C3 Solutions recently co-hosted a roundtable on critical minerals policy, bringing together representatives from government, the policy world, and industry to work through a question that is becoming more urgent in Washington: how the United States can secure the mineral and rare earth supply chains needed for its energy, computing, and defense sectors. Held under Chatham House rules, the conversation covered the policy solutions needed to bring new domestic production online, build robust allied partnerships, and foster innovation to improve supply chain reliability. A few takeaways stood out because they show that the problem is largely one of our own making.

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Permitting is the clearest example. Participants noted that the timeline for discovery-to-extraction of minerals in the U.S. averages roughly 29 years, compared to about five in peer jurisdictions like Canada and Australia. That gap isn’t based on differences in our resources or available capital; it results from differences in how mining is regulated and is compounded by open-ended litigation exposure that undermines the economics of mining and refining projects and scares off investors. Participants also agreed that a durable legislative fix will matter more than speedy but volatile executive solutions. Executive actions can accelerate existing and proposed projects, but because the next administration can reverse them, they leave developers exposed to political volatility that predictable rules would not.

The need for durable solutions, especially to self-imposed constraints, resurfaced in discussions of international cooperation and removing obstacles to innovation. Secure supply chains will depend on partnerships with allies, and those work best when treated as genuine two-way relationships between nations with differing objectives. Washington should view critical minerals policy as a place to find compromise with friendly nations rather than as an extension of domestic policy. For instance, accepting that some defense-related demand may need to be opened to trusted partners like Australia and the United Kingdom rather than reserved for domestic projects alone. On innovation, participants identified the central difficulty as commercialization, not scientific breakthroughs. Funding research into new technologies does not, by itself, mean those technologies can meet the cost, purity, and throughput thresholds needed to be competitive.

The key lesson is that policymakers must first remove self-imposed constraints. That lesson needs to guide how Washington approaches the critical minerals problem. Before instituting sweeping policies that risk creating costs and distortions worse than the supply disruptions and Chinese dependence they aim to solve, Washington needs to weigh the benefits of intervention against its costs.

As the roundtable illustrated, permitting reform leads the list. Without it, new domestic mining or refining may not get built even with heavy government support. Removing trade barriers ranks just as high. Tariffs on friendly nations, especially Canada and Japan, raise the cost of the most realistic near-term alternatives to China while also straining ties with the very nations we should be compromising with to build more robust supply chains. Neither reform requires a difficult cost-benefit tradeoff. They simply stop us from working against our own interests, which makes them and similar fixes the natural place to begin.

Only after that does it make sense to weigh targeted fixes for genuine vulnerabilities. More robust stockpiling, focused on defense needs, could safeguard sectors where the national security risk of a sudden cutoff is highest. Modest efforts to reduce the technical uncertainty of certain high-risk, high-reward innovations, or to address specific problems like workforce development, might be warranted, so long as we remain cognizant of potential pitfalls and put clear limits in place. In an extreme case, more substantial interventions could offset proven, existing market distortions, such as limited countervailing duties to counter Chinese state support for its own minerals industry. But each of these should stay narrow, subjected to explicit boundaries, and clear a genuine cost-benefit test rather than be motivated by panic over our “critical” needs.

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The throughline must be that the risk of true market failure is always weighed against the risk of government failure. China’s dominance of key minerals and the fragility of others’ supply chains do create a legitimate vulnerability. But the current concern is likely overblown. Our long access to cheap minerals has convinced us we cannot live without them, yet markets have a remarkable ability to adapt, often in ways inconceivable to policymakers trying to predict the future. 

Government, by contrast, is rigid, and its incentives are frequently misaligned with what is best from an economic standpoint. A costly, permanent response to a threat that proves smaller or shorter-lived than feared is far harder to unwind than it was to enact. The prudent course is to clear away the constraints of our own making and escalate only where a clear and legitimate need for intervention can be justified on the merits.

Read C3 Solutions’ unattributed summary of the roundtable here.