Critical minerals are finally getting the attention they deserve. This year, rare earth elements have dominated headlines, whether because of geopolitical tensions in Greenland and Ukraine or escalating trade disputes with China.
The 17 rare earth elements (REEs) are indispensable. They exhibit unique electromagnetic properties that make numerous technologies function—think smartphones, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, humanoid robotics, advanced defense systems, and more.
The Trump administration seems to understand this. Recent actions by President Donald Trump—including his executive order “Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production” and his use of Section 232—have made clear America’s interest in rare earths. Indeed, long before this administration, bipartisan recognition of these minerals’ strategic value already existed, for national security and a vast array of advanced technologies.
China dominates in rare earth elements
As has been widely reported, China currently controls around 90% of global REE production. Its dominance is so strong that even some Western companies must send their rare earth materials to China for processing. Now, with Beijing imposing export controls on key elements and rare earths becoming a central focus for US-China trade talks, this challenge has been further amplified for America.
China’s grip is the result of decades of long-term investment, aggressive policy, and an economic playbook designed to corner the market. Processing rare earths is also notoriously dirty, which is something China has historically been less concerned about.
A 4-point fast-track program
If the U.S. is serious about building a resilient, domestic REE supply chain, it must act with urgency. Here’s how we can do it, and do it fast:
Inject capital at scale
The U.S. must follow China’s lead by strategically funding and investing in rare earth producers and infrastructure. Rare earth development, particularly refining, requires significant capital, unless the asset is already advanced and leverages existing infrastructure. That is rarely the case in the U.S., and while both private and public companies are raising funds, significant federal support is essential to compete with China at scale. America’s late start means we must move faster and spend smarter. We can’t afford to wait.
Establish price stability
Once U.S. producers are operational, price volatility becomes the next major hurdle. China can manipulate the global market by flooding it with underpriced material, undermining U.S. startups before they can gain traction. A temporary pricing floor or purchase guarantee for U.S.-sourced rare earths would help stabilize the market and protect domestic growth. The U.S. has implemented similar pricing strategies to support other foundational industries, including oil and agriculture. America’s emerging rare earth industry is critical and could benefit from these types of pricing initiatives.
Streamline permitting
While the U.S. rightly values environmental protection and community impact, permitting delays are hampering progress. Responsible, low-impact projects are waiting in line, when they should be fast-tracked. We must retain environmental oversight but remove unnecessary bureaucratic barriers that stifle innovation and increase costs. China has little to no concern with environmental protection in regard to REEs, so removing these roadblocks in the short term will not only allow U.S. companies to get set up to compete, but will also be better for the environment in the long term, all while delivering significant value for American stakeholders.
Create a centralized refining hub
The rare earth bottleneck isn’t mining—it’s refining. Processing capacity outside China is severely limited. The U.S. needs a centralized, government-backed refinery that serves multiple companies, enabling cost-effective and collaborative scaling. This shared facility would accelerate production, reduce risk, and mark a crucial step toward independence from China’s stranglehold. I believe this effort is the best path forward for Americans to unite and build the industrial infrastructure required to combat the big bully in the rare earth space.
The power of a public-private partnership
With government support and private-sector innovation, we can build a fully integrated rare earth supply chain. Doing so would neutralize one of China’s most powerful economic weapons and create a strategic advantage for the U.S. in critical industries. It’s also a smart investment in America’s long-term manufacturing future.
This isn’t just about minerals. It’s about national security, technological leadership, and economic resilience. The time to act and join forces is now.
Kuljit (Jeet) Basi is the president and executive chairman of Tactical Resources Corp.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
The report, produced by the nonpartisan CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation, factors in expected debt service costs and finds that the bill would increase interest rates and boost interest payments on the baseline projection of federal debt by $441 billion.
The analysis comes at a crucial moment as Trump is pushing the GOP-led Congress to act on what he calls his “big, beautiful bill.” It passed the House last month on a party-line vote, and now faces revisions in the Senate. Vice President JD Vance urged Senate Republicans during a private lunch meeting Tuesday to send the final package to the president’s desk.
“We’re excited to get this bill out,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune afterward.
Tuesday’s report uses dynamic analysis by estimating the budgetary impact of the tax bill by considering how changes in the economy might affect revenues and spending. This is in contrast to static scoring, which presumes all other economic factors stay constant.
The CBO released its static scoring analysis earlier this month, estimating that Trump’s bill would unleash trillions in tax cuts and slash spending, but also increase deficits by $2.4 trillion over the decade and leave some 10.9 million more people without health insurance.
Republicans have repeatedly argued that a more dynamic scoring model would more accurately show how cutting taxes would spur economic growth — essentially overcoming any lost revenue to the federal government.
But the larger deficit numbers in the new analysis gave Democrats, who are unified against the big bill, fresh arguments for challenging the GOP position that the tax cuts would essentially pay for themselves.
“The Republican claim that this bill does not add to the debt or deficit is laughable, and the proof is in the numbers,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee.
“The cost of these tax giveaways for billionaires, even when considering economic growth, will add even more to the debt than we previously expected,” he said.
Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said Tuesday on social media that considering the new dynamic analysis, “It’s not only not paying for all of itself, it’s not paying for any of itself.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other Republicans have sought to discredit the CBO, saying the organization isn’t giving enough credit to the economic growth the bill will create.
At the Capitol, Mehmet Oz, who heads up the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services and joined Vance at the GOP Senate lunch, challenged CBO’s findings when asked about its estimate that the bill would leave 10.9 million more people without health care, largely from new work requirements.
“What will an American do if they’re given the option of trying to get a job or an education or volunteering their community — having some engagement — or losing their Medicaid insurance coverage?” Oz asked. “I have more confidence in the American people than has been given to them by some of these analyzing organizations.”
Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee unveiled their proposal Monday for deeper Medicaid cuts, including new work requirements for parents of teens, as a way to offset the costs of making Trump’s tax breaks more permanent in their draft for the big bill.
The Senate’s version of the package also enhances Trump’s proposed new tax break for seniors, with a bigger $6,000 deduction for low- to moderate-income senior households earning no more than $75,000 a year for singles, $150,000 for couples.
The proposals from Senate Republicans keep in place the current $10,000 deduction of state and local taxes, called SALT, drawing quick blowback from GOP lawmakers from New York and other high-tax states, who fought for a $40,000 cap in the House-passed bill. Senators insisted negotiations continue.
Bessent said Tuesday that the Senate Republican proposal for the tax cuts bill “will deliver the permanence and certainty both individual taxpayers and businesses alike are looking for, driving growth and unleashing the American economy.”
“We look forward to continuing to work with the Senate and the House to further refine this bill and get it to President Trump’s desk,” he said in a news release.
While the House-passed bill exempted parents with dependents from the new Medicaid work requirements, the Senate’s version broadened the requirement to include parents of children older than 14, as part of their effort to combat waste in the program and push personal responsibility.
The work requirements “demonstrate that you are trying your hardest to help this country be greater,” Oz said. “By doing that, you earn the right to be on Medicaid.”
The CBO separately released another analysis on the tax bill last week, including a look at how the measure would affect households based on income distribution. It estimates the bill would cost the poorest Americans roughly $1,600 a year while increasing the income of the wealthiest households by an average of $12,000 annually.
Dozens of legal scholars and economists have issued stark warnings over attempts by the European Commission (EC) to weaken corporate accountability laws, saying the action will wreck corporate accountability commitments, slash human rights and environmental protections, and lead to higher costs for companies and society.
Under pressure from corporate lobbyists, the EC has been discussing reshaping rules that govern how companies monitor and report their activity. Last month, both French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz escalated their campaign against the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), which covers firms’ supply chains, claiming that the regulations threatened to make European businesses uncompetitive. In a speech, Macron told business executives the CSDDD should be “put off the table” entirely, expressing support for an EC “Omnibus Simplification Package” that would eliminate requirements for companies to monitor their supply chains for violations, remove mandatory climate transition plans, and significantly weaken enforcement mechanisms including civil liability provisions.
But legal and economics scholars, environmental organizations and businesses, along with countries such as Sweden and Denmark, have united to defend the regulations.
“The members of the European Parliament shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that if they remove this article that that’s going to somehow amount to a reduction in regulatory burden,” said Thom Wetzer, associate professor of law and finance at the University of Oxford, and the founding director of the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme. “What will come in its place is a very litigious landscape and differential implementation of national requirements. You will have replaced a nicely uniform obligation with a patchwork of a variety of different and uncertain obligations.”
In May, Wetzer and more than 30 other legal scholars sent a letter to the EC warning that, far from reducing costs, scrapping the regulations would create a range of new financial and legal risks for companies, as well as making it harder for them to achieve their sustainability and climate goals. The scholars warn that, “Without guiding regulations, corporate climate transitions will be more disorderly and costly.”
Furthermore, Wetzer notes, many European companies have already taken steps to comply with the regulations. Indeed, towards the beginning of the year, 11 major brands, including the likes of IKEA [F500E #85, as Ingka], Maersk [F500E #70] and Unilever [F500E #49] came out in support of the CSDDD, signing and open letter that stated: “Investment and competitiveness are founded on policy certainty and legal predictability. The announcement that the European Commission will bring forward an ‘omnibus’ initiative that could include revisiting existing legislation risks undermining both of these.”
“Businesses have already started to put in place reporting frameworks to be able to align with the regulatory package,” Wetzer told Fortune. “There has been a lot of investment in the regulatory architecture on the assumption that this would stay in place for a long time. If you change this regulation and you go beyond simplification, you run the risk that all of those investments go down the drain.”
Legal scholars aren’t the only experts to have sounded the alarm on the EC’s plans. Also in May, more than 90 prominent economists criticized Omnibus proposals, strongly refuting claims that the sustainability regulations harm European competitiveness. Instead, they point to other factors behind Europe’s economic challenges, including the energy price crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, declining global demand, wage stagnation, and chronic underinvestment in public infrastructure.
The economists’ statement emphasizes that implementation costs for sustainability regulations are minimal, citing a London School of Economics study that estimated compliance costs for large companies at just 0.009% of revenue. They argue that the benefits of the regulations far outweigh such modest expenses, and further note that, with an estimated €750 billion investment gap in sustainable initiatives, the weakening of sustainability reporting requirements could undermine crucial programs like the Clean Industrial Deal and discourage private investment in sustainable projects.
“Economic choices are political choices,” said Johannes Jäger, a professor at the University of Applied Sciences BFi Vienna. “With the Omnibus proposal, the European Commission is choosing to reward short-sighted corporate lobbying at the expense of people, planet, and long-term economic resilience.”
To this point, many critics of the Omnibus package have framed it as opportunistic, saying it is an attempt to both mimic and placate U.S. President Donald Trump who, whilst threatening Europe with tariffs, is carrying out a program of sweeping deregulation across America. U.S. companies have been at the forefront of lobbying efforts to undermine the CSDDD, with watchdogs claiming that investment giant BlackRock helped carve out exemptions from the directive for large financial firms.
“With the Omnibus proposal, the European Commission is choosing to reward short-sighted corporate lobbying at the expense of people, planet, and long-term economic resilience.”Johannes Jäger, professor, University of Applied Sciences BFi Vienna
Such actions have motivated other European finance leaders to rally around the CSDDD. In February, more than 200 financial institutions, representing $7.6 trillion in assets under management, urged the EC to maintain strong sustainability standards. Aleksandra Palinska, executive director at the European Sustainable Investment Forum, warned that the Omnibus would “limit investor access to comparable and reliable sustainability data and impair their ability to scale-up investments for industrial decarbonisation.”
Rather than following Trump and doubling down on deregulation, European finance experts have urged the EU to maintain its resolve, along with its reputation for probity. In January, François Gemenne, a professor at HEC Paris and a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report, said that “the best response to the policies implemented in the U.S. is to beef up the EU green agenda, not to weaken it. Rather than follow Trump’s way, we should design our own path.”
Wetzer agreed, saying that the Omnibus proposals harm the European Union’s standing as a rational actor. “The European Union is proving itself not to be a reliable regulator because they’re flip-flopping in the face of changing political winds,” he said. In turbulent times, he suggested, a strong stabilizing influence is required. “We should chart our own course based on our assessment of the fundamentals.”
But beyond the legal and economic impacts, it is the environmental and human rights implications of the EC’s proposed changes that have drawn the most fire. In March, more than 360 global NGOs and civil society groups issued a joint statement against the Omnibus, stating that EC President Ursula von der Leyen was “deprioritizing human rights, workers’ rights and environmental protections for the sake of dangerous deregulation.”
“The European Union is proving itself not to be a reliable regulator because they’re flip-flopping in the face of changing political winds…”Thom Wetzer, associate professor of law and finance, University of Oxford and founding director of the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme
In comments accompanying the letter, Marion Lupin, policy officer for the European Coalition for Corporate Justice, said: “The message from Brussels couldn’t be clearer: industry interests come first, while people and the planet are left behind … hundreds of civil society organisations around the world are standing up—no to deregulation, no to greenwashing, and no to this reckless rollback of corporate accountability.”
As the Omnibus proposal moves through the European Parliament, the key question is whether EU institutions will preserve their original ambition to guide Europe through its sustainability transition, or acquiesce to corporate lobbying power. The outcome will likely have far-reaching implications for corporate accountability, human rights, and the fight against climate change.
Wilmar International, the Singapore-based agrifood giant, has handed over 11.9 trillion Indonesian rupiah ($729 million) to Indonesia as a “security deposit,” related to misconduct allegations over palm oil export permits. Wilmar’s shares dropped by 3% on the news, reaching their lowest point in a decade.
Wilmar generated $67.4 billion in revenue last year, a 0.3% increase year-on-year. The agrifood giant earned $1.2 billion in annual profit, meaning its $729 million “security deposit” is equal to about 60% of Wilmar’s entire 2024 net income.
Indonesian prosecutors accuse Wilmar of bribing officials to obtain the permits in 2022, during a national cooking oil shortage. While an Indonesian court cleared Wilmar and two other companies in March, the three judges behind the ruling were arrested on graft charges a month later.
Indonesia’s Attorney General’s Office claims that corruption tied to these export permits cost the state 12.3 trillion rupiah ($755 million).
On Tuesday, Wilmar claimed that “all acts carried out by [Wilmar] during this period in relation to the export of cooking oil was done in compliance with prevailing regulations.” Wilmar will get its “security deposit” back if Indonesia’s Supreme Court upholds the acquittal–but will forfeit the money if it loses the case.
“Wilmar paid for the state losses they caused,” a senior official from Indonesia’s AGO said at a Tuesday press conference.
Indonesia accounts for about 60% of global palm oil supply. Crude palm oil is a major ingredient in food products and household goods. In response to a cooking oil shortage in late 2021 and early 2022, Indonesia imposed strict export restrictions on palm oil, including a three-week-long export ban, in order to preserve local supply and rein in rising prices.
Wilmar is one of the world’s largest owners of oil palm plantations, with a total planted area of over 230,000 hectares. It’s one of the region’s largest companies, ranked No. 4 on Fortune’s Southeast Asia 500; it’s also one of the few companies in the region to make it onto the Global 500, Fortune’s ranking of the world’s largest companies by revenue.
Two-thirds of Wilmar’s oil palm plantations are in Indonesia. Besides palm oil and cooking oil, Wilmar also produces other food products like rice, noodles and margarine for global markets.
Politics8 years ago