Revisiting the National Critical Minerals Council Act and Critical Materials Future Act

Among the many recent and past critical minerals policy proposals introduced over the past couple years, which might a new Congress prioritize? China’s recent export restrictions on germanium, gallium, and antimony to the U.S. pose a clear reminder of domestic critical mineral supply chain vulnerabilities. Yet, efforts to strengthen those supply chains will remain incoherent if policymakers keep pursuing only sporadic, disconnected initiatives.

Successfully alleviating staggering import reliance for these and other minerals like graphite and dysprosium requires sustained efforts to diversify volatile markets concentrated in adversarial countries. Opportunistic project grants, limited research and development efforts, and blunt permitting reforms cannot meaningfully or durably achieve such market shifts at scale. To secure critical mineral supplies for advanced energy and defense technologies, the U.S. federal government must increase overall support for the sector as part of a coordinated framework. Otherwise, domestic industry efforts will remain limited, sensitive to market disruption, and slow to grow.

The National Critical Minerals Council Act (NCMCA) and the Critical Materials Future Act (CMFA), both introduced in September 2024, constitute two fresh policy proposals that represent an important step forward from past piecemeal approaches. The first draft bill would coordinate whole-of-government critical mineral supply chain efforts around a national critical minerals strategy. The second establishes a pilot program with the authority to use price support mechanisms that help de-risk new domestic projects and protect them from market manipulation and volatility.

To date, policy support for and public investment in the critical minerals sector have often lacked defined, specific goals or an explicit, broader, more holistic strategy. Reforms that add additional agency staff or enforce stricter length limits on agency environmental review documents, for example, might accelerate permitting lead times for mining projects, modestly improving the business case for new mineral projects in the U.S. But permitting barriers constitute only one of many factors discouraging investment in domestic mine projects, while an increase in domestic mining itself by no means guarantees that mined minerals stay within friendly supply chains during subsequent supply chain steps like downstream processing.

Policymakers have also often treated critical minerals as a monolithic category rather than as 50 distinct commodities, many subject to unique considerations. Such thinking has encouraged proposals that dilute federal support and fail to prioritize the most at-risk commodities. For example, making projects across the entire mining sector eligible for the FAST-41 accelerated permitting program runs the risk that program administrators might have to sift through a wide range of applications, not all of which carry the same national strategic value. In practice, the FAST-41 program covers an even wider array of energy and infrastructure projects beyond the mineral sector. Such broad coverage has resulted in only a single domestic mineral project—the South32 Hermosa zinc-manganese mine— currently benefiting from the FAST-41 pipeline.

The national critical minerals strategy the NCMCA calls for can channel federal efforts to maximize national benefits through functions such as identifying five top-priority critical minerals. To inform this prioritization and fill important knowledge gaps, the bill proposes centralized tracking of Chinese industry activity to highlight supply chain vulnerabilities and risks, such as assessment of Beijing’s recently revised export restriction frameworks for rare earth, gallium, germanium, and graphite shipments. The strategy would also promote meaningful real-world outcomes by establishing benchmarks to assess the success of supply chain efforts and update national priorities as critical commodity markets change over time.

In addition to providing coordination, the NCMCA recognizes the need for foreign partnerships. Critical mineral policy discussions often narrowly focus on increasing domestic capacities and onshoring supply chain segments. While downstream processing industries can always establish new U.S.-based capacity, the U.S. cannot onshore the upstream mining of many mineral commodities due to limited geologic resources.

The council the NCMCA establishes would embrace this reality by promoting the U.S. as a partner for projects and agreements abroad. Though the current draft version of the bill does not clarify if the council has the authority to execute specific arrangements, it would, nevertheless, codify the role of international coordination into the national strategy. In doing so, the council would encourage policies that would secure raw materials the U.S. cannot sufficiently produce itself, supplement shortfalls of other commodities while onshoring efforts take effect, and discourage disruptive market practices by engaging with partners and allies.

Meanwhile, the CMFA calls attention to an important area policymakers have neglected so far: direct intervention in critical mineral markets. In recent decades, policies have generally favored grants and loans, which have successfully helped bring critical mineral projects online by defraying high capital costs as an entry barrier. However, niche critical mineral markets often confront opaque, uniquely volatile price conditions, strongly influenced by state-affiliated Chinese producers with sizable global market shares. Such volatility has shuttered even critical mineral projects that received federal support like the Idaho Cobalt and Mountain Pass rare earth operations. Therefore, prospective mine operators may still hesitate to pursue projects despite the availability of federal grants. While price support mechanisms may seem contrary to free market principles, Chinese production of these critical commodities already involves muscular state intervention that has perpetuated highly unfair terms for market competition. Policymakers must recognize that strengthening critical mineral supply chains will require sustained, multifaceted support—or else risk repeated failures, wasting federal resources in the process.

The CMFA would address this oversight by launching a 5-year pilot program, authorized to employ innovative financial tools that can help critical mineral facilities weather market disruptions and price volatility. Equipped with $750 million, the program would support at least 3 domestic processing facilities using financial mechanisms, including price supports to prevent closures during market downturns, or advanced market commitments to bolster liquidity for new market entrants. The program’s selection criteria prioritizes facilities that have secured agreements to supply downstream companies in domestic and allied jurisdictions—a stipulation policymakers have too often neglected when designing support mechanisms for the critical minerals sector.

Congress has introduced an ambitious docket of critical mineral legislation in recent years. Now, lawmakers must work towards a consensus on the most effective way to put the many valuable ideas such bills propose into practice. Without a larger coordinating strategic framework and a set of countermeasures to combat market interference, other narrower critical mineral initiatives such as identifying supply chain vulnerabilities through the Critical Minerals Security Act or coordinating mining and mineral processing research under the Unearth Innovation Act risk faltering. Consequently, one hopes that in 2025 the new Congress will take up such ideas once more, and set the nation on a path towards developing a coordinated federal critical minerals strategy armed with effective tools.