American mining policy reform is needed to help prepare for health crises such as the current battle against COVID-19. The Trump Administration is making progress, and the U.S. Supreme Court has also offered a hand.

At issue are “rare earth minerals” – including the nearly unpronounceable yttrium, neodymium, terbium and gadolinium. They exist in abundance in the United States, but are largely out of reach right now due to government regulations on the mining industry.

With American resources locked up and in high demand, National Center Senior Fellow Bonner Cohen, Ph.D. unveils a surprising fact in an Epoch Times news analysis:

The beneficiary of America’s regulatory morass is the government in Beijing, which has long recognized the strategic importance of rare earths and now controls over 95 percent of these minerals’ supply chain.

Bonner adds:

After successive administrations had largely ignored the geopolitical implications of U.S. dependence on China for critical minerals, the Trump White House abruptly reversed course…. It called on agencies across the federal government to develop a strategy to reduce the nation’s susceptibility to disruptions of critical mineral supplies.

These rare earth minerals are extremely important to the American economy because they are vital for everyday items like catalytic converters in cars and televisions screens. They are also instrumental in fossil fuel production such as oil refining and for magnets in wind turbines. In health care, they are necessary for CT and MRI scanners, computers, protective glass and lighting.

Yet regulations have given much of the market to hostile government powers.

Bonner reports that the Trump Administration has made three concrete steps toward making the process of mining rare earth minerals domestically an easier process...

• The Free Enterprise Project (FEP), the liberty movement’s only full-service shareholder and activism group that’s effective in pushing corporate America to the right;
• Project 21, the liberty movement’s only public relations agency for black conservatives and libertarians that has already created over 40,000 media opportunities;
• The Environment and Enterprise Institute (EEI), which counters misinformation being spread by the environmental left.