It’s not that the United States lacks rare earth minerals. Quite the opposite. From Mountain Pass in California to quiet fields in Texas, Wyoming, and Alaska, the ground is packed with critical elements. Neodymium. Praseodymium. Dysprosium. Terbium. Unfamiliar names to most Americans, yet they sit at the center of every modern supply chain. Defense. Energy. Technology. Transportation. These minerals are the backbone of the twenty first century.
The rock is there. The problem starts the moment you dig it out of the ground.
The United States has the resources but lacks the processing muscle. The refining and separation work that turns raw ore into usable components is overwhelmingly done overseas, mostly in China. That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the economics of refining are brutal inside the U.S. when placed next to environmental rules.
The Environmental Protection Agency treats rare earth refining like nuclear waste. Water runoff, chemical residue, radioactive tailings—each one invites a federal audit, lawsuits, or local protests. And in a regulatory landscape where a single permitting delay can last a decade, private capital walks away.
This is not about scarcity. It is about cost and control.
Companies have surveyed the potential. Politicians have discussed the urgency. Yet the core issue remains untouched. You cannot build a supply chain on rhetoric. You need facilities. You need labor. You need legal breathing room. Today, China controls around 87 percent of the global refined rare earth output. The United States once led this industry, but over the past three decades, we handed the advantage away in slow, quiet increments.
The national security angle has become impossible to ignore. These minerals are used in everything from F-35 fighter jets to electric vehicle motors and missile guidance systems. If a geopolitical crisis escalates, reliance on foreign processing becomes an immediate liability. The vulnerability is obvious. Yet building up domestic capacity without triggering inflation or backlash from environmental groups presents a puzzle with no easy solution.
The only scenario where this gets solved quickly is wartime. If the U.S. entered a major conflict, the regulatory structure would be swept aside in days. Refineries would break ground before the ink dried on permits. National interest would override every EPA clause. The laws would bend. The capital would flow. America would scale production because it would have no other choice.
Until then, we wait in the middle. Plenty of minerals in the ground. No path forward that is fast, cheap, or politically easy.