers.
Adherence to internal procedure becomes ever more important as organisations grow larger, eventually becoming by far the most critical requirement for all work, internal or external. Cost, efficacy, customer happiness, etc... become distant secondary requirements, dwarfed by the mountains of procedure, policy, and paperwork.
That's actually a funny and real example. For a long time there was a heat map that showed where the concentration of MSIE 6 was. It was China because every copy of Windows was pirated and may have also had government keys hard coded in the pirated copies. They were locked at the patch level the pirated version was made from and it was impossible to patch it otherwise.
Either way the US has nearly unlimited amounts of rare earth material in raw form. Its just much more expensive and time consuming to process it in the US and US regulations make it even more expensive. China does not follow our environmental laws and we breath the output of that. That's why they are processed in China. Processing it in the US would reduce global pollution for a hefty price.
Some of it perhaps. A lot of it is more localised, going into their dust clouds and water supplies. We should face the fact that moving rare earth processing to the US would mean either expensive mitigation measures or a lot more Americans experiencing health conditions - and probably both.
Then China will switch a billion desktops to Linux and the US will still need rare earths.
Easier than smuggling a few tonnes of metal? Let me introduce you to my elderly parents...
https://thoriumenergyalliance.com/resource/jim-kennedy-rare-...
Its sounds plausible, but I'm not a geologist.
Though it doesn't address the issue of waste from the refining process which currently looks like this: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...
https://www.ctvnews.ca/northern-ontario/article/company-work...
https://www.jxscmineral.com/blogs/gold-tailings-impacts-and-...
I don't think it is good, but let's be reasonable in comparing environmental harm.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mildred+Lake,+AB+T9K+2Z1/@...
Check the previous dates. 2018 yes, 2022, no.
This isn't about China or the size of the lake, but the fact that there is a lake because the effluent is difficult to dispose of and currently has no use.
Edit: to further clarify, I am not against refining them in the USA. Just that we have to also address the consequences of doing so.
Either you eat the cost of the externality or you accept that countries that can will end up dominating the industry, and hold entire sectors like automotive or semiconductors hostage. This is what China did and what Vietnam [0] and India [1] are attempting to do as well.
It's like packaging for grid batteries - someone has to do the dirty work because manufacturing is inherently dirty.
The only rule that matters even in a "rules based order" is might makes right.
If we don't want to do it, then we need to cultivate partners who can - but the only countries who are not China and open to eating the externalities are Vietnam and India, which is why South Korea and Japan depend on them after China weaponized REE imports to both in 2016 (THAAD) and 2012 (Senkaku) respectively.
[0] - https://en.mae.gov.vn/Pages/chi-tiet-tin-Eng.aspx?ItemID=811...
Let China process the materials under normal circumstances, but keep 6 months of processed output on hand in case trade is disrupted (trade disagreement, pandemic, war, etc.).
I think there are two ways to effectively mitigate this risk: 1) have mining and manufacturing of your own that covers most of your needs, or 2) balanced trade where you get something critical from another country, but they also get something critical from you (and can't easily get it somewhere else).
(Of course when you have very solid allies, you can relax a bit more and rely on them, but you still have to be prepared for a situation where that ally has a shortage and prioritizes their own use.)
Waiting out 6 months of production would be easy. And even the threat of interruption would drastically mess with prices.
That's not enough of a leeway when dealing with a country who has active land disputes with 2 countries we have a defense treaty with (Japan, Phillipines) and 1 with whom we have an ambiguous defense commitment (Taiwan).
And even the Chinese government knows that countries like the the US will try to stockpile. Almost all processing, mining, and exporting in China for REEs is managed by SoEs and under close monitoring from state regulators.
This is why the Biden admin initiated the Minerals Security Partnership with Japan, India, and Australia.
The only way to mine rare earths is to just process massive quantities of earth. Typically this is done as part of another mining operation, like mining nickel. It's labor intensive and requires nasty chemicals. Places with cheap labor, weak environemental regulations, and extremely large scale mining operations that they are going to be operating anyways are always going to be able to produce the cheapest rare earths. It's very easy to see why China naturally dominates the market.
...and we were just looking for zinc!
https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/52342/202...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_Rare_Earth_Mine
The Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine and Processing Facility, owned by MP Materials, is an open-pit mine of rare-earth elements on the south flank of the Clark Mountain Range in California, 53 miles (85 km) southwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. In 2020 the mine supplied 15.8% of the world's rare-earth production. It is the only rare-earth mining and processing facility in the United States. It is the largest single known deposit of such minerals.
Look at the history section to see how this mine initially dominated rare earth element production, then shut down due to low price competition, then reopened, then shut down due to low prices, then reopened.
The total addressable market for rare earth elements is small in dollar and tonnage terms, but opening mines and processing plants is expensive. One big new mine could tank the global market price.
The US used to maintain large stockpiles of many mineral resources for defense purposes, but mostly stopped in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War. The pendulum may be swinging the other way now. The Mountain Pass mine received DoD grants in 2022 and 2023 to support continued operation, regardless of open market prices.
This creates a perverse incentive where it is often cheaper to reprocess low-grade ore from an existing mine than to jump through the regulatory hoops and decades of lawsuits to develop a new mine with high-grade ore. Refining a low-grade ore in the US often is not cost competitive on the global market, so there isn't much incentive to do so even though you've already mined the material.
The US needs to make it fast and efficient to develop new high-grade ore deposits. America has extraordinary mineral wealth as a matter of geology but we barely even explore in the US anymore because even if you find it you can't develop it. This has been the case since circa the 1980s or 1990s.
Price controls on gold up until the late 1970s didn't help either, since it discouraged gold exploration. Many high-value mineral deposits in the US have been discovered as a side-effect of gold exploration. The price controls disappeared but were almost immediately replaced with regulatory regimes that made it unprofitable to develop new mines.
Many rare earth deposits in the US were discovered as a side-effect of uranium prospecting. The US government stopped subsidizing uranium mining ~1970, which was the main reason it was being done at all, and so people stopped discovering associated minerals around the same time.
Simplistic thought, but, they're the only ones willing to ignore and cover up the insane pollution it causes. Rare earth is somewhat synonymous with "exceptionally toxic."
The unwritten implication is, we can do it ourselves, but the price will skyrocket as a result. I personally think that would be fine. Wait a minute and someone else will come by to yell about this the other way.
You want carcinogens in you water supply, and a whole NYT expose about it? That's why. Mining and processing is VERY VERY VERY dirty.
Countries like China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India are choosing the accept the externalities and/or make deals with shady partners if needed.
Add to that spamoflauge campaigns lead by nation state competitors trying to stoke opposition to these projects [0], and it becomes hard.
[0] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...
Edit: can't reply, so replying here.
> mines many elements domestically, so why the sudden environmental concern specifically with rare earths
Optics mostly, along with a healthy dose of social media disinfo [0]. Processing is also a pain in the butt and causes severe externalities.
> while the US relied on market forces to handle supply chains.
Pretty much, but private sector firms are also worried/hemmed by the implications of litigation.
The recognition that the status quo is unstable arose after China weaponized exports to Japan during the Senkaku Diaoyu crisis (it was one of the first things I worked on in my short stint in policy), but "industrial policy" was a dark word you could never utter on the hill until the last 3-4 years.
Also, 13-15 years ago, China wasn't really viewed as a threat the same way it is today. Russia was viewed as the primary peer state competitor to the US back then. I yelled hoarse warning the people I reported to that we needed to deep dive into Chinese institutions back then, but no one listened.
Is there evidence that China’s rare earth mining creates more environmental damage than US coal, gold, or other domestic mining operations?
The real issue seems to be strategic: China made rare earth supply security a policy priority, while the US relied on market forces to handle supply chains.
With that being the case, how can I in good conscious take a position that would lead to mining and manufacturing being done in any country that is not enforcing environmental and safety regulations? In any country that is not paying a living wage?
So yes, I want mining and processing done here. I want the manufacturing jobs here. We want clean air and clean water, we have to pay for it.
As such, there will be environmental externalities no matter what, and wishing for "clean mining and processing" is the same as giving "thoughts and prayers" - essentially meaningless.
In my opinion, we need to accept that cost.
These are good things, but they make it a lot more expensive to do this stuff domestically.
Mining and processing is very dirty.
In a similar vain, I was talking with a friend about plastic straws and the movement at the time to ban them. My friend was all on board and told me about the stainless steel ones they just bought from Amazon Prime. It's very convenient, delivers straight to your house and if you don't like it you just send it back.
So here we are worried about the straw but are having things shipped with 2 day delivery to the door. We live in a reasonable large city, drive to and from work past stores that are selling the same items. 2019 numbers have Amazon's van fleet at 30,000. Assuming 67 tons of GHG per vehicle(https://www.transportationenergy.org/resources/the-commute/l...) gets you 2 million tons.
I don't worry about the straws, I worry about the thinking that gets us to focus on the straws instead of the larger picture.
I hardly ever drive anywhere these days. Pretty much everything we buy in the household comes through Amazon or another online seller, and gets delivered by vehicles that would have been on the road anyway, delivering other things to other people. The "larger picture" may be larger than you think it is.
The problem is that the US, for the most part, no longer has any appetite for projects that leave the landscape scarred and the waters polluted.
In California, we prefer to go through annual cycles of water rationing rather than build new dams. I'm sure the mindset would change if things get sufficiently dire, but that threshold might be farther than we assume.
That and brine are legitimate concerns.
Also cost. The desal project in Huntington Beach was projected to increase local water prices.
Yes. And they're all being rapidly depleted
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97801...
The major fresh water use is mostly agriculture. We need to eat, but on the other hand a lot of that water ends up getting used to grow alfalfa for export to Saudi Arabia: profitable for certain farmers, not great for the rest of us.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar...
Iluka (Aus) has a mineral sands stockpile from their zircon/rutile processing, and are constructing a refinery next to the heap to process the rare earth minerals. Plant is fully funded and should come online end of 2026.
https://www.iluka.com/products-markets/rare-earth-products/
Lynas (Aus) has two refineries (and one planned in the US with DoD funding) and is partnering with a Korean firm in magnet production. They are also the only commercial-scale producer of Dy/Tb outside of China and recently raised an additional AUD800m to fund expansion.
Turns out (to no surprise) that it's to the US's advantage to outsource very polluting mining and processing of critical minerals. (Nobody likes open-pit mines, see people thoughts about the Permanente quarry south of Cupertino)
Of course it's a trade-off, as the US becomes dependent on an external source, and the cost of bringing up internal production increases as internal mining sources are shut down and potentially skill is lost.
Related link: https://www.usgs.gov/news/science-snippet/department-interio...
And here's the 2025 draft report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2025/1047/ofr20251047.pdf
Edit: here's the USGS talk, from 2017: https://youtu.be/N53Rm-aDCu8
Most metals commonly occur together with specific other metals in nature. For example, it is rare to find silver and zinc without a lot of associated lead. You can't make that lead disappear and we still need silver and zinc.
Well now see that'd be government spending and the majority of our voters/government don't want none of that
Tangentially, attending the USGS talks gave me a huge appreciation for the excellent, useful work that (some?) of our federal agencies do, which just made me that much more livid at the senseless cuts that DOGE & Republicans have done.
What do you mean? Trump spent more than the US government has ever spent before just this year. He did so in his last term too.
He just doesn't want to spend it on necessary things. After all, they're necessary. If he doesn't do it, someone will, right? There's a slight issue with this reasoning: it usually ends in the state having to do it anyway, at greatly increased cost, further increasing the already eye-watering spend Trump did.
(And, you know, environmental regulations, so mining and refining sites don't turn into what's described in a sibling comment.)
The Chinese government even attempted to lead a spamoflauge campaign against North American REE projects initiated by the Biden admin [0]
[0] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...
North American mining firms tend to be private sector, but in Asian countries like China, Indonesia, India, and Vietnam the mining conglomerates and processors are state-owned enterprises, or in the case of Japan and South Korea, private sector firms with a controlling stake owned by a sovereign development fund.
This is why we need a Temasek or Mubadala for America.
Mining seems like it should be firmly on the list of things that are of national security importance.