> My house was so difficult to walk through with the years of stuff piled up. Much easier now that it's all been burned to the ground!

For anyone who's dealt with a hoarder house that's not the reducto ad absurdum you think it is, just the tragic reality.

Please say sike

Actually...that sort of works.

Yes, and here's some nuance: based on my experience, the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient.

To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable.

Those in the general public who thinks that government budgets should increase monotonically are a linear combination between total idiots and outright politically malicious.

They do. DoD made a deal with MP Minerals (Mountain Pass, CA) in 2024. DoD will buy rare earths at a guaranteed price which is well above the world price.[1]

This followed a 2021 deal with General Motors to insure GM's magnet supply.[2] That resulted in building a modest magnet plant in an industrial park in Texas, using MP Minerals ore.

This deal expanded in 2025, with DoD taking a majority stake in MP Minerals.[3]

The history here is that the price goes up and down so much that the Mountain Pass mine has been shut down twice since the 1990s. There were two bankruptcies. The most recent glut and price crash was in 2015.[4]

The process has four steps: 1) mining, 2) beneficiation, where mixed rare earth ores are separated out, 3) chemical separation, where the individual rare earths are separated, and 4) magnet metal making. For years, 3) wasn't done in the US, and MP Minerals was shipping ore to China for processing.

[1] https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...

[2] https://investor.gm.com/news-releases/news-release-details/g...

[3] https://mpmaterials.com/news/mp-materials-announces-transfor...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP_Materials

There is nothing rare about rare earth minerals. The only thing is that it's expensive to extract them by American workers vs Chinese workers which is why all the business went to China. The prices will have to go up in order for it to be "worth it" but now that it's a national security issue, maybe more effort will be put into this.

Of course they do. The SR-71 was built with Russian titanium that the Russians believed was going to be used in pizza ovens. There’s no reason to think schemes like that ever stopped. Or that that was the first time. My guess is most countries have been doing it for as long as they have been trading.

There is historical precedent for this. As I understand it the US was only able to make the SR71s by sourcing Soviet titanium for the airframe in this manner.

nope, china has 90% of the market, and some of the rest are probably just secretly from china

> friendly (or neutral) 3rd party countries

Well... In 2024 there were things like that.

Ever wonder why there was a sudden spike in antimony, gallium, and germanium shipments from Thailand - a country that does not produce either of the 3 at scale - this summer?

That said, much like smuggled GPUs - it is difficult to transship an export controlled material at scale.

I’m shocked you thought the government was ever functional enough to do something like that.

That's the plan as part of the Minerals Security Partnership - US, Japanese, Korean, Emirati, EU, and other members capital would go into Australian, Canadian, and other countries with large enough deposits to build an ex-China supply chain.

The current admin has made it rocky, but the rest of the countries are still participating in it.

No free country can compete

Right, especially since we've made anyone that knows anything in the government unemployed. It'll be almost impossible to hire back even a small portion of the experts in 3 years.

It's going to be a rough couple of decades.

That's not even the real waste in DOD. The real waste is mostly in failed projects. Projects that either never deliver, or deliver years late and millions or billions over budget, typically with reduced features. They'd have to buy a million of those hot cups to come close to the waste that occurs due to these failed projects.

DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem.

The idea behind DOGE was to

1. fire people who don't automatically support Trump regardless of the law/constitution/good of the nation 2. Fire people who Trump or maga dislike for some reason (LGBTQ, minorities, people who have ever criticized Trump) 3. Destroy government in general (from people on the ideological right who are willing to set aside any principles to work for Trump)

Reducing waste or making government efficient was never one of the goals. Otherwise they wouldn't have gotten rid of people doing actual oversight work for the government. They also wouldn't have fired so many people on whims (that they had to take back in many cases)

I've been the one selling the "$1,280 mug", not in America, and not to the military, but to state and federal governments all over the place.

It's always the same problem: They write "requirements" that end up being total nonsense, they have an unlimited budget, and they're terrified that they'll get "in trouble" for some slight oversight. This is a recipe for overspending, and is the bane of all such organisations everywhere.

The reason that DOGE had a snowball's chance in hell of fixing government overspend is that this can't possibly be achieved by merely cancelling a few hundred contracts out of millions!

The dynamic has to change, by realigning incentives and changing the rules, but DOGE did not have that power.

Not to mention that nobody knows how to do this at the scale of the US government! Nobody. I don't have the answers, Elon doesn't, neither does anyone else like Peter Thiel.

They keep talking about how the government is bad, but they don't have an alternative that wouldn't be subject to the exact same forces and produce an equally bad (or even identical) outcome.

the US can embargo Windows updates

That's actually a funny and real example. For a long time there was a heat map that showed where the concentration of MSIE 6 was. It was China because every copy of Windows was pirated and may have also had government keys hard coded in the pirated copies. They were locked at the patch level the pirated version was made from and it was impossible to patch it otherwise.

Either way the US has nearly unlimited amounts of rare earth material in raw form. Its just much more expensive and time consuming to process it in the US and US regulations make it even more expensive. China does not follow our environmental laws and we breath the output of that. That's why they are processed in China. Processing it in the US would reduce global pollution for a hefty price.

It's much easier to smuggle a USB drive with Windows updates than it is a few tonnes of metal.

Then China will switch a billion desktops to Linux and the US will still need rare earths.

Is this a serious question? China probably has the full source code of Windows, which has leaked before and could be obtained easily by spies abroad who are employed at Microsoft. They also don't need Windows. They make practically all the computer gear, or enough of it that they can get by in a war. We need to make real essential goods to sustain ourselves, not a bunch of spyware products and "service industry" gigs.

I don't think that lake tailing pond even exists any more.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mildred+Lake,+AB+T9K+2Z1/@...

Check the previous dates. 2018 yes, 2022, no.

That is a whataboutism.

This isn't about China or the size of the lake, but the fact that there is a lake because the effluent is difficult to dispose of and currently has no use.

Edit: to further clarify, I am not against refining them in the USA. Just that we have to also address the consequences of doing so.

Would outsourcing the dirty production combined with a strategic stockpile of processed materials (and some processing capacity) be a smart solution?

Let China process the materials under normal circumstances, but keep 6 months of processed output on hand in case trade is disrupted (trade disagreement, pandemic, war, etc.).

Yep! And we just struck graphite in the US, in the middle of bumfuck nowhere in New York. A little county (well, geographically large), 2800 square miles, 100,000 or so people, and we've struck the first graphite in the US...

...and we were just looking for zinc!

https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/52342/202...

I was going to say the same. Let China destroy their land and everyone else just buy what they need. When that’s all gone only then mine your own land.

Subsidized by the Chinese government.

The US mines many elements domestically, so why the sudden environmental concern specifically with rare earths?

Is there evidence that China’s rare earth mining creates more environmental damage than US coal, gold, or other domestic mining operations?

The real issue seems to be strategic: China made rare earth supply security a policy priority, while the US relied on market forces to handle supply chains.

I like nature and care about the environment. I care about my fellow man, I want them to be able to work a safe job with good pay and have the ability to provide for their family.

With that being the case, how can I in good conscious take a position that would lead to mining and manufacturing being done in any country that is not enforcing environmental and safety regulations? In any country that is not paying a living wage?

So yes, I want mining and processing done here. I want the manufacturing jobs here. We want clean air and clean water, we have to pay for it.

Curious why this is downvoted, as this matches my understanding. We have strong (ish) environmental and worker protections in the US that other countries don't have.

These are good things, but they make it a lot more expensive to do this stuff domestically.

Mining and processing is very dirty.

Have you tried building a subsurface well? Last project didn't want to build one even though the desal plant would otherwise have negatively impacted local wildlife, including marine animals in and around sensitive estuary habitat.

That and brine are legitimate concerns.

Also cost. The desal project in Huntington Beach was projected to increase local water prices.

Golf courses use a minuscule fraction of California's total water supply. Many of them are now irrigated by gray water.

The major fresh water use is mostly agriculture. We need to eat, but on the other hand a lot of that water ends up getting used to grow alfalfa for export to Saudi Arabia: profitable for certain farmers, not great for the rest of us.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar...

If you're operating under the idea that we can't expand the supply of water, then you basically believe California is full. It would then follow that you would be against immigration, since more people would only exacerbate the problem.

Mining is industrial chemistry. If you dig up a bunch of lead or arsenic that is mixed with some other metal you actually want, you have to put that arsenic or lead somewhere. You can covert it to different forms of lead or arsenic but they will always contain those elements. At which point, the only question is how much money you want to spend to convert those toxic waste products into a specific form that may be more manageable or slightly less toxic when you dump them. When we talk about "downsides" to mining, this is the elephant in the room because we can't make those elements not exist and mining will always produce them.

Most metals commonly occur together with specific other metals in nature. For example, it is rare to find silver and zinc without a lot of associated lead. You can't make that lead disappear and we still need silver and zinc.

> spend some of your research budget on figuring out how to do the mining without the downsides.

Well now see that'd be government spending and the majority of our voters/government don't want none of that

Tangentially, attending the USGS talks gave me a huge appreciation for the excellent, useful work that (some?) of our federal agencies do, which just made me that much more livid at the senseless cuts that DOGE & Republicans have done.

I feel like we'll see more and more of that style of ownership in the US when it comes to mining. We're already seeing the government buying stakes in semiconductor companies, as well as subsidizing manufacturing.

Mining seems like it should be firmly on the list of things that are of national security importance.