By the end of the Biden administration, widespread policy failures became so egregious—from mass invasion from an open border policy, humiliating and costly withdrawal from Afghanistan, government-sponsored mass censorship, failing public schools, out-of-control federal spending, and near national bankruptcy—that the American people massively rose and voted for fundamental change.
Middle-class Americans are also waking up to the fact that it is not just the government that has failed the American people, but corporate and Wall Street elites who have hollowed out the American economy through the offshoring of American sourcing and manufacturing. During COVID-19, this became painfully apparent when America had to depend on hostile communist China for basic medicines.
But the greatest betrayal of all is allowing the safety and security of the American people to become fundamentally compromised. Today, the U.S. can no longer produce the all-important rare earth elements that are critically necessary to produce high-tech military weapons systems, like F-16, F-22, and F-35 jet fighters, drones, and AI-driven systems. Instead, the U.S. has become dependent on China. In fact, the U.S. Government admits that we rely on China for 100% of 20 key minerals and rare earth elements required by our high-tech defense systems.
Such government incompetence borders on treason.
As with the production of lithium and cobalt, which power electric vehicles, China also controls most of the global rare earth supply chain, including mining, processing, and refining. At present, the U.S. has only one operational rare earths mine. But we can’t process heavy rare earths, so we send the mine’s ore to China for processing.
The U.S. was, in fact, the largest producer of rare earths until the 1980s, and well-known companies manufactured rare earth magnets. How did this collapse of domestic independence and capability happen?
In short, it has been due to the Left’s long march through the institutions and the supplanting of America’s constitutional republic with an “administrative state,” also known as the “deep state.”
Over the last fifty years, Congress failed to properly oversee, rein in, and direct the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency EPA to support national security priorities and goals. Bureaucratic U.S. government agencies became peppered with progressives seeking political influence. And so, the administrative state of government agencies became increasingly politicized and hostile to developments such as logging, drilling, and mining, often under questionable pretexts of protecting nature or one or more endangered species.
While the media was preoccupied with the organized opposition to the high-visibility Keystone Pipeline Project, the Biden administration was quietly quashing other U.S. natural resource development, suspending mining projects and proposals, such as:
The Pebble Mine in Alaska—one of the greatest stores of mineral wealth ever discovered—and potentially the world’s largest undeveloped copper and gold resource, rich in palladium, molybdenum, and rhenium.
The Twin Metals and Duluth Complex Mines in Minnesota--rich copper, nickel, and cobalt deposits.
The Twin Pines Mine in Georgia—containing titanium, staurolite, and zircon.
In the name of “protecting the environment,” Biden and his elitist supporters of the radical green agenda bottled up America’s most valuable resources. Recently, S&P Global ranked the United States second to last among the top mining countries in the world based on the time it takes to tap a major deposit.
In estimated oil reserves, the U.S. previously ranked below Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Venezuela, and it was believed that oil and gas hydrocarbon deposits in the U.S. would run out in forty to fifty years. However, with advances in seismic geological analysis and breakthroughs in horizontal shale drilling and fracking technologies, America’s real and estimated oil and gas reserves exploded, making the U.S. number one worldwide. In 2018, under Trump, America became the world’s largest oil and gas producer.
Just as U.S. oil and gas reserves skyrocketed due to new discoveries and recovery technologies, the U.S. reserves of rare earth elements are much greater than previously estimated if only we create economic incentives and allow exploration on public lands, which has previously been prohibited.
The implications of President Trump’s February 3rd Executive Order No. 14196, titled "A Plan for Establishing a United States Sovereign Wealth Fund,” are revolutionary. What is likely to be unveiled soon is a masterful plan that will add tremendous wealth to the asset side of the U.S fiscal ledger. In fact, it will strengthen the U.S. balance sheet, adding the value of enormous previously undeclared natural resource assets to offset the $36+ trillion in national debt liability.
This sovereign wealth fund will maximize the stewardship of the United States' natural resource wealth, notably amplifying the financial return on our rare earth elements by supplying the defense industry. It will strengthen U.S. defensive capabilities and war deterrence by restoring the posture of being able to sustainably project unquestioned superior U.S. military power.
Even without including rare earth elements in the sovereign wealth fund, the domestic quantities of which are presently unknown, the value of just four known primary U.S. natural resources will dramatically strengthen the U.S. balance sheet:
U.S. oil and natural gas reserves total about $19.4 trillion
U.S. coal deposits total about $2.5 trillion
U.S. gold deposits total about $2.2 trillion
U.S. copper deposits total about $8.4 trillion
President Trump has received criticism for upending the status quo in the funding and size of the U.S. government. But suppose this sovereign wealth fund gets legs. In that case, President Trump may go down in the history books as the first president who did the impossible of simultaneously strengthening national defense and the national treasury.
Scott S. Powell is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. His timeless book, Rediscovering America, has been an Amazon New Release in the history genre for eight weeks. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1637581599. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org
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