Trump Has A Plan To Break China’s Mineral Grip. It Needs Workers First.

A Trump administration plan to bolster American critical minerals production by training more miners won’t loosen China’s chokehold on the sector, according to industry executives and mining school officials.

The White House pledged $180 million last week to double by 2028 the number of mining school graduates with the skills necessary to work in the critical minerals sector. But even if that plan succeeds it won’t produce a fraction of the number of workers that the rapidly expanding industry requires.

It also ignored a fix that industry and mining school representatives say would help quickly — bringing in foreign workers.

“The administration should consider alliances or treaties with certain nations, such as India,” to source skilled workers said a senior executive of a rare earth magnet producer, who, like others, was granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of their comments. “Those working critical minerals or magnets should be treated like royalty — their skills are a national asset.”

That’s not a direction the White House is interested in pursuing. “President Trump’s priority is American workers,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said when asked why foreign workers weren’t part of the administration’s critical mineral workforce expansion plan.

At the same time, mining firms also have to contend with the data center boom, which is siphoning away skilled labor.

Industry concerns underscore the mismatch between the Trump administration’s ambitions to dramatically expand rare earth mining and processing through billions in federal funding and the numbers of skilled workers who can actually do the job.

One issue — existing schools can’t quickly scale up to accommodate the surge in new students that the government-funded expansion expects.

“We graduate around 150 to 200 students a year, but current demand is probably three to four times that,” said Aaron Noble, the head of the mining and minerals engineering department at Virginia Tech, which will get a share of that government funding. “When you layer on top of that these growth ambitions around mining to increase our production of critical minerals, the gap’s going to widen and that makes me very nervous.”

In the meantime, foreign workers could help bridge the labor gap. But the Trump administration has been dramatically cutting the programs — including work-based green cards as well as H-1B and foreign student visas — that have long provided a pipeline of skilled foreign talent into the U.S. workforce.

Companies are struggling to find the workers to build their facilities.

“We’re hitting a shortage of pipe fitters and electricians because we’re competing against data centers for those workers,” said another critical mineral company executive. Foreign workers would address that shortfall but “that comes with really complicated visa and taxing issues,” they added.

Some U.S. companies are increasing automation of their operations using artificial intelligence and other technologies to make up the difference, but say there’s only so much that can do.

“Automation can support this workforce gap to an extent, but that is only once you’ve proven a method or process that works at production scale,” said the senior executive of a rare earth magnet producer. “AI can be a tool but it is not a solution to work force development.”

The administration funding includes $100 million in Department of Energy support for the country’s 14 mining schools to “revitalize the next generation workforce” and an additional $80 million in Defense Department cash to three schools “to train the next generation of geologists, metallurgists and mining engineers,” the White House said in a statement last week.

Neither the Defense Department nor the Energy Department responded to requests for comment.

The Trump administration has made it a priority to break U.S. reliance on Chinese sources of those materials. They include antimony, necessary to produce car batteries and munitions; samarium, which goes into cancer therapies and precision weaponry; and germanium, which is a key to the production of both solar cells and military night vision equipment.

And the federal government hasn’t given schools clear guidance on how they should spend the money, so there’s no guarantee that schools will do what the White House is asking for.

“The U.S. government right now is throwing money around like a drunken sailor at this and that and everything, and every now and then they’re hitting something, but mostly they’re missing,” said Corby Anderson, a professor of mining engineering at the Colorado School of Mines which will receive a portion of that $100 million. “The fact that they had a big meeting and they reached out to 14 mining schools and are going to give them checks — that’s good. Where’s the money going to go and how is it going to be used? I don’t know.”

The administration is on a broader spending spree to end U.S. reliance on Chinese critical minerals — including more than $10 billion plowed into direct equity stakes in half-a-dozen critical mineral companies over the past year. But Beijing is fighting back. China halted exports of rare earths essential to civilian and defense sector manufacturing during the U.S.-China trade war last year.

“We’ve fallen years behind China,” said Nazak Nikakhtar, who served as undersecretary at the Department of Commerce in Trump’s first term. “We’re still trying to catch up.”

A combination of educational funding cuts and a plunge in mineral commodity prices in the ’90s slashed the number of U.S. mining schools to 14 from 25 in 1982, per data from the nonprofit Colorado-based Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration. China has since cornered the critical minerals market through a state-funded network of dozens of specialized technical colleges, and universities. China’s Central South University alone has 500 graduate students and 1,000 undergraduates in its mineral processing department.

“We’re dying through attrition,” said the second critical mineral company executive. “We’ve offshored our production of raw materials so other countries are just kicking our teeth in and so now when you say to a high school kid ‘Hey, do you want to be a miner?’ you’re met with just a blank face.”

And some mining school representatives suggest politics may be the reason for the lack of clear guidance, and the fact that it’s spread across several states.

“Some aspects of this funding won’t come out as well as it could because it’s politically packaged,” said Michael Free, director of the Institute for Critical and Strategic Minerals at the University of Utah, which will get a share of that government funding. Part of the calculus of spreading the money across schools in 14 different states may have been to cater to “senators and congressmen” in those states,” he added.

The current labor shortages are going to be a big problem for defense companies — and soon. Trump issued an Executive Order last month requiring defense contractors to stop using materials produced by “geopolitical adversaries” by Jan. 1.

“Good luck,” Anderson at the Colorado School of Mines said of that deadline. “It’s already August — I’m not optimistic about how that will be achieved by next year.”

Bolstering the U.S. mining education system also requires schools to overcome what they say are outdated public perceptions of such jobs as dirty, dangerous and environmentally damaging.

“There’s a stigma associated with the metallurgical and mining industry because of old practices,” said Jerry Downey, who teaches extractive metallurgy at Montana Technological University. “There’s not going to be a quick fix to any of this — somehow public awareness has to shift.”

That will require crafting a public image “that mineral resource production is a valuable, high tech innovative career,” Noble at Virginia Tech said.

That needs to happen sooner than later.

“Within the next 10 years, a majority of the professionals that we know of in the field are going to retire. And yet the demand for these skills is going up,” Anderson said.