Highlights
- The United States remains dangerously underprepared in rare earth elements, with China dominating the entire supply chain from mining to magnet production.
- Critical gaps exist across upstream (mining), midstream (refining), and downstream (manufacturing) sectors, requiring significant investment in education and infrastructure.
- Solving the rare earth challenge demands a holistic approach focused on building knowledge, training workforce, and creating integrated industrial capabilities.
Despite the strategic importance of rare earth elements (REEs) for defense, clean energy, and high-tech manufacturing, the United States remains dangerously underprepared across the entire rare earth supply chain. Despite two executive orders now from President Donald Trump, and frankly, a decade-plus of talk from the U.S. political establishment, the U.S. is becoming ever more dependent on the People’s Republic of China. From mining to magnets, America is decades behind China—not just in infrastructure, but in knowledge. The problem is systemic, spanning upstream (mining), midstream (refining and separation), and downstream (magnet-making and end-use product manufacturing). If the U.S. is serious about achieving rare earth independence, it needs more than tariffs and executive orders. It needs an industrial education renaissance.
UPSTREAM – A Fragmented and Fading Mining Education Base
Rare earth mining begins with geology, extraction, and beneficiation—skills traditionally taught at mining universities. In the U.S., institutions like Colorado School of Mines, the University of Arizona, Missouri University of Science and Technology, and the South Dakota School of Mines have long carried this banner. However, over the past two decades, mining engineering programs have experienced a decline due to decreasing domestic demand, environmental concerns, and the offshoring of production.
Today, fewer than a dozen universities offer robust mining programs. Most of these focus on traditional commodities—coal, copper, gold—not rare earths, which occur in low concentrations, require advanced beneficiation, and often co-occur with radioactive elements like thorium. Rare earth deposits aren’t easy—they’re geochemical puzzles requiring deep mineralogical expertise. But the U.S. has trained far too few people to solve them.
While companies like MP Materials at Mountain Pass are revitalizing extraction, the workforce pipeline is shallow. According to the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration (SME), mining programs in the U.S. graduate fewer than 300 students per year, in total. Of those, only a handful will ever work on rare earths. That’s not a workforce; it’s a rounding error.
The fix? The Department of Energy, Department of Defense, or perhaps Department of Commerce must dramatically expand scholarships, grants, and research centers focused on rare earth mining. Public-private partnerships should flourish. Curriculum should integrate mineral processing, radioisotope handling, and environmental permitting—all critical to rare earth extraction. A National Rare Earth Mining Institute, anchored at one or more land-grant universities, would be a good start.
MIDSTREAM–Where the U.S. Is Most Vulnerable—and Most Ignorant
If upstream is weak, midstream is nearly non-existent. China controls more than 85% of global rare earth separation and refining capacity. Why? Because midstream rare earth processing is not traditional “smelting,” it’s advanced chemistry, more akin to petroleum refining than mineral mining.
This is where the real bottleneck lies. Separating neodymium from praseodymium, dysprosium from terbium, and extracting thorium safely—all of this requires solvent extraction, ion exchange, acid leaching, and precision metallurgy. These are not core competencies in U.S. mining or chemical engineering programs. In fact, few American universities teach solvent extraction at all, let alone for rare earths.
MP Materials is building midstream capabilities at Mountain Pass, but the facility remains years away from achieving full-spectrum processing, and the expertise is limited. Other players, such as Energy Fuels, Ucore Rare Metals, and Texas Mineral Resources, are advancing pilot projects; however, most rely on imported knowledge or joint ventures. The bottom line: China has a 25-year head start and a deeply embedded knowledge ecosystem. The U.S. has pilot plants, trade shows, and press releases.
The fix? America must invest in rare earth processing centers of excellence. That means partnering with countries that have rare earth expertise but aren’t strategic adversaries. Candidates include Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and France. Joint faculty appointments, co-developed curricula, and binational graduate programs are essential. Brookhaven National Laboratory, Ames Lab, and the Critical Materials Institute have made inroads, but they cannot scale alone.
Moreover, the Trump administration should establish a National Rare Earth Processing Institute, or something similar. This would coordinate research, scale pilot plants, and train chemists and metallurgists in the kind of precision separation science China mastered in the 1990s.
DOWNSTREAM – America Can’t Build What It Can’t Design
The final step in the rare earth value chain is where raw materials are transformed into products—magnets, motors, sensors, guidance systems, electric vehicle drivetrains, and wind turbines. Unfortunately, the U.S. has outsourced this capability almost entirely. NdFeB permanent magnets—the backbone of modern defense and clean energy systems—are produced almost exclusively in China, Japan, and South Korea. As of 2025, there is still no large-scale neodymium magnet manufacturing facility operating in the United States.
Yes, things are changing. Businesses like USA Rare Earth and Noveon Magnetics are emerging. Of course, MP Materials inked a deal with General Motors. Niron Magnetics is working on non-rare-earth magnet production.
Government grants are beginning to flow. But the base of knowledge—material design, magnet manufacturing, precision sintering, heat treatment—is limited. U.S. companies lack the technical depth, trained workforce, and supplier ecosystem that East Asian firms have built over decades. Defense contractors have resorted to importing magnets and motors from adversarial supply chains because they have no choice.
The fix? The Trump administration must act decisively. First, establish a Defense Magnetics Initiative under the Defense Production Act to fund the development of new facilities, equipment, and training centers. Second, require federal contractors to source magnets domestically within five years and provide subsidies for the transitional costs. Third, develop partnerships with Japanese and South Korean firms willing to license technology and co-locate facilities in the U.S. Magnet-making should be treated as a critical capability on par with semiconductor fabrication or nuclear engineering.
Just as DARPA seeded the U.S. computing revolution, the Department of Defense or a designated agency must seed a domestic rare earth magnet renaissance. That means long-term contracts, innovation grants, and a clear signal: the United States is back in the rare earth game.
Knowledge Is the Real Shortage
The rare earth problem isn’t just about digging holes or building refineries. It’s about knowledge and integrated systems. China didn’t win the rare earth war by accident—it invested in people, institutions, and infrastructure for 30 years. The U.S. treated rare earths like a commodity, then woke up in a supply chain trap.
Fixing this will take more than executive orders. It will take all sorts of investment, including in a full-spectrum education strategy—one that trains geologists, chemists, metallurgists, engineers, and machinists to work across the value chain. Universities must modernize curricula. National labs must accelerate translational research. The industry must train the next generation, not just poach from the previous one.
America once dominated the rare earth landscape. It can do so again—but only if it stops thinking like a miner and starts thinking like a systems engineer.
Tags: Rare Earth Elements, MP Materials, Critical Minerals, Mining Education, Processing, Midstream Refining, Permanent Magnets, Trump Administration, Industrial Policy, Defense Supply Chain
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