President Trump Jumpstarts American Mining; Opens the American West

This is big! President Trump, in his Executive Order, Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production, signed Thursday, began organizing the unleashing of US mineral extraction and processing.

It can open up the American West, and secure a massive increase in domestic mineral production on national security grounds.

Invoking the Defense Production Act, operating under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, it is grounded in the earlier Declaration of National Energy Emergency. Both domestic energy & mineral resource development are vital national security requirements.

The EO taps an array of federal agencies with specific timelines for action - 30 days, 45 days, etc. It is a very timely and systematic document. (Not that there won't be the expected and unexpected bumps along the way. The City of London-centered global commodity markets, and Malthusians and green/brown fascists in general are going to hate this!)

Opening Up the American West

The EO represents an opening up of virtually all of the American West for renewed development!

Especially if one combines this EO with the little-noted, March 1st Executive Orders directed at:

These EO’s intend to unleash the American domestic logging and forest products industry, including timely survey of the nation's forest resources (the US logs less than a mere fraction of 1% a year), and ordering a systematic, thought-through increase in logging and forest management in the US National Forests.

Obviously, Trump’s idea of using federal lands for home building, now percolating as a possible step to increased home building for young families, and his idea of creating new American cities (and revival of many small American towns and cities) get a boost from these orders.

(All this whittles away at US dependence on the Crown’s Canada and Australia base of minerals and lumber, as I developed in my book’s chapters covering the US mining and forestry sectors. The book, Rebuilding the USA, the Trump Presidency and Beyond, anticipates much of what the Trump administration is doing now across multiple sectors of the U.S. physical economy. It’s available on Amazon. This push by Trump will also provide positive impetus for Canadian provincial leaders and various Canadian economic interests to consider becoming "the 51st state"!)

Thursday’s EO on expansive US mineral production is not at all limited to mining rare earths (of which the US could actually mine plenty) but is intentionally broad. It names uranium and copper among other critically needed minerals, and more will be added. The National Mining Association applauded the President’s initiative.

The EO specifically assigns responsibilities to a number of federal agencies, to survey potential resources and broad domestic production needs, and further directs the cutting down of regulatory rule-making which has made mines almost impossible to open in the US (10 years to open a mine).

It will also require coordination with the American citizenry, our state governments (particularly in the West), and private sector actors in mining and processing, to identify resources and potentials, and to remove various state environmental strictures imposed over past decades.

Financing - Very Important Initiatives

Here, the Trump administration is further tipping its hand:

The Mining EO convenes the National Security Capital Forum (established in 2024 - as part of the NDAA) under the Secretary of Defense, to round-up leaders of US capital markets (and potentially international capital markets), investors, etc. and organize immediate private-sector financing of domestic mining and processing of minerals deemed vital to national security.

The use of the National Security Capital Forum could itself be a decisive and novel action by President Trump & team, using a new tool, just now taken out of the tool box, to organize federally-directed, dirigist financing, but redirecting private financial institutions into hard capital investments, this in a transformed "market" reshaped by tariffs.

Why should $7 trillion, on any given day, be sloshing around in US money market mutual funds? (Why would Tether reportedly be the 7th largest purchaser of US Treasuries in 2024? -- perhaps a more sensitive topic for some.) The Trump administration seems to be pointingly saying, "We are creating better places now, for you to invest your private capital." Drain the financial swamp.

The EO also singles out, for clear reasons regarding resource oversight, the National Energy Dominance Council (NEDC) chaired by the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, to play a key coordinating role It also uniquely singles out the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), for a potential financing role. I have written about this agency in recent months.

The DFC has been talked about as being utilized as President Trump's "commonwealth fund" vehicle. Regardless of that, or overlapping it, the DFC – which is chaired by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and includes Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik and others by statute – is now to play a potentially large – and domestic – role in financing mining and mineral processing. (For further capitalization, tariff funds could flow into it, via the Treasury, and/or perhaps further empowerment and capitalization by Congress.)

The EO leverages the President's declaration of an energy emergency and intersects the drive for a renaissance in nuclear (uranium) (and coal) and also the continued opening-up and prioritizing of backlogged Army Corp of Engineers projects (already off the leash with the official Declaration of Energy Emergency). It also will intersect "America's Iron Dome/Golden Dome” EO, with Pete Hegseth, DOD & OMB set to announce their proposed architecture and implementation plan for the "Golden Dome" in the next week or two. Secretary Hegseth is a very busy man.

First, it was a lot, right out of the gate. Now, the Administration’s efforts, to rapidly rebuild the economy with American System methods, have momentum. It is still a lot of fun, eight weeks into the race! Thoughts and comments are welcome.