The People Problem in Rare Earths
Closing the U.S. rare earths gap with China starts with human capital
BLAKE MCFALLS is a rising senior at Trinity Preparatory School of Florida.
Throughout 2025, China exploited its rare earths stranglehold in trade conflict with the United States. In April 2025, China temporarily halted exports of rare earths to the United States, shocking defense and commercial industries alike and prompting immediate action from the Trump administration. The principal focus of the administration has been investment in private mining and refining enterprises to grow a rare earth supply chain independent of China. While providing federal financing is important, the government also needs to focus on the most significant gap between China and the United States in this area: human capital, or the collection of experts, skilled workers, and knowledge required to produce rare earths domestically. Closing the human capital gap is the most critical move the Trump administration can currently take to rebuild a domestic rare earths manufacturing base.
The effort will require an extraordinary role reversal between the two countries. After the Second World War, the United States, principally through the Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University, pioneered the discovery and refining of rare earths. Dr. Frank Spedding led the effort, bringing his experience from the Manhattan Project to create the Ames Laboratory through federal government funding and state university support. Ames attracted dozens of chemists who pioneered the foundational methods for separating rare earths. Its efforts benefited both the federal government and private industry.
However, as federal government interest and support waned in the 1970s and 1980s, the human capital backbone in the United States collapsed. A generation of scientific pioneers retired and federal funding disappeared. The necessity of investing in rare earths innovation vanished, as American companies were able to outsource research burdens to China. The basic know-how of processing rare earths and building laboratory infrastructure was transferred to China on a one-way trip.
China was able to mirror early U.S. industrial policy in rare earths, overtly building off earlier U.S. contributions to the field. The father of Chinese rare earths, Xu Guangxian, received his PhD in chemistry from Columbia University in 1951. His thesis regarding Quantum Chemical Theory was a concept that would prove transformative to the study of rare earths worldwide. Xu returned to China and eventually established the Research Center of Rare Earth Chemistry in 1986, working in collaboration with Nankai University’s School of Materials Science and Engineering and the National Institute for Advanced Materials. The Chinese government continued this strategy by expanding upon its State Key Laboratory (SKL) System with the founding of the SKL Rare Earth Materials Chemistry and Applications in 1989. In essence, China used existing American human capital and the American model of leveraging universities to further innovate and build necessary infrastructure to dominate rare earth expertise.
At the very same time, the United States was losing its knowledge as support for domestic mining plummeted, university funding decreased, and the federal government dawdled. By 2010, a panel of experts, including one of the key members of the Ames Laboratory, warned Congress that the U.S. human capital foundation of the rare earth minerals field had disappeared, creating a key strategic vulnerability for the United States. Dr. Karl A. Gschneider testified that “some of [these] rare earth experts have moved on to other industries, others have retired, and others have died, basically leaving behind an intellectual vacuum.”
Though the federal government heard these warnings for years, it did not listen and took no action. The United States needs engineers to mine and process, scientists to continue doing the basic research, and educators to train the next generation of experts who will rebuild what the country lost. As a result, even if current initiatives to support processing succeed in terms of private investment — such as the Department of War’s investment in MP Materials — the United States does not have a critical mass of talent to sustain the scaling of an independent and innovative U.S. supply chain.
Rebuilding a Workforce
At the core of reviving U.S. rare earths capability is rebuilding a domestic workforce that can support growth to foster and scale long-term innovation. This includes engineers and skilled labor for extraction, midstream processing, and downstream manufacturing. The federal government needs to ensure and enhance the education and training of a new generation of engineers and workers, incentivize the lateral movement of talent from adjacent industries, and turn to skilled labor immigration where necessary.
A. Educating Engineers
Processing is the largest vulnerability in the rare earth value chain; a key reason for the lack of processing capacity is the difficulty of obtaining expertise. One of the most significant advantages China has over the United States is its knowledge on processing practices. Chinese IP strength would not matter if the United States had its own supply of rare earth specialists, but America is uniquely weak here. Upstream, the number of college engineering graduates entering the mining industry has declined by 39 percent since 2016. In mining itself, the differences are even more stark: China produces 3,000 mining graduates annually, while the United States only produces 162.
Similarly large gaps are present in midstream processing. In the United States, Europe, and Japan combined, there are only a few dozen processing specialists. China has thousands. Thus, the United States lacks knowledge on rare earth separation and refining techniques. The difference in human capital is reflected in recent patent data; 81 percent of all new rare earth patents are filed in China. Closing the gap over the long haul will require the federal government to work closely with universities and federal labs to offer training and employment to engineering and geoscience students.
The United States must also encourage the lateral movement of talent from adjacent industries, such as battery and solar manufacturing. This was how the United States government was able to develop the Cold War generation of computer scientists at a time when the country lacked a baseline workforce. In the 1950s, the U.S. government gave grants to RAND in order to train the workforce that would build SAGE, a supercomputer designed for nuclear deterrence. Although most hires did not understand supercomputing, RAND developed 800 specialists by scouting for exceptional STEM talent and training new hires for four months.
B. Lateral Movement and Training of Skilled Workers
After garnering baseline talent, the United States must create a mechanism for skilled workers to specialize in and enter the rare earth industry. The talent should be channeled into the following skillsets: process control engineering, lab expertise, and solvent extraction plant operation. Drawing from its aforementioned Cold War computing successes, the U.S. government should award grants to training institutions. To a small extent, the Department of Labor (DOL) has already done this. In May 2025, the DOL’s Apprenticeship Building America (ABA) Grant Program awarded a grant to ReElement Technologies Corporation (ReElement), an industrial processing firm with experience in rare earth processing, and Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana to partner on rare earth industrial training.
Focusing on apprenticeship, the initiative will lay the foundation for rare earth IP in Indiana, attempting to develop 300 rare earth specialists for ReElement’s main rare earth operations. The DOL should make the program more widespread, combining the few sources of IP in the private sector with vibrant intellectual communities in universities across the country. Expanding the program would have bipartisan support in Congress, as did similar programs in the CHIPS Act. The Department of Energy (DOE) intends to expand its use of Industrial Training and Assessment Center funding for the retraining and development of a critical minerals workforce; it is essential for these initiatives to be harmonized under one body. The Trump administration must consider whether the DOL or the DOE is better to handle rare earth workforce development, or else talent growing initiatives will be decentralized and less effective.
C. Friendshoring Engineering and Skilled Labor Where Necessary
If the administration wishes to develop domestic expertise, it must consider some selective policy redirection. There is an opportunity for the administration to be more welcoming to genuinely high-skill immigration in rare earth elements extraction and processing. There is a lack of such talent immediately available, and upskilling the domestic workforce will take time even under the most optimistic of timelines. The U.S. government should give more attention to the EB-2 specialized visa. The EB-2 visa, like the EB-1 visa, is reserved for top global talent in specific fields that the United States deems demanding extra expertise. However, EB-2 visas can be approved for more people than the EB-1 visa.
Friendshoring this talent from U.S. allies like Australia could focus principally on metallurgists, chemical process engineers, materials scientists, and logistics experts. While it would be ideal to pilfer Chinese talent in these areas, China’s restrictions on IP outflow present an obstacle. China not only finalized a ban on the export of rare earths processing technology in December 2023, but has also banned workers in the rare earths sector from revealing intellectual secrets. In 2024, China jailed a Chinese worker for 11 years for stealing state secrets on rare earth processing practices, suspecting the worker of exporting the information to other countries. A creative workaround for the United States would be a sort of Operation Paperclip, where the government would aggressively—and covertly—recruit China’s elite rare earths talent to move to America with their entire families.
Further catalyzing labor integration into rare earths, the Senate Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party should reintroduce an unchanged version of H.R. 10375, the Critical Minerals Workforce Enhancement Act. The bill died in 2024, not because it had low support, but because governmental attention on rare earths was low. Now, the rare earths industry is a key concern of the legislative and executive branches. If passed, the bill would allow workers in these fields looking to enter the U.S. rare earth industry to sign a National Interest Waiver (NIW), which would allow these workers to receive visas without navigating regulatory hurdles other applicants must face. Additionally, the U.S. can continue using private sector applications, such as NES Firecroft, that organize and track talent pools in specific fields across the world in order to further speed up the process.
D. Universities, Federal Labs and Hubs
Longer-term U.S. innovation and leadership will require a reinvestment in the university and federal lab programs that enabled the U.S. to pioneer and dominate the rare earths industry during the Cold War. The Ames Laboratory pioneered most of the separation processes that industry used, and it worked closely with companies in encouraging the diffusion of processes and associated technical knowledge. Longer-term support for basic research in critical minerals could also facilitate materials innovation that would make substitution for some rare earth elements feasible or more attractive.
Again, these are challenges that the U.S. government was able to overcome in the past. In the 1950s, for example, the Pentagon needed titanium for the development of next-generation fighter jets, but defense contractors like Lockheed Martin struggled to properly make titanium usable in the aerospace industry. The titanium industry required technology at the same stage of the value chain as rare earths do currently.
As with rare earths in the 1940s and 1950s, the government looked to the universities and federal research to kickstart innovation. Throughout the 1950s, the U.S. government directly supported the Bureau of Mines Physical Metallurgy Laboratory College Park at the University of Maryland, resulting in a 1957 research paper that detailed the invention of the modern titanium electrode melting technology, which was monumental for titanium processing. Through government support, the industry took off within a decade of commencement. The government provided the R&D and the private sector took on innovation management. Costs fell 23 percent every time production doubled.
The United States could similarly support labs in Houston, a promising city for rare earths processing. If human capital is agglomerated in Houston, the city will have the talent to develop rare earth processing technologies in local chemical material labs, such as the University of Houston and Rice University’s Jones Lab. The Colorado School of Mines is another logical focus for government investment in developing expertise and training of future engineers. And, coming full circle, the federal government could revive and enhance support for the Critical Minerals Innovation Hub at Iowa State University, which not only has its own expertise, but works with other national laboratories in exploring a variety of approaches to the critical minerals gap with China.
The administration has done an excellent job prioritizing investments in rare earths projects, but another hurdle must be overcome to develop a sustainable U.S. supply chain. Developing baseline expertise in rare earths processing would be instrumental in ensuring that America eliminates this Achilles’ heel in its trade and defense strategy. Workforce capabilities must be developed in conjunction with current federal investments instead of at a separate time. Ultimately, it is the miners, engineers, and scientists who will determine whether the United States succeeds.
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