Press release · Administration
The mining roundtable: the whole of government shows up at once.
A White House roundtable lands over $2 billion in mining investments and $180 million for mining schools — with War, EXIM, DFC, and Energy all writing checks the same day.
Today, President Donald J. Trump held a historic roundtable with the mining industry where he announced over $2 billion in critical mining and mining-related projects to revitalize the industry and over $180 million in mining school investments to bolster the American mining workforce.
The individual numbers are modest by industrial-policy standards; the choreography is the point. In one day, on one stage: Department of War investments in bauxite, rare-earth-free magnets, and battery materials; EXIM loans for Alabama graphite, Pennsylvania tantalum, and California boron; DFC’s first Madagascar rare-earths financing; Energy Department support alongside. The fact sheet counts 160 minerals deals totaling almost $40 billion since January 2025. Whatever one makes of any single deal, the roundtable demonstrated a working interagency machine — defense procurement, export credit, development finance, and energy programs pulling the same supply chains in the same direction.
The $180 million for mining schools is the least glamorous line and arguably the most doctrinal. A supply-chain strategy that stops at ore bodies fails at the workforce; putting mining-school investment in the same announcement as project financing treats human capital as an industrial-base input, which is what reindustrialization means when it is meant literally. The week’s companion actions — Treasury’s reference-price statement, the polysilicon proclamation — supplied the market architecture around these checks.