The Trump administration is engaged in a multibillion-dollar, governmentwide effort to loosen Beijing's chokehold on critical minerals. It is slowly starting to work.
The effort to develop a China-free supply chain for vital manufacturing inputs moved into high gear after April 2025, when China put export controls on key rare-earth elements. The U.S. push for mineral independence has spanned the departments of Defense, Energy, State, Commerce and Interior, as well as new offices and two government banks, much of it coordinated by the White House National Security Council.
It represents one of the most comprehensive, sustained and focused efforts by the second Trump administration to onshore an essential U.S. supply chain, say current and former government officials and mineral experts. As China's restrictions riled up U.S. manufacturers, the Trump administration almost immediately began pushing hundreds of millions of dollars into domestic minerals projects.
Critical minerals are crucial to the manufacturing of defense, transportation, energy and computer systems; they underpin AI and weapons development. By the time China imposed its rare-earths export controls, President Trump had already declared the lack of a domestic supply a national emergency.
Before the mid-1990s, the U.S. was a global leader in rare-earths production. "It took us 30 to 35 years to lose industrial capacity," said Tomasz Nadrowski, author of "Mineral War: China's Quest for Weapons of Mineral Destruction."
And it will be at least a decadelong effort to escape China's chokehold, experts say. Senior Trump officials discussed rare-earths exports with their China counterparts ahead of the Chinese leader Xi Jinping's recent visit to Washington, and China agreed to extend until January a truce to provide minerals to the U.S.
A White House official said the administration has completed more than 180 critical-minerals-related projects since Trump took office for the second time. Projects still have to go through due diligence and meet conditions to get the money, the official said.
U.S. government nonequity investment in rare-earths and magnet projects grew to $7.6 billion in the 18 months ended June 2026, more than four times the amount between 2020 and 2024, according to an analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The administration has encouraged private investors to join the minerals boom. Among them, the president's sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., have deals with companies that the administration has backed.
Other nations targeted by China's export controls, such as Japan, are also taking steps to erode Beijing's dominance. But the U.S. has done perhaps the most to scramble the global order, industry experts say, striking more than two dozen agreements with countries for mineral development. In addition, a new State Department-led initiative called Pax Silica coordinates minerals production with U.S. allies such as Greece and Israel.
By next year, U.S. defense contractors will be required to eliminate from their supply chain certain metals sourced from adversary countries including China, a requirement that many contractors say isn't feasible despite the progress being made. Some Pentagon officials say they are aiming for a "closed loop" of U.S. and allied supply chains for some minerals by 2030.
A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment on specific transactions, but said the department's "priority is securing the end-to-end supply chain for minerals critical to national security."
In April, Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Rick Switzer said that with help from Japan and Europe, the U.S. has the capacity to develop an end-to-end critical-minerals supply chain free of China within six to 12 months, if the country were pressed to do so.
Recent projections from CRU, a London-based commodities-data provider, show China losing market share by the end of the decade in many of the elements and minerals it had most tightly controlled.