The One Trade Washington Won't Fight Over

On June 7, 1939, with Europe less than three months from war, Franklin Roosevelt signed a law most Americans have never heard of.

It was called the Strategic and Critical Materials Stock Piling Act. A Democratic senator from Utah named Elbert Thomas introduced it that February, and the idea behind it was simple.

If a war ever cut America off from the raw materials it needed to build warships and bombers, the country should already have a supply sitting in a warehouse.

It didn’t take long to find out how right he was.

Within three years, Japan had overrun Southeast Asia, the source of most of America’s natural rubber and a big share of its tin.

And Washington ended up rationing tires and racing to build a synthetic rubber industry from scratch in the middle of a world war.

That’s where the word “critical” comes from in this conversation.

It’s a national security word first. The economics come second.

And 87 years later, it’s still the one subject in Washington where the two parties mostly stop fighting and start writing checks.

That matters a lot right now, because last week’s midterms just handed both chambers of Congress to the Democrats. And if you own anything tied to the domestic mining push, you might be wondering whether the money is about to dry up.

I don’t think it is. And here’s why…

What Makes a Mineral “Critical”

There’s a legal definition for “critical” now, and it came from the Energy Act of 2020.

You see, in order to make the federal list, a mineral has to matter to America’s economic and national security. Its supply chain has to be vulnerable to disruption. And manufacturers have to depend on it to make a product.

In plain English: we need it, we can’t easily replace it, and somebody could cut us off.

The U.S. Geological Survey keeps the official list, and it keeps getting longer…

The first version, published in 2018, had 35 minerals. The 2022 update had 50. And the final 2025 list, published last November, has 60.

And the newest additions tell you how much the thinking has changed.

Copper and silver made the cut, along with potash, lead, rhenium, and silicon. So did uranium and metallurgical coal at the Department of Energy’s request, and phosphate at the request of the USDA.

To build that list, the USGS modeled 1,200 different supply disruption scenarios across 84 commodities and asked one question: how much would it hurt the U.S. economy if this one got cut off?

And the answers weren’t comforting.

In fact, according to USGS data, the United States is 100% dependent on imports for 16 critical minerals.

And China processes or refines roughly 70% of the world’s critical minerals. But for the rare earths that go into permanent magnets, the International Energy Agency puts China’s share of refined output at 91%.

Why the Whole Chain Matters

Now, here’s the part a lot of investors miss…

Owning a deposit doesn’t solve the problem.

Because a mineral has to be mined, then separated and refined, then turned into a usable material, and only then built into a finished product like a magnet or a battery cell.

And America can dig plenty of rock; but where we fall short is the middle of that chain, the processing and refining, and that’s exactly where China has built its advantage over the last 30 years.

Just think about what that means for a second.

An F-35 needs rare earth magnets. So does the electric motor in your car and the servos in a factory robot.

Gallium and germanium go into chips and military electronics. And battery makers can’t build a grid battery without lithium and graphite.

The saying goes that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

And it applies here because if any one link in that supply chain runs through a country that can turn off the tap, the whole thing is exposed.

Beijing has shown it knows that. And it started requiring export licenses for seven heavy rare earths in April 2025, expanded the list that October, and then agreed to pause the newer restrictions as part of a trade truce.

That pause was set to expire on Tuesday. Thankfully for us, the day before, China’s Commerce Ministry extended it, but only to January 10.

That’s a two-month leash. And everyone in Washington, regardless of party, can see who’s holding it.

Three Administrations, One Direction

Now look at what Washington has done about it, and pay attention to who did what.

In December 2017, President Trump signed Executive Order 13817, which directed the government to identify critical minerals and reduce our dependence on foreign supply.

That order produced the first list of 35 in 2018.

In 2019, Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, and Senator Joe Manchin, then a Democrat from West Virginia, introduced the American Mineral Security Act.

It became the core of the Energy Act of 2020, which passed as part of the year-end spending package and was signed by Trump in December 2020. And that’s what put the definition of “critical mineral” into federal law.

Then a Democrat moved into the White House…

Now, you might expect a new administration to toss out its predecessor’s priorities. But Joe Biden did the opposite.

And in his first month in office, he signed Executive Order 14017, ordering a 100-day review of America’s critical mineral supply chains.

Then, his administration expanded the list to 50 in 2022, and a month later invoked the Defense Production Act to boost domestic production of battery minerals.

In 2025, Trump came back and pushed even harder.

A March 2025 executive order called for immediate measures to increase American mineral production. The list grew to 60.

And in February of this year, the White House launched Project Vault, a $12 billion critical minerals stockpile backed by a $10 billion Export-Import Bank loan and $1.67 billion in private money, with GM, Boeing and Google among the companies signing on.

It’s modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And I guarantee you that FDR would recognize the idea immediately.

And you can see the same continuity at the company level.

MP Materials (NYSE: MP), which runs the only scaled rare earth mine in the country at Mountain Pass, California, got Pentagon funding in 2020 under Trump, more Pentagon funding in 2022 under Biden, and then in July 2025 a $400 million equity investment plus a 10-year price floor of $110 per kilogram for its magnet material.

And Lithium Americas (NYSE: LAC) got its federal permit for the Thacker Pass lithium project in the final days of Trump’s first term. Then the Biden administration backed it with a $2.26 billion Energy Department loan. And last year the Trump administration took a 5% equity stake in the company.

Two parties. Three presidential terms. And every administration kept what the last one built and then added to it.

That almost never happens in Washington.

Congress Is On the Same Page

And the cooperation goes well beyond the White House when it comes to critical minerals…

Case in point: this year in March, the House unanimously passed the Critical Mineral Consistency Act.

It was co-led by Susie Lee, a Nevada Democrat, and Juan Ciscomani, an Arizona Republican, and it would merge the Interior and Energy Department lists so that more materials qualify for federal tax credits and financing.

Then, on October 1, a group of senators introduced the National Critical Minerals Council Act to create a single White House-level body to run national minerals strategy.

Look at the names: Democrats John Hickenlooper and Jacky Rosen alongside Republicans Thom Tillis, Tim Sheehy, Kevin Cramer, and Mike Lee.

Hickenlooper summed up the problem about as well as anyone has: “China doesn’t need to fire a shot. It just needs to stop a shipment.“

You won’t find many issues where Hickenlooper and Mike Lee put their names on the same bill, but this is one thing they can agree on.

What Last Week’s Results Change

So let’s talk about the midterms…

Democrats gained at least 33 seats in the House and won control of the Senate with at least 54 seats. But the president still has the veto pen.

And that’s a recipe for two years of gridlock on just about everything that makes cable news.

But think about how a divided government works: most bills die before seeing the light of day.

And the ones that survive are the ones with names from both parties already on them. Critical minerals bills fit that description better than almost anything else in the hopper.

The new majority will likely want more oversight of the federal stakes in companies like MP Materials and Lithium Americas.

That’s fine. Oversight is about how the money gets spent. But nobody in either party is arguing that it shouldn’t be spent at all.

And remember, Democrats aren’t new to this…

Biden’s administration wrote the Defense Production Act orders and the multibillion-dollar loans.

Hickenlooper and Rosen, two of the senators behind the minerals council bill, are now in the majority.

Meanwhile, Beijing’s January 10 deadline keeps the issue on the front page.

And no politician in either party wants to explain to voters why a car plant or a missile line in their district shut down because a shipment from China never showed up.

The Man I’d Ask About Where the Money Lands

Now, me… When I want to know where that money is going to end up, I walk down the hall to Keith Kohl.

You see, Keith runs our sister publication, Energy and Capital, and he’s the investment director behind Energy Investor.

He’s spent nearly two decades covering energy and natural resources, and he’s built his reputation by getting there first.

He called the Bakken shale boom before it hit the mainstream and drove out to North Dakota and the Alberta oil sands to see the plays for himself.

He was also early on uranium and rare earths before Wall Street caught on.

And over the past year, he’s spent his time tracking Washington’s push to reopen American mines.

Keith points out that modern defense depends on dozens of critical metals the U.S. barely produces. And he’s found one small mining company that he believes sits right at the center of Washington’s effort to rebuild that supply chain at home.

Keith first made that case when the push was coming hard from the White House. But last week’s election doesn’t change the math behind it.

If anything, it proves the point. This is the rare priority that survives a change in power, because both parties already own it.

He’s put together a full presentation on the company and why he thinks it’s positioned to benefit. I suggest you give it your full attention.

Because Washington is going to fight about almost everything over the next two years.

But I guarantee you it won’t fight about this. It hasn’t since 1939.