Latest news with #ClimateandCommunityInstitute
Atlantic
8 hours ago
- Business
- Atlantic
New Yorkers May Soon Be Grocery Guinea Pigs
New York City—where takeout is a food group and ovens are for storing clothes —may soon get into the grocery business. If he wins the general election this November, Zohran Mamdani, the new Democratic nominee for mayor, has said he will build a network of municipally owned, affordable grocery stores, one in each of the city's five boroughs. According to Mamdani, the city could help pay for the stores' rent and operating costs by taxing the wealthy, and the stores won't seek to turn a profit, enabling them to sell food at wholesale cost. In the vision Mamdani laid out in a campaign video, the stores' mission would be combating 'price gouging' by offering lower prices than corporate grocery stores. If Mamdani is able to pull this off—a huge if, given the economic considerations, as critics are quick to point out—it will be the first time in American history that a city of New York's size has commanded its own grocery stores. New Yorkers are in favor of the idea: Two-thirds of them, including 54 percent of Republicans, support public groceries, according to a March poll by the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank. But because nothing exactly like Mamdani's plan has ever been tried before in a large city, no one can be certain whether it will really be able to sell more affordable food, let alone help address food insecurity and health disparities in the city. What Mamdani has proposed is a $60 million experiment, with New Yorkers as test subjects. A couple of other large American cities are trying out similar plans, but what little real precedent exists for Mamdani's plan comes mostly from rural America. A handful of towns have opened municipally owned groceries, mostly because they had no choice: Small towns once relied on mom-and-pop shops, but these are vanishing as dollar stores proliferate and big-box retailers in larger rural cities monopolize the wholesale supply. Without a supermarket, residents have to either drive out of town for food or rely on convenience stores and dollar stores, which don't stock many healthy options. In 2018, the town of Baldwin, Florida (current population 1,366), lost its only grocery when the local IGA closed. It became a food desert: The next-closest supermarket was 10 miles away—not a simple trip for older adults who don't drive or for people without a car. The mayor proposed a municipally owned store, which opened the next year. In Kansas, the cities of St. Paul (population 603) and Erie (population 1,019) started their own grocery stores in 2008 and 2021, respectively. St. Paul had not had a supermarket since 1985. The fates of these stores and their hometowns have varied. Baldwin Market became a lifeline for many residents, particularly during the pandemic. But it struggled to break even and closed in 2024. Now the town largely relies on a handful of convenience stores and a Dollar General as it awaits the rumored opening of a new private grocery. Erie Market similarly struggled to balance its books. Operations were a challenge; the store sometimes stocked expired food, and its refrigerated section lost power after a thunderstorm. Last year, the city leased it to a private owner, who has yet to reopen the store. By contrast, St. Paul Supermarket has operated as a fully municipally owned grocery since 2013 (before that, it was funded by a community-development group) and shows no signs of closing. Its success has been attributed to community buy-in. Locals were motivated by the desire to preserve their city, fearing that the lack of a grocery store would drive away current residents and scare off potential new ones. 'It's a retention strategy, but it's also a recruitment strategy,' Rial Carver, the program leader at Kansas State University's Rural Grocery Initiative, told me. The primary goal of a municipally owned store is to get food to people who need it. But the city will have to decide which food to stock and, inevitably, will face questions about how those choices influence the diet or health of potential customers. (Imagine the criticism a Mamdani administration might face for subsidizing Cheetos—or, for that matter, organic, gluten-free cheese puffs.) Theoretically, getting people better access to any sort of food can have health benefits, Craig Willingham, the managing director of CUNY's Urban Food Policy Institute, told me. But so few examples of successful municipal grocery stores exist that there is virtually no research on their health effects. Research on the health impact of opening a privately owned grocery in a food desert has had mixed results. An ongoing study of a food-desert neighborhood in Pittsburgh has found that after a supermarket opened, residents consumed fewer calories overall—less added sugar, but also fewer whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. A 2018 study set in a Bronx neighborhood with few grocery stores linked the opening of a new supermarket to residents eating more vegetables and fruit and consuming fewer soft drinks, salty snacks, and pastries, but their spending on unhealthy foods increased along with their purchases of healthy ones. A new grocery alone won't change food habits, according to a 2019 study led by Hunt Allcott, an economist at Stanford. 'People shop at the new store, but they buy the same kinds of groceries they had been buying before,' Allcott told me. What does help nudge people toward buying healthier foods, he said, is making those foods affordable—while also taxing unhealthy items such as soda. With so little background information to go on, there's no telling how Mamdani's experiment will play out in a big city—or whether it will even get off the ground. New York differs from the sites of other municipal-grocery experiments not only in its size and density but also in its general abundance of grocery stores. Proximity isn't the major reason people can't get food, healthy or otherwise, Allcott said—cost is. From 2013 to 2023, the amount of money New Yorkers spent on groceries rose nearly 66 percent —far higher than the national average. The city's poverty rate—a metric based on the price of a minimal diet—is nearly twice that of the national average; from 2020 to 2023, one in three New Yorkers used food pantries. In Chelsea, a Manhattan neighborhood that is known for its luxury high-rises and is also home to a large housing project, some residents would rather take the train into New Jersey to buy groceries than shop at the expensive local supermarkets, Willingham said. Grocery stores are tough business. Profit margins are as slim as 1 to 3 percent, and prices are largely determined by suppliers, who tend to privilege volume. A single grocer (or the small network that Mamdani envisions) won't get as good a deal as a large chain. And running a store is hard, Carver told me: A manager needs to be nimble and adjust to customer demands, skills that municipal bodies are not exactly known for. In New York, at least, there's reason to expect that public groceries wouldn't actually be cheaper. Mamdani (whose campaign did not respond to a request for comment) has acknowledged that New York's city government might not be cut out for stocking shelves. If the pilot plan doesn't work, he said on the podcast Plain English last week, he won't try to scale it up. Yet he believes that it's worth trying. 'This is a proposal of reasonable policy experimentation,' he said. National grocery costs are expected to increase 2.2 percent this year, according to the USDA. Price hikes will hit poor Americans even harder if Congress passes President Donald Trump's megabill, which includes cuts to federal food-assistance programs such as SNAP. Among such threats to food affordability, the mere possibility of change could justify a trial of something new. Other large cities, too, are signing up as guinea pigs: Madison, Wisconsin, is in the process of opening a municipally owned store. Last year, Atlanta addressed food insecurity among public-school students and their families by opening a free grocery store—it functions like a food pantry but is stocked like a supermarket—funded by a public-private partnership. Its impact on health hasn't yet been studied, but demand is high. 'We do slots for appointments, and they're immediately gone,' Chelsea Montgomery, the adviser to operations of Atlanta Public Schools, told me. Mamdani's proposal is hardly the first unorthodox policy experiment New York has considered. The city took a chance on congestion pricing to reduce traffic and fund public transit, on universal pre-K to guarantee access to early childhood education, and on supervised injection sites to curb the overdose crisis. All have achieved their objectives. Perhaps, in a decade, millions of New Yorkers will get their organic, gluten-free cheese puffs on the cheap at a city-owned market. Or perhaps the whole project will go the way of the city's failed attempt to end poverty by offering cash in exchange for efforts to build healthy habits. The point of experimentation is to find out.
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
How Mamdani connects climate policy to his affordability agenda as he runs for New York mayor
As she canvassed for Zohran Mamdani in New York City on Tuesday last week, Batul Hassan should have been elated. The mayoral candidate – a 33-year-old state assemblymember – was surging in the polls and would within hours soundly defeat Andrew Cuomo on first preference votes in the Democratic primary election. But Hassan's spirits were hampered by record-breaking temperatures. In Crown Heights, where she was the Mamdani campaign's field captain, the heat index soared into the triple digits. 'I couldn't think about anything but the heat,' she said. 'It was so dangerous.' Early that Tuesday morning, Hassan visited a public school polling site, where elderly workers sweltered without air conditioning. The city board of elections sent over paper fans, but they were no match for the heat. Related: A roadmap to beat Trump? How rise of Zohran Mamdani is dividing Democrats If Mamdani is elected, that school could be retrofitted with air conditioning and green space to bring down temperatures as part of his green schools plan, or could even be transformed into a resilience hub for communities shelter amid extreme weather events. 'Seeing total infrastructural failure on election day emphasized the stakes of what's happening with the climate crisis and the importance of the election,' said Hassan, who took time off from her day job at the leftist thinktank Climate and Community Institute to canvass. Mamdani's green schools plan is just one of his schemes to slash carbon emissions and boost environmental justice. If elected mayor, his plans for New York City would make residents 'dramatically more safe' from extreme weather, said Hassan. But the democratic socialist, who was endorsed by the national youth-led environmental justice group Sunrise Movement and student-led climate group TREEAge, did not place the climate crisis at the center of his campaign, instead choosing to focus relentlessly on cost-of-living issues. The model could help build popular support for climate policies, supporters say. 'Climate and quality of life are not two separate concerns,' Mamdani told the Nation in April. 'They are, in fact, one and the same.' Over the past two decades, Democrats increasingly focused on the climate. But often, their proposed schemes have been technocratic, Hassan said. Carbon taxes, for instance, can be impenetrably complex, making them difficult candidates for popular support. They can also be economically regressive, with 'working class people experiencing them as an additional cost', Hassan said. More recently, Joe Biden coupled climate plans with green industrial policy and plans to boost employment. But even those projects can take years to affect tangible change, critics say. As president, for instance, Biden achieved historic climate investments in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). But its green incentives disproportionately benefited the wealthy, and its job creation remains invisible to most people around the country. One poll found only a quarter of Americans felt the IRA benefited them. 'Now with Trump, we see the pitfalls of the IRA, where there is real difficulty in consolidating enough political support to defend those climate policy achievements,' said Hassan. Mamdani 'learned from some of the mistakes' of the Biden administration, said Gustavo Gordillo, a co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which supported Mamdani's campaign. His housing plan, for instance, aims to lower planet-heating pollution by boosting density, but his signature promise is a rent freeze. That pledge could ensure residents are not priced out of New York City and forced to move to more carbon-intensive suburbs, and prevent landlords from passing the costs of energy efficiency upgrades or air conditioning installation to renters, preventing displacement, said Hassan. Similarly, Mamdani's headline transit goal was to make buses faster and free, which could boost ridership and discourage the use of carbon-intensive cars. 'Public transit is one of the greatest gifts we have to take on the climate crisis,' Mamdani said at a February mayoral forum. Biden's IRA placed little focus on boosting public transit, said Gordillo. This was a missed opportunity to cut emissions and also lower Americans' fuel costs, he said. 'We need to expand mass transit to fight the climate crisis, which hasn't been a priority for the Democratic establishment,' said Gordillo, who is an electrician by day. 'But we also need to expand it because we want to improve people's lives right now.' As a New York assemblymember, Mamdani has backed explicitly green policies. He was a key advocate for a boosting publicly owned renewable energy production. The effort aimed to help New York 'live up to the dream of our state as being a climate leader', he said in 2022. He also fought fossil fuel buildout. He coupled that climate focus with efforts to keep energy bills low, consistently opposing local utilities' attempts to impose rate hikes, said Kim Fraczek, director of the climate nonprofit Sane Energy Project. 'His growing political influence is a clear win for communities demanding a just transition: renewable power, democratic control and relief from crushing energy costs,' said Fraczek. Progressive cities like New York are often climate leaders. But if they price out working people, only the wealthy get to see the benefits of their green policies, Mamdani's backers say. By crafting popular climate policies, the Democratic nominee is also building a base of New Yorkers who will work to defend those plans in the face of threats from the Trump administration, they say. 'New Yorkers want an affordable city, clean and green schools, fast and free buses, and a rent freeze,' said Daniel Goulden, a co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America ecosocialist working Group. 'But most importantly, New Yorkers want a future – one where they can live and thrive in New York.'
The Guardian
13 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
How Mamdani connects climate policy to his affordability agenda as he runs for New York mayor
As she canvassed for Zohran Mamdani in New York City on Tuesday last week, Batul Hassan should have been elated. The mayoral candidate – a 33-year-old state assemblymember – was surging in the polls and would within hours soundly defeat Andrew Cuomo on first preference votes in the Democratic primary election. But Hassan's spirits were hampered by record-breaking temperatures. In Crown Heights, where she was the Mamdani campaign's field captain, the heat index soared into the triple digits. 'I couldn't think about anything but the heat,' she said. 'It was so dangerous.' Early that Tuesday morning, Hassan visited a public school polling site, where elderly workers sweltered without air conditioning. The city board of elections sent over paper fans, but they were no match for the heat. If Mamdani is elected, that school could be retrofitted with air conditioning and green space to bring down temperatures as part of his green schools plan, or could even be transformed into a resilience hub for communities shelter amid extreme weather events. 'Seeing total infrastructural failure on election day emphasized the stakes of what's happening with the climate crisis and the importance of the election,' said Hassan, who took time off from her day job at the leftist thinktank Climate and Community Institute to canvass. Mamdani's green schools plan is just one of his schemes to slash carbon emissions and boost environmental justice. If elected mayor, his plans for New York City would make residents 'dramatically more safe' from extreme weather, said Hassan. But the democratic socialist, who was endorsed by the national youth-led environmental justice group Sunrise Movement and student-led climate group TREEAge, did not place the climate crisis at the center of his campaign, instead choosing to focus relentlessly on cost-of-living issues. The model could help build popular support for climate policies, supporters say. 'Climate and quality of life are not two separate concerns,' Mamdani told the Nation in April. 'They are, in fact, one and the same.' Over the past two decades, Democrats increasingly focused on the climate. But often, their proposed schemes have been technocratic, Hassan said. Carbon taxes, for instance, can be impenetrably complex, making them difficult candidates for popular support. They can also be economically regressive, with 'working class people experiencing them as an additional cost', Hassan said. More recently, Joe Biden coupled climate plans with green industrial policy and plans to boost employment. But even those projects can take years to affect tangible change, critics say. As president, for instance, Biden achieved historic climate investments in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). But its green incentives disproportionately benefited the wealthy, and its job creation remains invisible to most people around the country. One poll found only a quarter of Americans felt the IRA benefited them. 'Now with Trump, we see the pitfalls of the IRA, where there is real difficulty in consolidating enough political support to defend those climate policy achievements,' said Hassan. Mamdani 'learned from some of the mistakes' of the Biden administration, said Gustavo Gordillo, a co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which supported Mamdani's campaign. His housing plan, for instance, aims to lower planet-heating pollution by boosting density, but his signature promise is a rent freeze. That pledge could ensure residents are not priced out of New York City and forced to move to more carbon-intensive suburbs, and prevent landlords from passing the costs of energy efficiency upgrades or air conditioning installation to renters, preventing displacement, said Hassan. Similarly, Mamdani's headline transit goal was to make buses faster and free, which could boost ridership and discourage the use of carbon-intensive cars. 'Public transit is one of the greatest gifts we have to take on the climate crisis,' Mamdani said at a February mayoral forum. Biden's IRA placed little focus on boosting public transit, said Gordillo. This was a missed opportunity to cut emissions and also lower Americans' fuel costs, he said. 'We need to expand mass transit to fight the climate crisis, which hasn't been a priority for the Democratic establishment,' said Gordillo, who is an electrician by day. 'But we also need to expand it because we want to improve people's lives right now.' As a New York assemblymember, Mamdani has backed explicitly green policies. He was a key advocate for a boosting publicly owned renewable energy production. The effort aimed to help New York 'live up to the dream of our state as being a climate leader', he said in 2022. He also fought fossil fuel buildout. He coupled that climate focus with efforts to keep energy bills low, consistently opposing local utilities' attempts to impose rate hikes, said Kim Fraczek, director of the climate nonprofit Sane Energy Project. 'His growing political influence is a clear win for communities demanding a just transition: renewable power, democratic control and relief from crushing energy costs,' said Fraczek. Progressive cities like New York are often climate leaders. But if they price out working people, only the wealthy get to see the benefits of their green policies, Mamdani's backers say. By crafting popular climate policies, the Democratic nominee is also building a base of New Yorkers who will work to defend those plans in the face of threats from the Trump administration, they say. 'New Yorkers want an affordable city, clean and green schools, fast and free buses, and a rent freeze,' said Daniel Goulden, a co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America ecosocialist working Group. 'But most importantly, New Yorkers want a future – one where they can live and thrive in New York.'
Forbes
5 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Why New Yorkers Want Public Grocery Stores
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JUNE 24: New York mayoral candidate, State Rep. Zohran Mamdani (D-NY) speaks to ... More supporters during an election night gathering. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images) Getty Images The Democratic mayoral primary victory of New York City's Zohran Mandani has attracted global attention. The 33 year old from Queens won due to an impressive grassroots field campaign and a focus on economic justice issues. At the top of that agenda are publicly-owned grocery stores, which would be a first for the sprawling metropolis. But New York City already has thousands of grocery stores. Why would America's largest city want to road test such a plan? Mamdani's proposal would establish a pilot program of municipal grocery stores with the goal of providing affordable groceries to New Yorkers. Recent polling from Data for Progress and Batul Hassan of the Climate and Community Institute (CCI) shows the idea resonating with New Yorkers. Two-thirds of New York City voters (66%) support a proposal to create municipal grocery stores, including a strong majority of Democrats (72%), as well as a majority of Independents (64%) and Republicans (54%). Grocery costs are a top concern for New Yorkers. Climate and Community Institute/Data For Progress The polling found that 85% of New Yorkers are paying more for groceries now compared to last year and 91% of New Yorkers are concerned about how inflation impacts what they pay to get food on the table. Four out of five households in New York report finding it harder to afford groceries over the last year. More than half of all families struggle to cover basic expenses. These household economic strains are at crisis levels, and the private sector cannot solve for them in the current economic climate. Two-thirds of New Yorkers polled (66%) support the creation of municipal grocery stores in New York ... More City. Climate and Community Institute/Data For Progress Syndicated market data from NIQ shows that grocery prices have spiked over 32% since 2019. Prices have shot up even higher in many ultra processed food categories such as snacks, frozen foods and meat that make up over 60% of America's calories. Such categories are usually dominated by a handful of companies. Market concentration in the grocery industry has enabled processed food conglomerates to raise prices and generate enormous profits, all while actual food consumption has been stagnant since 2019, vastly increasing food insecurity. According to CCI's Hassan, the resources needed to establish a public grocery program are infrastructure within the city's control. Grocery store planning and rollout would be driven by communities, incorporating the food preferences of people in the neighborhoods. Some grocers have expressed skepticism at the idea, including the billionaire owner of Gristedes and D'Agostinos, who has threatened to close stores. But publicly owned grocery stores are quite common and already exist at scale—in the U.S. military. Every branch of the military has its own public grocery system, called an exchange or PX, that provides goods and services for enlistees. These include groceries, commissaries, department stores, gas stations and convenience stores, the same services that many full service grocers provide for civilians. The exchanges provide basic consumable goods, tax-free, and generate over $4.6 billion in annual revenue across 236 commissaries. This size enables commissaries to leverage supply chain efficiencies at the level of any national grocery chain. If the PX were a U.S. grocery chain, it would rank in the top 20 by sales nationally. How much of a stretch would it be to municipalize such the PX model, especially if there were a large scale, committed effort to build multiple locations quickly and create the efficiencies of scale to make it viable? Exchanges keep their costs down by operating as cost (not profit) centers, with a 2-3% percent gross margin, while budgeting labor and administrative expenses, rent, occupancy and utility costs centrally and not through each operating unit. This math means exchange prices can be 30% lower than typical retail prices, and saved military families and veterans over $1.6 billion in 2023. By comparison, independent and specialty grocers typically run at 35-40% gross margins, while national chains such as Walmart and Kroger run at 22-25%, all to cover their costs and generate a thin profit margin, usually 2-5% of sales. Lower costs and massive profits are the result of massive sales volumes that give bigger chains market power with suppliers, especially due to lax enforcement of antitrust laws such as Robinson Patman. This is also why smaller independent grocery operators, such as those that dominate the New York Metro area, typically have higher prices and high operating costs. Like a post exchange, a civilian-facing public grocery option could take some of these costs out of the consumer price equation. FT. BELVOIR, VA - MAY 31: Commissary at Ft. Belvoir in Ft. Belvoir, VA. (Photo by Bill O'Leary/The ... More Washington Post via Getty Images) The Washington Post via Getty Images Military exchanges still rely on the same supply chains as the private sector, stocking familiar brands and products. For example, the wholesaler SpartanNash, which was just acquired by C&S Wholesale, is a large supplier to military exchanges. A network of New York City public grocery stores could leverage city purchasing power to negotiate strong wholesale contracts and keep markups low, as well as buying food directly from local growers and producers in the Northeast. And public grocers could require vendors to meet values-based purchasing standards, such as those being implemented in New York City's public schools. Such standards emphasize healthier, whole food options, fair wages for workers, environmental impacts and diversifying supply chains. In South Korea, such public investment in 'precautionary' supply chains ensures that public institutions have access to healthy, safe and sustainably grown products. In New York City, it could mean healthier options are also the most affordable, turning typical grocery value chains on their head. Public grocery stores could therefore operationalize the Right To Food, an idea supported by over 80% of Americans. A public grocery option would not be a utility, which would imply a monopoly. New York would still have a thriving and diverse grocery sector, from Food Bazaar to Trader Joe's, to thousands of immigrant-owned bodegas, even Gristedes- if they want to stay open. Nor would it be a charity vehicle, dependent on donated or lower quality products from grocers, wholesalers and processors. A public grocery sector could instead be a backstop, a vital public service and an expansion of the safety net in the tradition of the New Deal, one that bridges affordability and access for cash-strapped New Yorkers. With the Trump Administration delivering a one-two-three punch of raising grocery prices through tariffs and trade wars, sharply cutting back on SNAP food assistance and not enforcing antitrust laws to ensure fair competition, a public grocery option presents a proven, pragmatic and timely policy solution. In an era of constant supply chain crisis and disruption, Mamdani's idea for public grocers is not any more radical than the Pentagon. But it has captured the imagination of hard-working New Yorkers hungry for change.
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's Critical-Minerals Obsession Is Leading to Some Weird Places
Alongside tariffs, DOGE, and chaos, Trump's thirst for 'critical minerals' has quickly become one of his young administration's defining features. Even before taking office, Trump floated the idea of invading Greenland, home to the world's sixth-largest uranium deposits and its second of a subset of minerals known as 'rare earths.' Vice President JD Vance is set to visit later this week. Over the last several months, federal officials have pursued deals with Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of Congo promising peace and security in exchange for access to those countries' mineral deposits. Last week, a sprawling executive order outlined a wonky list of efforts to boost domestic production of everything from lithium to gold. 'It is imperative for our national security that the United States take immediate action to facilitate domestic mineral production to the maximum possible extent,' the order states, blaming 'overbearing Federal regulation' for undermining homegrown extraction. Already, two contradictions are clear in the Trump administration's approach: First, by aggressively intervening in the private sector, Trump's critical minerals strategy would expand rather than shrink the administrative state, as the White House has pledged to do. Second, it isn't likely to resolve the considerable problems facing the United States' fledgling critical mineral mining sector—some of which the administration's other policies are exacerbating. 'Unlike many of these other efforts coming out of the White House, this executive order includes a lot of really granular administrative state actions. It says we don't just need de-regulation. We also need money and institutions,' says Thea Riofrancos, strategic co-director of the Climate and Community Institute and author of the forthcoming book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. 'DOGE is currently destroying the administrative state.' 'Critical minerals' is a term of art referring to a range of materials used in the production of everything from semiconductors to electric vehicles and missiles. While there's no standard definition for what precisely makes a mineral 'critical,' the Department of Interior has its own list of 50 minerals that it says meet the definition, last updated in 2022 and subject to review every three years. The first Trump administration amended the list in 2018 to include lithium, cobalt and more than 30 other substances. The Biden administration's review excluded some that had previously been included—helium, potash and uranium—while adding others. Last week's executive order applies to the existing list as well as uranium, copper, potash and gold. The order empowers the recently-formed National Energy Dominance Council—chaired by Interior Secretary Doug Bergum—to determine 'any other element, compound or material' eligible for the kinds of support it outlines. Though it doesn't explicitly promise new funds, which would need to be authorized by Congress, the support the executive branch could offer might be immense. The wide-ranging order instructs government departments and agencies to conduct a rapid review of mining projects to fast-track through federal permitting processes, expedite approvals and solicit industry feedback on 'regulatory bottlenecks and other recommended strategies for expediting domestic mineral production.' It directs the interior secretary to prioritize mineral production and mining as the 'primary' use for federal lands identified as having mineral deposits and reserves, 'consistent with applicable law.' The order further empowers the White House to use the Defense Production Act as a means to direct federal funding capacities toward 'domestic production and facilitation of strategic resources to advance domestic mineral production.' That includes funds—like those from the Export-Import Bank and Development Finance Corporation—which have traditionally been used to support investments abroad. These sorts of actions aren't entirely unusual. Under the control of both Republicans and Democrats, the U.S. has long gone out of its way to support extractive industries in the name of national security. It's in line with Trump's no-holds-barred pursuit of 'energy dominance,' building on efforts during his first term to expand critical minerals production alongside oil and gas drilling by any means necessary. This time around, though, the White House is taking a somewhat bizarre approach: while lavishing generous support on mining and refining firms to boost extraction in the name of national security, it's also attacking predecessors' progress toward the same goal. The Biden administration generally expanded on the first Trump administration's efforts to foster domestic metals and mineral supply chains as it staked out a more hawkish position on China. Owing to decades of investments at home and abroad, coordination across state-owned enterprise, trade controls and planning, that country now refines nearly 70 percent of the world's nickel, 40 percent of its copper, 59 percent of its lithium, and 73 percent of its cobalt, per a 2022 report from the Brookings Institution. Shortly after taking office, the Biden White House launched a review of U.S. critical mineral and material supply chain vulnerabilities. The previous administration disbursed more than $300 million through the Defense Production Act, as well, to build domestic rare earth processing capabilities, explicitly aiming to reduce U.S. reliance on China. Biden never talked about invading Greenland, but his administration certainly wasn't shy about exerting influence over the country's resources. U.S. and Danish officials lobbied Tanbreez Mining—the cash-strapped company that was developing the country's largest mineral deposit—against selling to a Chinese-owned firm. Tanbreez did eventually sell to the New York-based firm Critical Metals. That company's third-largest investor is Cantor Fitzgerald, the brokerage firm that Howard Lutnick ran before stepping down to become Trump's Commerce Secretary. The company has been in talks with defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing to purchase supplies from mining operations in Greenland. The Democratic Republic of Congo—home to some of the planet's largest cobalt and copper reserves, as well as a brutal war—was the centerpiece of Biden's only trip to Africa. In late 2024, he travelled there to promote the so-called Lobito Corridor, where the U.S., European Union, G7, and private firms (including Critical Metals) are spending billions on mining and infrastructure development as part of a series of partnerships with the governments of the DRC, Zambia, Tanzania and Angola. The initiative is a bid to compete with China, whose firms control more than two-thirds of the country's copper and cobalt mining operations as a result of longstanding investments and infrastructure spending. Trump has taken a less multilateral approach in looking to negotiate a security-for-minerals deal, championed by Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi. And rather than embarking as Biden did on a partnership for minerals with Canada—home to some of the world's largest mining conglomerates—Trump has threatened to make Canada the 51st state. Charitably speaking, the Trump administration is focusing more on what are known as the upstream parts of the minerals supply chain (i.e. mining and refining) than Biden, whose White House emphasized investments further downstream in areas like battery manufacturing and recycling. The Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS and Science Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act—which Trump and fellow Republicans have vowed to scrap—subsidized exploration, extraction and processing along with the production of lithium-ion batteries, solar panels and other technologies that require critical minerals, plus infrastructure to support that manufacturing and increase the adoption of electric vehicles. Though Biden often spoke about the importance of those technologies for fighting climate change, his administration was just as explicit about supporting such investment as a means of eroding China's global dominance in these sectors. Last September, the White House boasted in a fact-sheet that companies had announced more than $120 billion worth of investments in battery and critical minerals supply chains since Biden took office, and claimed that the U.S. was on track to supply more than one-fifth of global demand outside of China by 2030. 'After years of ceding ground to China,' the fact-sheet argues, 'we are now winning the competition for the 21st Century, protecting our industrial base and creating good jobs, and strengthening our energy and national security.' Trump's more guns-blazing approach to securing minerals means that the administration could find itself caught in a web of contradictions. The trade war he's stoking with China, and longtime allies like Mexico, Canada and the European Union, threatens to drive up already inflated production costs for upstart domestic mining companies struggling to court investors. That hostility is also encouraging foreign governments to safeguard their own access to those resources, providing the small handful of firms that dominate mineral supply chains with other, potentially more reliable investment options abroad. 'Miners and the refiners are in a really bad way right now.' says Chris Berry, an independent analyst focused on battery metals supply chains. Among the core challenges are the fact that 'metals prices are too low to justify investment,' he told me, and that 'the cost of building a mine or refinery has exploded' over the last several years thanks to rising interest rates and production costs. While these dynamics are a problem for companies that already dominate the market for many so-called critical minerals—most of which are headquartered in Asia, and many in China—U.S. firms looking to break into mining and refining lack experience and relationships with buyers. Given just how far the U.S. lags behind its international competitors in mining and refining those materials, taking a sledgehammer to government R&D via indiscriminate DOGE cuts won't help, either. The White House's pledge to nuke many existing subsidies aimed at boosting the consumption of critical minerals threatens to dry up critical sources of domestic demand, frustrating U.S. extractive firms' efforts to ink the kinds of supply deals with manufacturers that can assure investors they won't be wasting their money. 'He definitely wants to reduce trade imbalances around resources. He seems less interested in what the resources are used for,' Riofrancos says of Trump. 'He just really doesn't explain why particular resources are important. I'm not sure if that's the limits of his brain, or the fact that he wants more mining and doesn't care about the end uses.' The military contractors and AI developers in Trump's orbit are plenty hungry for minerals in some general sense, and Riofrancos notes that a focus on mining is something of a 'crowd pleaser' for various arms of the Trumpist coalition: from economic nationalists who want to reduce trade imbalances and Make America Great Again to Silicon Valley titans eager for chips and cheap energy to power data centers. But the U.S. is a long way off from being able to extract, process and sell the materials the White House wants at a scale that would make it a critical minerals superpower. Whereas the U.S. accounted for roughly a third of global lithium production in 1995, it produced just 1 percent as of 2021. Between 2013 and 2020, by contrast, China expanded its lithium processing capacity sevenfold, compared to a 10 percent expansion in the rest of the world. Bluster and resource grabs and executive orders can't wish away that gap. 'I don't think that we're going to be able to—nevermind beat the Chinese—but I don't know if we're going to be able to catch up,' Berry says. 'We're very sensitive here to low metals prices and capex and returns. They're not worried about quarterly earnings statements. They've said that, in 5 years or 10 years, we want to dominate rare earths, or lithium. We're bellyaching, saying, 'What do you mean it costs $1 billion and 5 years to build that?' But that's what it costs and that's what it takes.'
