I used to work on a DoD special project that required rare earths that we could only get from China and we had to write a monthly memo about the risk to our $10B program that China would just stop selling it to us.
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.
It's amazing how the general public seems to think people involved with the bureaucracy would never support cuts and downsizing. They should get a moral compass and try working there for a while.
Yes, and here's some nuance: based on my experience, the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient.
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.
They do. DoD made a deal with MP Minerals (Mountain Pass, CA) in 2024. DoD will buy rare earths at a guaranteed price which is well above the world price.[1]
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.
Commenter meant straw buyers as in buyers of Chinese rare earths that do so at the behest of the US DoD while under the guise of buying the metals for their own use internal to whatever country they are based in.
There is nothing rare about rare earth minerals. The only thing is that it's expensive to extract them by American workers vs Chinese workers which is why all the business went to China. The prices will have to go up in order for it to be "worth it" but now that it's a national security issue, maybe more effort will be put into this.
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.
Just about everything is a national security issue if you think about it. The military should be forced to buy things from domestic suppliers, at least some percentage of the time, to make sure that there are people and resources available to deal with a war. As a compromise, set a maximum rate of profit allowable to these companies after they recover their investments, to discourage monopolies and price gouging.
Plus the shit is dirty to extract. On the one a hand I'd rather export our environmental disaster, on the other hand I think we really need to eat our dog food -- but I'm not confident that any amount of dog folding will lead to much change.
it's always been a national security issue and I don't understand why it took the election of this chucklefuck to change things
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.
These two topics are not remotely the same or even in the same league.
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.
No, fructose bypasses the insulin control pathways and is converted almost immediately to ldl fats that deposit and cause arterial occlusion leading to an enormous amount of health problems across the country.
With one exception, HFCS is lower in fructose than common natural alternatives. Cane sugar is 50% fructose. HFCS used in food is typically 42% fructose. Fruit juice is extremely high in fructose, whence “fructose” got its name. The HFCS used in sweetened beverages is 55% fructose, which is only marginally higher than cane sugar.
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.
Most likely because America has been in a political dead lock for the last 2 decades. Everything supported by one party is rejected by the other, everything that would benefit one state is a detriment to another, everything that would benefit the masses are extremely rejected by very load minorities. There is a strong man in charge pushing every button to see what happens, in the course of things it will turn out that at least one or two of them were far overdue to be pushed.
It wasn't that they were fighting each other, they were working in concert with each other, like a dance. If the Dems say one thing, the Republicans say the opposite and vice versa, because they knew it would keep both of them in power. Now we have a true Agent of Chaos in charge that doesn't heed any of the previous rules and us peons will have to deal with the fallout from that. The biggest negative repercussions is that both the Republicans and the Democrats will be completely emboldened to do whatever they want now and we are going to suffer because neither party gives a fuck about us, they only care about maintaining their own power.
100%. The damage that has been done in just the past several months is unthinkable. It’s not going back to the old ways any time soon, if ever. The democratic republic experiment might even be over at this point.
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 not the Constitution. No democratic-adjacent political system can survive the majority of its constituents being apathetic and disengaged (as is currently the primary problem. Our current Constitution was designed to assume some measure of engagement from the citizens because that's a hard constraint that bounds all democratic systems.
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.
> obviously popular that I don't understand why it was never an issue before.
Maybe previous administrations have been economically incentivized to not fix those problems. Perhaps those previous administrations didn't have our best interests in mind.
Of course they do. The SR-71 was built with Russian titanium that the Russians believed was going to be used in pizza ovens. There’s no reason to think schemes like that ever stopped. Or that that was the first time. My guess is most countries have been doing it for as long as they have been trading.
There is historical precedent for this. As I understand it the US was only able to make the SR71s by sourcing Soviet titanium for the airframe in this manner.
Sure but I presume China will still want to sell stuff, even if not to the US. After it leaves their borders it's not super likely they can have an effective control on the chain of custody. What I'm referring to is diversion from foreign commerce.
I think its reasonable to assume the US demand is so large that any laundering of resources can not be disguised easily simply due to the quantity. Countries with sudden spikes in demand with no way to explain the need for the demand will be suspect.
Ever wonder why there was a sudden spike in antimony, gallium, and germanium shipments from Thailand - a country that does not produce either of the 3 at scale - this summer?
That said, much like smuggled GPUs - it is difficult to transship an export controlled material at scale.
The US government was pretty decent up until ~50-100 years ago. Pretty standard, functional democracy. Lots of money and effort spent on improving the physical and social environment for the betterment of the people. You know, normal, expected stuff from a functioning government.
Up until the US went into debt to fund the arms race, things were great. Now that there's so much debt and unfettered financial engineering by Wall Street, the idea we can get get back to "the American Dream is a home with a white picket fence" is impossible.
"The American Dream" was made possible by government spending to subsidize home purchases. The 1950s housing act.
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.
>"The American Dream" was made possible by government spending to subsidize home purchases. The 1950s housing act.
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.
Re: "Look at tax receipts relative to GDP. We've never taxed harder than we do now. " - would you mind sharing some data sources for this. Thanks a lot!
When the US has a surplus with no debt, as it was pre-Nuclear Arms race, they can afford to do things like be generous with housing, etc. We can't do that now because we have too much debt, and most of the money is being funneled to the elites.
From Obama until now, the income gap between the wealthy and regular people has skyrocketed. Most of the new money being generated in our economy is going into the pockets of the top 0.1% and none is going into the bottom 50%.
I misused the word "surplus". Surplus is talking about a net positive in terms of government income less spending. What I meant was total government debt. Yes we had surpluses under Clinton but the US was still deeply in debt. We went from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in the world under Ronald Reagan.
To me it was WW2 and the lingering "intelligence apparatus" it spawned. We went from using our resources for national security and started using it to steal banana plantation land and contracts in South America. It went from a necessary evil to a clandestine service available to the highest bidder.
Yes, it was Franklin Roosevelts declining health and death the fascists took over. They already brought Hitler to power, and from then on took over their state. They planned, but didn't need their Business Plot.
Lots of comments below. I think Reagan “Government doesn’t help” campaign + (obviously) big tax cuts were the beginning of the end. Early 1980s was the beginning of deficit spending and tax cuts based on the Laffer Curve big lie. Bush followed suit, and Obama/Biden realized that the American people would gladly elect presidents who spent borrowed money.
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.
That's the plan as part of the Minerals Security Partnership - US, Japanese, Korean, Emirati, EU, and other members capital would go into Australian, Canadian, and other countries with large enough deposits to build an ex-China supply chain.
The current admin has made it rocky, but the rest of the countries are still participating in it.
> Maybe this administration blowing up the government is good, actually.
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
Right, especially since we've made anyone that knows anything in the government unemployed. It'll be almost impossible to hire back even a small portion of the experts in 3 years.
The idea behind DOGE made a mountain of sense, even if the execution was all over the place.
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.
That's not even the real waste in DOD. The real waste is mostly in failed projects. Projects that either never deliver, or deliver years late and millions or billions over budget, typically with reduced features. They'd have to buy a million of those hot cups to come close to the waste that occurs due to these failed projects.
DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem.
>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.
> >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?
I'm not disputing it; but the downvoters missed my point.
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.
It is even deeper than that. The problem is that voters do not have faith in the organizations created to oversee and regulate government waste. Perhaps there isn't enough visibility. Or maybe the typical shenanigans that commenters love to harp on hides the actual good work that public servants sometimes do in managing the public purse.
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.
Of they just don't fundamentally trust the institutions.
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 not saying people should implicitly trust the government.
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.
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)
Anyone who thinks DOGE was anything other than an ideological purge is incapable of critical thinking. Though, in all honestly, most who say it wasn't know it was, and are just lying to buy time till the project is complete.
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.
I've been the one selling the "$1,280 mug", not in America, and not to the military, but to state and federal governments all over the place.
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.
One thing that would help, but only help, not solve, is to train the people writing requirements. I've seen so much overfitting. "We developed on a Dell 1234ABC, so that's what we need 200 of when we deliver this to the field." That's not how computers work, but that's how they end up writing requirements. That can even make it into the TO for systems so now they have a drawing of the back of a Dell 1234ABC and the front, showing how it's installed at a desk and cabled up.
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.
We get the project management we pay for. You can outsource implementation but you can't outsource accountability; ultimately, the only way to get effective government is to build up project management expertise in-house, and to do that you need to be willing to match the pay and conditions (including but not limited to reliable long-term employment) that skilled project managers could obtain in private industry.
That would help a tiny amount. The bigger problem, which GP alluded to and which is very, very frustrating to entangle, is the incentives around accountability. Pahlka’s writing puts it better than I could:
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.
It is not realistic to expect a modern supply chain to be completely uninterruptible. The US has large stockpiles of (not very) rare earth metals and there are multiple ways of acquiring them in case China stops exporting. If China ever embargoes rare earth metals, the US can embargo Windows updates. Who do you think will last the longest?
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.
> China does not follow our environmental laws and we breath the output of that.
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.
I run desktop Linux. It's pretty hard to switch a billion desktops to Linux even if you do it one at a time. Not to mention a ton of problems with compatibility and corporate and government IT
Is this a serious question? China probably has the full source code of Windows, which has leaked before and could be obtained easily by spies abroad who are employed at Microsoft. They also don't need Windows. They make practically all the computer gear, or enough of it that they can get by in a war. We need to make real essential goods to sustain ourselves, not a bunch of spyware products and "service industry" gigs.
The BBC piece is an interesting attempt at garnishing attention. The reporter provides the google maps link to show how large and disgusting the process is. But it is actually a very small lake, if you compare it to things such as oil extraction.
Take a look at the oil sands of Fort Mcmurray, Alberta; and at the same zoom level as the reporter uses, you'll see this is absolutely massive and diminishes the "massive" rare earths waste lake by orders of magnitude: https://www.google.com/maps/@57.0304073,-111.55372,6025m/dat...
I don't think it is good, but let's be reasonable in comparing environmental harm.
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.
"Difficult to dispose of and has no use" is the very definition of a tailings pond, and you'll find them all over the place if you care to look. Environmental catastrophies are happening all over the globe on a massive scale. My point is exactly that; yeah it's toxic, but so is basically every mine and many oil refineries too. Check out the rate of cancer around coal mines or refining hubs, you might be surprised.
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.
Would outsourcing the dirty production combined with a strategic stockpile of processed materials (and some processing capacity) be a smart solution?
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.).
Six months feels insufficient. You'd want several years, at minimum.
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.)
> 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.)
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.
This is actually super interesting to me. Given that the US is actually blessed with mineral concentrations, why is it so assumed that only China can produce rare earths? Is it the land opportunity cost? Is it the cost of labor? Is it the cost of regulation? And in the end, this is only a motor, or a battery, and the actual rare earth content is not very high. If the cost of rare earths was double or even triple the amount of sourcing them from China, how much does that actually impact the end price of a consumer good?
Rare Earths aren't rare in the "there is a small supply" sense, but in the "very dilute" sense. Rare earths don't concentrate into ores the way that say copper does. Rare earth deposits are just places where you happen to have 300 ppm instead of the crust average of 220 ppm.
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.
Yep! And we just struck graphite in the US, in the middle of bumfuck nowhere in New York. A little county (well, geographically large), 2800 square miles, 100,000 or so people, and we've struck the first graphite in the US...
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.
It is regulatory costs these days. Most mines currently operating in the US were grandfathered into current regulatory regimes, they'd likely never be developed today.
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.
> why is it so assumed that only China can produce rare earths?
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."
I was going to say the same. Let China destroy their land and everyone else just buy what they need. When that’s all gone only then mine your own land.
We're reasoning about the current state of things. We're /not/ suggesting this is good or should continue.
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.
Refining. China has build up the entire pipeline from mining to raw ore to refining for industry use. It's the only place that has it all. Building the refining capacity took decades.
> 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.
The US mines many elements domestically, so why the sudden environmental concern specifically with rare earths?
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.
I like nature and care about the environment. I care about my fellow man, I want them to be able to work a safe job with good pay and have the ability to provide for their family.
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.
This isn't manufacturing (though even that is very dirty depending on the industry). This is mining and processing. There is NO clean way to scar the earth and then leverage chemicals to separate and extract the materials needed.
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.
Curious why this is downvoted, as this matches my understanding. We have strong (ish) environmental and worker protections in the US that other countries don't have.
These are good things, but they make it a lot more expensive to do this stuff domestically.
Probably because it brings into focus the unconformable truth of what we have been doing.
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.
The vans are probably a wash, carbon-wise, because they are taking cars off the road.
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.
"Having" and "willing to use" are two things, right?
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.
Have you tried building a subsurface well? Last project didn't want to build one even though the desal plant would otherwise have negatively impacted local wildlife, including marine animals in and around sensitive estuary habitat.
That and brine are legitimate concerns.
Also cost. The desal project in Huntington Beach was projected to increase local water prices.
Certainly we could curb our water use. Do we even have enough sites to build dams which would solve the problem? Otherwise we should consider the relative merits of golf courses and agricultural production and allocate accordingly.
Golf courses use a minuscule fraction of California's total water supply. Many of them are now irrigated by gray water.
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.
If you're operating under the idea that we can't expand the supply of water, then you basically believe California is full. It would then follow that you would be against immigration, since more people would only exacerbate the problem.
That makes no sense and derails the discussion (which is about mining of minerals -- not immigration), considering over 90% of the water is used by industrial agriculture -- not individuals. The fact that individuals are being asked to conserve water at all is a sham.
I recommend looking into the work of Vaclav Smil & Mark Mills. Vaclav is pretty well known & his work is pretty easy to find. Mark Mills was a physicist who started working at investment funds & energy research think tanks. He also has a lot of interesting things to say about the so called "energy transition"¹. In short, you don't have to take my word for it but the material reality & physics of the situation is much more complicated & dire than people realize. It's more than just a simple matter of "critical" minerals & metals.
There are multiple moves outside the US to address this, but the cost of setting up a refinery is at least USD1b.
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.
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.
Years ago I attended a USGS talk about Critical Minerals. (it's archived somewhere...) The federal government (at least a competent one, not sure about the current status) tracks the stability of Critical Mineral sources.
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.
Why not do both, get minerals from other countries while it's polluting, spend some of your research budget on figuring out how to do the mining without the downsides.
Mining is industrial chemistry. If you dig up a bunch of lead or arsenic that is mixed with some other metal you actually want, you have to put that arsenic or lead somewhere. You can covert it to different forms of lead or arsenic but they will always contain those elements. At which point, the only question is how much money you want to spend to convert those toxic waste products into a specific form that may be more manageable or slightly less toxic when you dump them. When we talk about "downsides" to mining, this is the elephant in the room because we can't make those elements not exist and mining will always produce them.
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.
> spend some of your research budget on figuring out how to do the mining without the downsides.
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.
> Well now see that'd be government spending and the majority of our voters/government don't want none of that
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.
Odd lots mentioned about this. Only a very small portion of our “rare earth” mineral domestically came from China to begin with. And a lot can be procured locally (for now) but at a higher price
The Biden admin worked on this as part of the IRA and CHIPS, and a lot of bilateral treaties with Japan, Australia, South Korea, UAE, and India but now it's up in the air.
The Chinese government even attempted to lead a spamoflauge campaign against North American REE projects initiated by the Biden admin [0]
Mining is first and foremost a material logistics problem. If I need to study significantly more material to retrieve a economically viable amount of sight after elements it will be always a difficult proposition.
The economics are out of whack in the mining industry in the 2020s as well.
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.
I feel like we'll see more and more of that style of ownership in the US when it comes to mining. We're already seeing the government buying stakes in semiconductor companies, as well as subsidizing manufacturing.
Mining seems like it should be firmly on the list of things that are of national security importance.
I used to work on a DoD special project that required rare earths that we could only get from China and we had to write a monthly memo about the risk to our $10B program that China would just stop selling it to us.
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.
> 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!
> 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.
Please say sike
Actually...that sort of works.
It's amazing how the general public seems to think people involved with the bureaucracy would never support cuts and downsizing. They should get a moral compass and try working there for a while.
Yes, and here's some nuance: based on my experience, the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient.
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.
I'm shocked DoD doesn't have straw buyers in friendly (or neutral) 3rd party countries to deal with that possibility.
They do. DoD made a deal with MP Minerals (Mountain Pass, CA) in 2024. DoD will buy rare earths at a guaranteed price which is well above the world price.[1]
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...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP_Materials
Commenter meant straw buyers as in buyers of Chinese rare earths that do so at the behest of the US DoD while under the guise of buying the metals for their own use internal to whatever country they are based in.
Doesn't work. China's export controls on rare earths are product-based, not country based. You can buy motors, but not magnets.
There is nothing rare about rare earth minerals. The only thing is that it's expensive to extract them by American workers vs Chinese workers which is why all the business went to China. The prices will have to go up in order for it to be "worth it" but now that it's a national security issue, maybe more effort will be put into this.
>There is nothing rare about rare earth minerals
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.
Just about everything is a national security issue if you think about it. The military should be forced to buy things from domestic suppliers, at least some percentage of the time, to make sure that there are people and resources available to deal with a war. As a compromise, set a maximum rate of profit allowable to these companies after they recover their investments, to discourage monopolies and price gouging.
Plus the shit is dirty to extract. On the one a hand I'd rather export our environmental disaster, on the other hand I think we really need to eat our dog food -- but I'm not confident that any amount of dog folding will lead to much change.
it's always been a national security issue and I don't understand why it took the election of this chucklefuck to change things
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.
These two topics are not remotely the same or even in the same league.
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.
No, fructose bypasses the insulin control pathways and is converted almost immediately to ldl fats that deposit and cause arterial occlusion leading to an enormous amount of health problems across the country.
With one exception, HFCS is lower in fructose than common natural alternatives. Cane sugar is 50% fructose. HFCS used in food is typically 42% fructose. Fruit juice is extremely high in fructose, whence “fructose” got its name. The HFCS used in sweetened beverages is 55% fructose, which is only marginally higher than cane sugar.
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.
Most likely because America has been in a political dead lock for the last 2 decades. Everything supported by one party is rejected by the other, everything that would benefit one state is a detriment to another, everything that would benefit the masses are extremely rejected by very load minorities. There is a strong man in charge pushing every button to see what happens, in the course of things it will turn out that at least one or two of them were far overdue to be pushed.
It wasn't that they were fighting each other, they were working in concert with each other, like a dance. If the Dems say one thing, the Republicans say the opposite and vice versa, because they knew it would keep both of them in power. Now we have a true Agent of Chaos in charge that doesn't heed any of the previous rules and us peons will have to deal with the fallout from that. The biggest negative repercussions is that both the Republicans and the Democrats will be completely emboldened to do whatever they want now and we are going to suffer because neither party gives a fuck about us, they only care about maintaining their own power.
100%. The damage that has been done in just the past several months is unthinkable. It’s not going back to the old ways any time soon, if ever. The democratic republic experiment might even be over at this point.
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 not the Constitution. No democratic-adjacent political system can survive the majority of its constituents being apathetic and disengaged (as is currently the primary problem. Our current Constitution was designed to assume some measure of engagement from the citizens because that's a hard constraint that bounds all democratic systems.
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.
From 2004...
https://inthesetimes.com/article/magnet-consolidation-threat...
> obviously popular that I don't understand why it was never an issue before.
Maybe previous administrations have been economically incentivized to not fix those problems. Perhaps those previous administrations didn't have our best interests in mind.
Of course they do. The SR-71 was built with Russian titanium that the Russians believed was going to be used in pizza ovens. There’s no reason to think schemes like that ever stopped. Or that that was the first time. My guess is most countries have been doing it for as long as they have been trading.
There is historical precedent for this. As I understand it the US was only able to make the SR71s by sourcing Soviet titanium for the airframe in this manner.
nope, china has 90% of the market, and some of the rest are probably just secretly from china
Sure but I presume China will still want to sell stuff, even if not to the US. After it leaves their borders it's not super likely they can have an effective control on the chain of custody. What I'm referring to is diversion from foreign commerce.
I think its reasonable to assume the US demand is so large that any laundering of resources can not be disguised easily simply due to the quantity. Countries with sudden spikes in demand with no way to explain the need for the demand will be suspect.
IDK, China are requiring a license to export magnets, and I hear it is not easy to get
> friendly (or neutral) 3rd party countries
Well... In 2024 there were things like that.
Ever wonder why there was a sudden spike in antimony, gallium, and germanium shipments from Thailand - a country that does not produce either of the 3 at scale - this summer?
That said, much like smuggled GPUs - it is difficult to transship an export controlled material at scale.
I’m shocked you thought the government was ever functional enough to do something like that.
The US government was pretty decent up until ~50-100 years ago. Pretty standard, functional democracy. Lots of money and effort spent on improving the physical and social environment for the betterment of the people. You know, normal, expected stuff from a functioning government.
Up until the US went into debt to fund the arms race, things were great. Now that there's so much debt and unfettered financial engineering by Wall Street, the idea we can get get back to "the American Dream is a home with a white picket fence" is impossible.
"The American Dream" was made possible by government spending to subsidize home purchases. The 1950s housing act.
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.
>"The American Dream" was made possible by government spending to subsidize home purchases. The 1950s housing act.
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.
I see arguments like this all the time these days, and it feels important to me to have the story straightened out.
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...)
https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/80552/total-tax...
(Though this doesn’t capture top end federal income tax rate.)
Re: "Look at tax receipts relative to GDP. We've never taxed harder than we do now. " - would you mind sharing some data sources for this. Thanks a lot!
Wouldn’t say never harder, but it’s been pretty flat.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
“a little more accessible” is condescension of the poor
When the US has a surplus with no debt, as it was pre-Nuclear Arms race, they can afford to do things like be generous with housing, etc. We can't do that now because we have too much debt, and most of the money is being funneled to the elites.
Most of the money is being funneled to the old. The US government is an insurance company with an army.
From Obama until now, the income gap between the wealthy and regular people has skyrocketed. Most of the new money being generated in our economy is going into the pockets of the top 0.1% and none is going into the bottom 50%.
The actual numbers show it rising during Obama and being flat ever since https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134
We had a surplus under Clinton (well after Nuclear Arms race) which was parlayed into deficit by Bush tax cuts.
I misused the word "surplus". Surplus is talking about a net positive in terms of government income less spending. What I meant was total government debt. Yes we had surpluses under Clinton but the US was still deeply in debt. We went from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in the world under Ronald Reagan.
To me it was WW2 and the lingering "intelligence apparatus" it spawned. We went from using our resources for national security and started using it to steal banana plantation land and contracts in South America. It went from a necessary evil to a clandestine service available to the highest bidder.
Yes, it was Franklin Roosevelts declining health and death the fascists took over. They already brought Hitler to power, and from then on took over their state. They planned, but didn't need their Business Plot.
Lots of comments below. I think Reagan “Government doesn’t help” campaign + (obviously) big tax cuts were the beginning of the end. Early 1980s was the beginning of deficit spending and tax cuts based on the Laffer Curve big lie. Bush followed suit, and Obama/Biden realized that the American people would gladly elect presidents who spent borrowed money.
Unclear how we recover as a country given the reach of the Fox News propaganda. Maybe a huge recession?
> 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.
WtfHappenedIn1971.com
They used to, iirc that's how they sourced the titanium used in the b2 bombers, which was mined in the ussr.
A-12 Oxcart
I think that was the SR-71, but yeah.
They got the titanium from the Soviet Union, so not exactly an ally. The US just lied about using it for pizza ovens instead of jets.
I'm sure Australia would be happy to supply for a slight premium
That's the plan as part of the Minerals Security Partnership - US, Japanese, Korean, Emirati, EU, and other members capital would go into Australian, Canadian, and other countries with large enough deposits to build an ex-China supply chain.
The current admin has made it rocky, but the rest of the countries are still participating in it.
No free country can compete
> Maybe this administration blowing up the government is good, actually.
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
Right, especially since we've made anyone that knows anything in the government unemployed. It'll be almost impossible to hire back even a small portion of the experts in 3 years.
It's going to be a rough couple of decades.
The idea behind DOGE made a mountain of sense, even if the execution was all over the place.
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...
That's not even the real waste in DOD. The real waste is mostly in failed projects. Projects that either never deliver, or deliver years late and millions or billions over budget, typically with reduced features. They'd have to buy a million of those hot cups to come close to the waste that occurs due to these failed projects.
DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem.
>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.
> >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?
I'm not disputing it; but the downvoters missed my point.
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.
It is even deeper than that. The problem is that voters do not have faith in the organizations created to oversee and regulate government waste. Perhaps there isn't enough visibility. Or maybe the typical shenanigans that commenters love to harp on hides the actual good work that public servants sometimes do in managing the public purse.
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.
Of they just don't fundamentally trust the institutions.
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 not saying people should implicitly trust the government.
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.
The idea behind DOGE was to
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)
Anyone who thinks DOGE was anything other than an ideological purge is incapable of critical thinking. Though, in all honestly, most who say it wasn't know it was, and are just lying to buy time till the project is complete.
It was also to justify increased government spending, namely the extension of the tax cuts
What are you talking about? Reducing government revenue does not increase government spending.
That's really a matter of accounting.
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.
> That's really a matter of accounting.
So increasing taxes can be said to reduce government spending? Do you think anyone really buys that argument?
I've been the one selling the "$1,280 mug", not in America, and not to the military, but to state and federal governments all over the place.
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.
One thing that would help, but only help, not solve, is to train the people writing requirements. I've seen so much overfitting. "We developed on a Dell 1234ABC, so that's what we need 200 of when we deliver this to the field." That's not how computers work, but that's how they end up writing requirements. That can even make it into the TO for systems so now they have a drawing of the back of a Dell 1234ABC and the front, showing how it's installed at a desk and cabled up.
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.
We get the project management we pay for. You can outsource implementation but you can't outsource accountability; ultimately, the only way to get effective government is to build up project management expertise in-house, and to do that you need to be willing to match the pay and conditions (including but not limited to reliable long-term employment) that skilled project managers could obtain in private industry.
That would help a tiny amount. The bigger problem, which GP alluded to and which is very, very frustrating to entangle, is the incentives around accountability. Pahlka’s writing puts it better than I could:
https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/the-water-is-a-mirror
https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/
Precisely right.
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.
Their goal wasn’t to make the government better. It was to destroy it and steal data so that Trump and Musk could get richer.
It is not realistic to expect a modern supply chain to be completely uninterruptible. The US has large stockpiles of (not very) rare earth metals and there are multiple ways of acquiring them in case China stops exporting. If China ever embargoes rare earth metals, the US can embargo Windows updates. Who do you think will last the longest?
the US can embargo Windows updates
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.
> China does not follow our environmental laws and we breath the output of that.
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.
It's much easier to smuggle a USB drive with Windows updates than it is a few tonnes of metal.
Then China will switch a billion desktops to Linux and the US will still need rare earths.
> Then China will switch a billion desktops to Linux
Easier than smuggling a few tonnes of metal? Let me introduce you to my elderly parents...
old people in china don't have computers, they use smart phones
If all the US needs is a few tonnes the cartels can get it done no problem.
I run desktop Linux. It's pretty hard to switch a billion desktops to Linux even if you do it one at a time. Not to mention a ton of problems with compatibility and corporate and government IT
The Chinese pirate Windows extensively, and the code has been leaked before. If IP law goes out the window, they will do whatever the hell they want.
Is this a serious question? China probably has the full source code of Windows, which has leaked before and could be obtained easily by spies abroad who are employed at Microsoft. They also don't need Windows. They make practically all the computer gear, or enough of it that they can get by in a war. We need to make real essential goods to sustain ourselves, not a bunch of spyware products and "service industry" gigs.
Well not thrown away, but discarded as tailings. Otherwise, that would be quite the garbage pail and matching truck to collect it! :-D
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-...
And, just as how old gold tailings are revisited decades later, that pile of discarded material will one day be a resource.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/northern-ontario/article/company-work...
https://www.jxscmineral.com/blogs/gold-tailings-impacts-and-...
The BBC piece is an interesting attempt at garnishing attention. The reporter provides the google maps link to show how large and disgusting the process is. But it is actually a very small lake, if you compare it to things such as oil extraction. Take a look at the oil sands of Fort Mcmurray, Alberta; and at the same zoom level as the reporter uses, you'll see this is absolutely massive and diminishes the "massive" rare earths waste lake by orders of magnitude: https://www.google.com/maps/@57.0304073,-111.55372,6025m/dat...
I don't think it is good, but let's be reasonable in comparing environmental harm.
I don't think that lake tailing pond even exists any more.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mildred+Lake,+AB+T9K+2Z1/@...
Check the previous dates. 2018 yes, 2022, no.
If you go down the road a bit so that you don't have the shrubs screening the view, it clearly still exists: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Et9kyrQ3DFSto6ap7
Ahh, crafty. Thanks for that!
That is a whataboutism.
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.
"Difficult to dispose of and has no use" is the very definition of a tailings pond, and you'll find them all over the place if you care to look. Environmental catastrophies are happening all over the globe on a massive scale. My point is exactly that; yeah it's toxic, but so is basically every mine and many oil refineries too. Check out the rate of cancer around coal mines or refining hubs, you might be surprised.
> Though it doesn't address the issue of waste
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...
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45093322
Would outsourcing the dirty production combined with a strategic stockpile of processed materials (and some processing capacity) be a smart solution?
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.).
Six months feels insufficient. You'd want several years, at minimum.
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.)
China plans in 5 year increments and actually follows through on that.
Waiting out 6 months of production would be easy. And even the threat of interruption would drastically mess with prices.
> 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.)
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.
"These minerals are being use to fortify our water supply."
This is actually super interesting to me. Given that the US is actually blessed with mineral concentrations, why is it so assumed that only China can produce rare earths? Is it the land opportunity cost? Is it the cost of labor? Is it the cost of regulation? And in the end, this is only a motor, or a battery, and the actual rare earth content is not very high. If the cost of rare earths was double or even triple the amount of sourcing them from China, how much does that actually impact the end price of a consumer good?
Rare Earths aren't rare in the "there is a small supply" sense, but in the "very dilute" sense. Rare earths don't concentrate into ores the way that say copper does. Rare earth deposits are just places where you happen to have 300 ppm instead of the crust average of 220 ppm.
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.
Yep! And we just struck graphite in the US, in the middle of bumfuck nowhere in New York. A little county (well, geographically large), 2800 square miles, 100,000 or so people, and we've struck the first graphite in the US...
...and we were just looking for zinc!
https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/52342/202...
There have been other graphite mines in the US.
The US can and does produce rare earth elements:
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.
It is regulatory costs these days. Most mines currently operating in the US were grandfathered into current regulatory regimes, they'd likely never be developed today.
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.
> why is it so assumed that only China can produce rare earths?
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."
I was going to say the same. Let China destroy their land and everyone else just buy what they need. When that’s all gone only then mine your own land.
It takes nearly a decade to get a mine online, under optimal conditions. If a conflict breaks out and China embargoes the West, what's your plan then?
Stockpile it beforehand and don’t create pointless conflicts.
We're reasoning about the current state of things. We're /not/ suggesting this is good or should continue.
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.
Refining. China has build up the entire pipeline from mining to raw ore to refining for industry use. It's the only place that has it all. Building the refining capacity took decades.
> why is it so assumed that only China can produce rare earths
For the same reason that only China can produce t-shirts, or a quality sedan EV with a 5-star EU crash test rating and 350 miles of range for $15,000.
Subsidized by the Chinese government.
> why is it so assumed that only China can produce rare earths
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.
The US mines many elements domestically, so why the sudden environmental concern specifically with rare earths?
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.
I like nature and care about the environment. I care about my fellow man, I want them to be able to work a safe job with good pay and have the ability to provide for their family.
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.
This isn't manufacturing (though even that is very dirty depending on the industry). This is mining and processing. There is NO clean way to scar the earth and then leverage chemicals to separate and extract the materials needed.
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.
Curious why this is downvoted, as this matches my understanding. We have strong (ish) environmental and worker protections in the US that other countries don't have.
These are good things, but they make it a lot more expensive to do this stuff domestically.
Mining and processing is very dirty.
Probably because it brings into focus the unconformable truth of what we have been doing.
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.
The vans are probably a wash, carbon-wise, because they are taking cars off the road.
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.
"Having" and "willing to use" are two things, right?
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.
Even building desalination plants is doomed by NIMBYs wielding environmental laws and the costal commission to block any project
Have you tried building a subsurface well? Last project didn't want to build one even though the desal plant would otherwise have negatively impacted local wildlife, including marine animals in and around sensitive estuary habitat.
That and brine are legitimate concerns.
Also cost. The desal project in Huntington Beach was projected to increase local water prices.
> Have you tried building a subsurface well?
Yes. And they're all being rapidly depleted
Certainly we could curb our water use. Do we even have enough sites to build dams which would solve the problem? Otherwise we should consider the relative merits of golf courses and agricultural production and allocate accordingly.
Golf courses use a minuscule fraction of California's total water supply. Many of them are now irrigated by gray water.
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...
If you're operating under the idea that we can't expand the supply of water, then you basically believe California is full. It would then follow that you would be against immigration, since more people would only exacerbate the problem.
That makes no sense and derails the discussion (which is about mining of minerals -- not immigration), considering over 90% of the water is used by industrial agriculture -- not individuals. The fact that individuals are being asked to conserve water at all is a sham.
I recommend looking into the work of Vaclav Smil & Mark Mills. Vaclav is pretty well known & his work is pretty easy to find. Mark Mills was a physicist who started working at investment funds & energy research think tanks. He also has a lot of interesting things to say about the so called "energy transition"¹. In short, you don't have to take my word for it but the material reality & physics of the situation is much more complicated & dire than people realize. It's more than just a simple matter of "critical" minerals & metals.
¹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8Nz-4eEBTw
There are multiple moves outside the US to address this, but the cost of setting up a refinery is at least USD1b.
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.
Years ago I attended a USGS talk about Critical Minerals. (it's archived somewhere...) The federal government (at least a competent one, not sure about the current status) tracks the stability of Critical Mineral sources.
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
Why not do both, get minerals from other countries while it's polluting, spend some of your research budget on figuring out how to do the mining without the downsides.
Mining is industrial chemistry. If you dig up a bunch of lead or arsenic that is mixed with some other metal you actually want, you have to put that arsenic or lead somewhere. You can covert it to different forms of lead or arsenic but they will always contain those elements. At which point, the only question is how much money you want to spend to convert those toxic waste products into a specific form that may be more manageable or slightly less toxic when you dump them. When we talk about "downsides" to mining, this is the elephant in the room because we can't make those elements not exist and mining will always produce them.
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.
> spend some of your research budget on figuring out how to do the mining without the downsides.
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.
> Well now see that'd be government spending and the majority of our voters/government don't want none of that
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.
Odd lots mentioned about this. Only a very small portion of our “rare earth” mineral domestically came from China to begin with. And a lot can be procured locally (for now) but at a higher price
This is a legitimate use-case for targeted tariffs and / or subsidies.
(And, you know, environmental regulations, so mining and refining sites don't turn into what's described in a sibling comment.)
The Biden admin worked on this as part of the IRA and CHIPS, and a lot of bilateral treaties with Japan, Australia, South Korea, UAE, and India but now it's up in the air.
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...
Mining is first and foremost a material logistics problem. If I need to study significantly more material to retrieve a economically viable amount of sight after elements it will be always a difficult proposition.
The economics are out of whack in the mining industry in the 2020s as well.
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.
I feel like we'll see more and more of that style of ownership in the US when it comes to mining. We're already seeing the government buying stakes in semiconductor companies, as well as subsidizing manufacturing.
Mining seems like it should be firmly on the list of things that are of national security importance.