FROM SCRAP HEAP TO ARSENAL: Trump Moves to Keep Critical Minerals in America

President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act Thursday to help keep recoverable critical minerals inside the United States, striking at America’s dangerous dependence on Communist China while strengthening Nevada’s emerging mine-to-battery industrial base.

The presidential determination grants the Secretary of Commerce authority to restrict exports of mineral-rich waste, discarded batteries, rare-earth magnets and other recyclable materials considered essential to America’s national defense.

The order covers “black mass,” the crushed material left after lithium-ion batteries are processed; end-of-life rare-earth magnets and manufactured goods; metal shavings known as swarf; and other scrap containing critical minerals. Copper scrap is excluded because it is already covered by separate federal action.

What Washington once dismissed as industrial garbage is now being recognized for what it really is: a strategic reserve hiding in plain sight.

End-of-life batteries, magnets and electronics still contain valuable lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite and rare-earth elements. Those materials can be reclaimed, processed and returned to American factories instead of being exported abroad, refined by foreign competitors and sold back to the United States at Beijing’s pleasure.

Trump’s determination finds that America’s inadequate supply of recoverable critical minerals poses an increasing threat to national security and warns that dependence on foreign sources leaves defense supply chains exposed to serious, sustained disruptions.

That vulnerability reaches far beyond electric vehicles or consumer electronics. Critical minerals are embedded throughout advanced weapons systems, military batteries, communications equipment, permanent magnets and the infrastructure required to keep America’s armed forces ready for combat.

An F-35 cannot run on a climate pledge. A missile cannot be built with a diversity seminar. Modern military power requires minerals, factories, skilled workers and secure supply chains.

Communist China understands that reality better than generations of American policymakers who happily outsourced industrial capacity in exchange for cheap imports and temporary political convenience.

A recent U.S. Geological Survey review found that China produced 74 of the 77 mineral commodities studied and ranked as the world’s leading producer of 39. The Pentagon has separately warned that China controls the majority of global critical-mineral refining and rare-earth production and refining.

Beijing does not dominate those industries by accident. The Chinese Communist Party spent decades securing mines, subsidizing processors, undercutting competitors and positioning itself between American manufacturers and the materials they require.

The result was an industrial surrender disguised as globalization. America supplied the market, China controlled the supply chain and American workers were handed the pink slip.

Trump is now attempting to reverse that humiliation.

The Commerce Department can use the delegated authority to issue regulations, rules and procedures limiting the export of recoverable materials when necessary to protect the national defense. The administration has not yet announced which exports will be restricted, but the determination lays the legal foundation for keeping strategic scrap available to American processors.

That distinction makes Nevada especially important.

The Silver State was the nation’s leading mineral-producing state by value in 2025. A May presentation to the Nevada Commission on Mineral Resources described Nevada as the only state with companies participating in all seven stages of the lithium supply chain, from exploration and mining through battery manufacturing and recycling.

Nevada also contains America’s only operating lithium mine, with additional major projects under development. The state is home to lithium deposits, battery manufacturers, research institutions and recycling operations capable of turning yesterday’s discarded batteries into tomorrow’s industrial power.

Near Reno, Redwood Materials has been developing a closed-loop battery-materials campus designed to recover valuable minerals from end-of-life batteries and manufacturing scrap before remanufacturing them into materials for new batteries.

That is almost precisely the domestic cycle Trump’s latest action is intended to protect: American minerals extracted by American workers, processed in American facilities, used in American products and recovered for another round of American manufacturing.

For Nevada, the stakes include jobs, investment and economic diversification. A stronger domestic recovery industry means more of the value inside discarded batteries and equipment can remain in the Silver State instead of being packed into containers and shipped overseas.

Nevada should not merely dig the minerals while China performs the profitable processing. It can help build the entire arsenal, from the mine to the factory to the recycling floor.

Thursday’s action follows Trump’s March 2025 order to increase American mineral production and streamline permitting. Earlier this month, he also directed the Pentagon to map vulnerable defense supply chains, limit waivers allowing materials from hostile countries and help defense contractors qualify new domestic suppliers.

The strategy is now attacking the problem from both ends. America must mine more minerals from the ground and stop throwing away or exporting the strategic materials it already possesses.

Environmental activists have spent decades trying to strangle Nevada mining while demanding technologies that require enormous quantities of the very minerals, they refuse to let Americans produce. The result was not less mining. It was mining and processing outsourced to countries with lower standards, dirtier operations and governments openly hostile to the United States.

Trump’s approach is considerably less complicated: mine here, process here, recycle here and employ Americans here.

For a state forged by miners, that is more than an economic opportunity. It is a return to common sense.

Nevada helped build America with the wealth beneath its soil. It can now help defend America by ensuring the minerals inside its mines, batteries and industrial waste remain available to American workers and American troops.

The discarded battery is no longer trash. The factory shaving is no longer worthless. In the struggle against Communist China, every recoverable mineral is another chip America does not have to leave on Beijing’s table.

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