The US government will look to leverage the “world’s largest balance sheet” and unlock up to US$1.5 trillion of private capital mired in the country’s byzantine permitting processes to revive domestic mining and mineral processing at the same time as it seeks to expand a new international mining and metals trading bloc.
“We’re saying, mine, baby, mine,” US secretary of the interior Doug Burgum told a meeting of government and mining industry leaders in the country’s capital.
“The Department of the Interior has a role in that, in permitting our onshore and offshore resources. It is probably the most misnamed [department] in the world because it spans everything from Guam to the Caribbean; 14 time zones, 500 million acres of surface, 700 million acres of subsurface [and] 3.2 billion offshore acres all under management by the Department of the Interior.
“If it was a standalone company it would have the largest balance sheet in the world by far.
“But that would make me the head of a hedge fund that has the world’s worst returns … because in prior administrations we have been shutting down mines in the US and shutting down resource development.”
Burgum was speaking with Center for Strategic and International Studies Critical Minerals Security director, Gracelin Baskaran, on the eve of the first Critical Minerals Ministerial in Washington. CSIS hosted 43 foreign and other ministers at the government meeting and also mining industry leaders in the earlier forum. Baskaran said 2025 was “the most cataclysmic year for minerals … that we’ve had probably in the last 50”. This year would be more about breaking through barriers and converting policies into actions.
That’s the aim, anyway.
Burgum cited the February 2 announcement of Project Vault, an initiative combining $10 billion of US Export-Import Bank (EXIM) funding and $2 billion of private capital to build mineral stockpiles and set reserve prices, as an indicator of the Trump administration’s accent on speed. It was “two-times the largest deal the bank has ever done”. Trump didn’t have to go to Congress for the money.
“This way is much faster,” Burgum said.
“Tremendous teamwork across 10 different departments within the administration” was enabling rapid progress, he said.
Strategic petroleum reserves had “been a stabilising force in the world for a long time”. The US still had its strategic petroleum reserve “but with the shale revolution it’s much easier to just turn it on and start producing more oil”.
It will take similarly radical forces on many critical mineral fronts, but the US is back in the hunt to rebuild its in-ground mineral stocks.
Burgum said growing returns on that vast DoI balance sheet would involve the US Geological Survey, which was under his wing. “We also say, map, baby, map,” he said. “With USGS as part of our portfolio, getting them back in the mapping business [is a focus] because we know there are lots of resources even within US domestic publicly owned lands that we haven’t discovered or fully understood yet.
“If we go back 100 years the US was a dominant world energy producer and … pick any metal and the US probably had 30-40% market share. Today that’s flipped. It’s not the US and it’s not our allies [though allies such as Canada and Australia do produce vast quantities of key commodities].
“We can’t put ourselves in a position where one country can shut off supply of something as simple as magnets … which would shut down every automobile plant in the world.
“Typically in the United States we’re free market folks – we don’t like messing with markets – but if you have someone that’s dominant, who can flood a market with particular material, they have the ability essentially to destroy the economic value of a company or a country’s production. And so that’s where within this Club of Nations there would be a price floor so we can attract long-term capital and the private sector can get involved and make investments in mining and refining and they don’t have to worry about the bottom falling out of the market because of predatory trade practices.”
Beyond finding new mineral deposits in the DoI’s purview and getting more materials processed onshore Burgum wouldn’t have expected to have a conversation about US mineral-led industrial sovereignty without the world’s longest project permitting horizons coming up.
He said, with a broad smile, it had been “really fun … because the opportunity was so great for improvement”.
“The federal government is decades behind in applying IT to core processes. Any private sector company would be out of business if they were operating this slowly. But when you are a monopoly I guess you can take as long as you want.”
Burgum said work across various federal government agencies and departments – after a declaration of national energy emergency “gave us some new authorities” to move through the gears – had demonstrated approvals that took years could be delivered in weeks. There were plenty of naysayers threatening a legal Armageddon but Burgum is resolute in his belief new processes can survive inevitable court challenges.
“And this is before we apply AI and say, the thing that’s just been done has been done 80,000 times before: what if we use AI to cut a bunch of that work out and make it even shorter?” he said.
“If we want to super-charge the US economy one of the things we need to do is speed up permitting.
“It’s not even about new capital, it’s about getting the capital already approved deployed.
“There could be as much as $1.5 trillion of capital that’s been approved by boards in the private sector … and then the money sits there any doesn’t get spent because they can’t get a permit.
“We are absolutely a pro-growth and pro-business administration and so I would just say people have to recalibrate. If you are sitting around the board room complaining about how slow the government is … Give me a call and I will see if we can change that perception. And if you are having a real problem, give us names – who, where, which department – because our job is to literally go out and fix that.”
How the industry leaders in the audience respond to this offer will be interesting because most will have seen wild policy pendulum swings in Western governments – particularly in the US – over the past 25 years. Politics is not the same as sound public policy. Short-term pendulum swings in the US have been no match for China’s long-term plotting and execution in the global minerals and metals arena.
Do miners have longer-term US domestic trends to worry about?
“We graduated 36,000 lawyers in America last year,” Burgum said.
“We had 300 under-graduates with mining and metallurgical degrees.”
Might be some concerns there.
By – https://miningbeacon.com/industry/us-looks-to-draw-private-capital-back-into-mining