Published
June 23, 2026
Twenty-nine years. That is the average time it takes to permit a mine in the United States. China controls roughly 60 percent of the world's critical mineral processing capacity. And the materials at stake — lithium, cobalt, rare earths — are not optional inputs. They are the physical foundation of electric vehicles, MRI machines, defense systems, and the semiconductors powering the AI revolution.
At the recent U.S. Chamber Critical Minerals Summit, the message from lawmakers, regulators, and industry leaders was consistent and urgent: America has a narrow window to act, and the clock is already running.
“Right now, we have a permitting process that's taking decades, which is not acceptable," said Rep. Jeff Hurd (R-CO). "As long as we have these supply chains running through particular parts of the world, you're going to be at risk in the future."
Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) put it in starker terms: "America cannot build again unless we are drilling and mining again. Everything begins with permitting reform, and our future begins with permitting reform."
The federal regulatory burden, she noted, now costs American households more than $14,000 per family per year — a figure that lands differently when you understand how much of that burden falls on the extractive industries the country most urgently needs to revive.
But focus shifted to moving past diagnosis toward the harder question of what durable solutions look like. On that front, Madeleine Bugel of the Department of Energy offered a genuinely encouraging signal: the interagency machinery is already moving.
"It has been really cool to see how much interagency coordination there's been and how collaboratively everyone has been working," she said. "There's not going to be a perfect fit for every single person in the critical mineral space. Everybody is in different stages. Different targets need different sorts of tools. That's what we're really working on coordinating to ensure government efficiency." The challenge, in other words, is not that Washington lacks the will. It is that the policy architecture still needs to catch up to the level of urgency.
That gap between urgency and architecture is most visible at the geopolitical level. Ben Kincaid of ReElement Technologies Africa framed American governance standards not as a compliance burden but as a genuine competitive asset.
"The world has woken up, the U.S. government has woken up, our allies have woken up, to the urgency of securing independent critical mineral supply chains," he said. "An American strength, if you look at home, is we are by far the most investable country in the world because we have rule of law, we have transparency, we have recourse, you have predictability across that entire spectrum."
The Export-Import Bank is already trying to deploy that advantage. Chief Banking Officer Brian Greeley described a strategy focused on securing supply at every stage of the value chain — upstream raw materials, midstream processing, and the finished products that American manufacturers need. His read on the political environment was direct: "The administration is dead serious about this, and I also think Congress, on both sides of the aisle, are dead serious about reshoring supply chains, ensuring that non-allied nations don't have a stranglehold on some of the most critical materials that not just our warfighters need, but — you need to be able to make a washing machine, you need to be able to make an MRI machine, you need to be able to make a truck."
The critical minerals debate can drift into abstraction — rare earth oxides, processing capacity, strategic reserves — but the downstream stakes are entirely concrete. Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) kept pulling the conversation back to that reality. "Let's make sure we have sufficient incentive to dig mines and keep those mines operational," he said. "That is the greatest security blanket we can have." On permitting reform specifically, he was unsparing about the cost of delay: "The opportunity cost of waiting another couple of years to get permitting reform done — if we don't do it this year, then that's an enormous cost. It's a national security risk if we don't get this done."
Young also offered another key insight: the only reforms that will actually hold are the ones built to last across administrations. "The only way to have enduring change is to make bipartisan laws." Rep. Hurd echoed that directly, warning that "wildly shifting policies" are themselves an investment deterrent — that regulatory whiplash is as damaging to long-term capital commitment as bad regulation. Mining and refining projects operate on decade-long timelines. Investors need to know the rules will still be in place when the project comes online.
Rep. Rob Wittman (R-VA) offered the clearest picture of what is ultimately at stake. "We all need to make sure we are producing products domestically, and that we're protecting our own national security by doing so," he said. "Diversity of source materials is the certainty that we need for our industries here in the United States." His prescription? Build a marketplace that is strategic, resilient, and well-supplied — one that runs on American strengths rather than trying to out-subsidize Beijing. "Free markets work better."
The ingredients for success are understood, and the political will is building on both sides of the aisle. The question is whether Washington can move fast enough to matter. As Sen. Young put it, the cost of waiting is not abstract — it is measured in mines not built, supply chains not secured, and industries left exposed. The work of the next Congress is to make sure that cost stops compounding.
About the author
Ruth Demeter Hayes
Ruth Demeter Hayes is the Senior Director for Policy at the Global Energy Institute.
