Highlights

• Trump's revival of Mountain Pass and support for MP Materials marked historic progress towards rare earth independence by 2027.
• Achieving this goal requires an Operation Warp Speed-scale mobilization, not political victory laps.
• China controls 90% of global rare earth magnets through a 30-year industrial ecosystem that cannot be replicated with a single magnet plant.
• The U.S. faces a decade-long rebuild requiring $50 billion, compressed permitting, workforce development, and coordinated federal action.
• REEx's Six-Point Letter to President Trump outlines the minimum conditions for true independence:
  • Treating rare earths as a national security emergency
  • 12-18 month permitting
  • Unified financing
  • Guaranteed demand
  • Workforce pipelines
  • National coordination plan with a Critical Mineral Czar

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There is a moment in every geopolitical drama when optimism becomes its own kind of danger—when belief in progress begins to obscure the harder truth that the next mile will be far harder than the first. The United States has arrived at that moment in its rare earths and magnet story.

What David Merriman Said

So when the Financial Times (opens in a new tab) published a quietly devastating line from Project Blue’s (opens in a new tab) David Merriman—

“Detaching from Chinese rare earths and magnet materials by end-2027 would require vast amounts of finance, permitting, and workforce development,”

— …it felt less like analysis and more like a gentle intervention—one that quietly summoned the far less gentle warning Rare Earth Exchanges (REEx) has been sounding for months.

A reminder that no matter how enthusiastically Washington congratulates itself on its newfound resolve, the road ahead has not shortened. It has merely come into sharper focus.

Because for months now, political leaders have been telling Americans a comforting story: that after years of drift and dependency, the country has finally woken up; that the problem is now understood; that independence is within arm’s reach.

There’s some truth in that. But only some.

As far as waking up, leaders in the field just testified to bipartisan embrace. The historic congressional hearing laid bare the structural reality of America’s critical minerals crisis, revealing how China spent 30 years deploying subsidies, predatory pricing, and export controls to corner global rare earth and lithium supply chains—forcing U.S. factory shutdowns within days.

So what’s really needed for US rare earth independence?

1. A Real Awakening

For anyone who has followed America’s rare earth fortunes over the past decade, the last few years have been astonishing. Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. did something it had not done in a generation: it stopped pretending that the rare earth problem would solve itself.

He revived Mountain Pass, the only meaningful rare earth mine left in the United States.

He backed MP Materials in a way no administration—Republican or Democrat—ever had. And this has been the right thing to do.

He approved a ten-year Pentagon price floor for magnets, a move so unprecedented it startled even seasoned analysts.

He supported the first major magnet factory in Texas.

He forced American OEMs—automakers, tech companies, energy giants—to seriously reconsider “Made in America” not as an aspirational sticker but as a supply chain strategy.

These weren’t gestures. They were structural moves in a system that had been hollowed out and offshored for thirty years.

And they worked. MP Materials, thanks frankly to the brilliance of the management, has grown from eight employees to nearly a thousand.

Billions of dollars flowed into refining, separation, and magnet manufacturing. Foreign firms began quietly scouting U.S. locations. Even allies like Japan and Korea recalibrated their expectations, sensing that America might—finally—be serious.

This is what it looks like when a country begins to turn its head toward the mountain. But the miracle of the first steps does not guarantee miracles on steps two, three, or ten. And this is where the American narrative begins to part ways with the terrain.

2. The Scale of China’s Shadow

The truth—spoken discreetly by analysts and whispered more loudly by engineers—is that China did not simply build a lead in rare earth magnets. It built an ecosystem, as dense and interdependent as a rainforest.

More than 90% of the world’s magnets, 90% of the metal powders that feed them, the overwhelming share of separated rare earths, and nearly all of the heavy rare earths essential for precision motors and other highly engineered products, especially in defense, come from one country.

A decade ago, Washington dismissed this as a supply chain inconvenience. Now it understands it was a strategy.

And strategies—especially ones built over thirty years—are not undone in twenty-four months by a single magnet plant, no matter how patriotic.

So when Project Blue says that “vast amounts of finance” and “workforce development” are required, that’s diplomatic understatement. What they mean is this:

The U.S. is staring at a ten-year industrial mobilization.

And the clock has barely begun ticking. See “_Roadmap to Western Rare Earth Independence (With the Meter Running).”_

This is exactly why Rare Earth Exchanges published its Six-Point Letter to President Trump, outlining the bare minimum conditions for true independence along with herein, an articulated need for an Operation Warp Speed like national emergency push:

1. Treat rare earths (and critical minerals) as a national-security emergency—open this up to a network of collaborative nations.
2. Compress permitting from 5–10 years to 12–18 months.
3. Stand up a unified financing stack—DPA, EXIM, DFC, and a permanent price floor (otherwise within a few years there will be mass company collapse)
4. Guarantee multi-year demand through defense and industrial procurement, industrial hubs along with intensive downstream R&D
5. Create a national workforce pipeline for metallurgists, chemists, and magnet engineers, and other roles anticipating future demand based on R&D.
6. Build a coordinated national plan—no more disconnected pilot projects—include a Critical Mineral Czar.

3. The Ghost of Operation Warp Speed

Whenever Americans talk about speed and industrial miracles, the same analogy resurfaces: Operation Warp Speed.

If we could build, test, and deploy a new class of vaccines in under a year—something once thought impossible—then surely we can build magnets. And in theory, we could.

In principle, the United States still has that capacity. But Warp Speed succeeded for a very specific reason: the government admitted it was in crisis.

Washington said the quiet part out loud:

• We are behind.
• We are vulnerable.
• We must act.
• The market cannot do this alone.

That honesty made everything else possible: regulatory acceleration, unprecedented financing, rapid manufacturing scale-up.

Today’s rare earth narrative is the opposite. President Trump has said that America will soon have “more rare earth magnets than we know what to do with,” a sentence crafted to reassure—not mobilize.

But here is the paradox: You cannot declare a national emergency while simultaneously declaring victory.

Political triumphalism and industrial mobilization cannot live in the same room.

One suffocates the other.

4. What It Would Actually Take

If America genuinely wanted to detach from China by 2027—or even 2028—it would need to recreate the full logic of Operation Warp Speed:

• Up to $50 billion in federal funding (this is included in the R&D necessary for downstream—the Chinese are well ahead here for downstream applicability. See REEx “_China’s Rare Earth Downstream Strategy: Innovation, Patents and Owning the Future_.” 
• A coordinated national magnet program spanning DOE, DOD, DOC, and DFC, mindful of downstream demand peaks and valleys in the future
• A rare earth workforce pipeline with thousands of trained specialists, plus scientists applied to race for owning tomorrow
• Permitting reform compressing years into months
• Federal price supports for magnet alloys and oxides, along with intensive national labs R&D funding.
• A national magnet reserve
• Traceability and disclosure laws for finished goods
• A federal enforcement apparatus for imported magnets

None of that exists yet in any meaningful way.

Some of it hasn’t even been drafted.

And even if all of it appeared tomorrow, the U.S. would still face the last, stubborn bottleneck: the hundreds of millions of imported goods that arrive each year with Chinese magnets already welded inside.

Decoupling doesn’t just mean producing new magnets. It means re-wiring the industrial wardrobe of the entire modern economy.

That wardrobe spans motors, robotics, EVs, drones, domestic appliances, turbines, medical devices—virtually every corner of American life.

Replacing that embedded inventory is not a sprint. It’s a rebuild. A five-to-ten-year one.

5. The Work So Far Matters—But the Story We Tell Matters Even More

None of this diminishes the scale of what Trump accomplished. In many ways, he shocked a stagnant system back to life.

• He broke Washington’s reflexive habit of outsourcing strategic industries.
• He forced the national-security establishment to pay attention.
• He made rare earths a household phrase again.

That alone is an achievement with generational resonance.

But the temptation now—dangerous in its simplicity—is to confuse motion with momentum, and momentum with completion. That’s exactly what it is when POTUS declares we’ll have all the magnets we need by next year.

The United States has taken the opening steps of a long industrial march.

REEx has merely pointed out that the mountain ahead is higher than the one behind. And that brings us to the unavoidable truth: America can reclaim its rare earth destiny.

But only if it stops telling itself the job is already done. Independence must be chosen—structurally, not rhetorically. It must follow the logic of Operation Warp Speed (or some similar action), not the logic of campaign flourish and mid-term anticipation.

Because in the end, the question is not whether Trump’s early actions were historic. They were.

The question is whether America is prepared to complete the work it has begun—and whether the country can finally admit that independence demands more than headlines and a few deals here and there (albeit important ones). It demands a plan.

And the Rare Earth Exchanges Six-Point Letter and a call for an Operation Warp Speed-like action is, at this moment, the closest thing the nation has to one.

© 2025 Rare Earth Exchanges™ – Accelerating Transparency, Accuracy, and Insight Across the Rare Earth & Critical Minerals Supply Chain.