President Trump signed Executive Order 14241, “Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production,” on March 20, formally invoking Defense Production Act Titles III and VII to accelerate domestic critical mineral project permitting and financing. The order built on the national energy emergency declared in January 2025 (EO 14156) and represents the most aggressive peacetime use of the DPA for mineral supply chain purposes in the agency’s history.
Simultaneously, DOE announced $355 million in funding across two programs: $275 million for the Mines and Metals Capacity Expansion program, targeting recovery of critical minerals from industrial byproducts and coal mine waste, and $80 million for Mine of the Future proving grounds, funding technology demonstrations for automation, precision extraction, and in-situ recovery. A separate DOE initiative flagged a $1 billion critical minerals supply chain initiative in the same period.
The policy signal matters separately from the individual grant amounts. DPA invocation gives the DOD and DOE authorities to direct private capital, offer off-take agreements, and co-invest in projects that would otherwise not pencil commercially at current prices. Combined with the DOE loan guarantee programs already active for lithium (Thacker Pass), the EO frames critical minerals as a national security procurement problem rather than a market efficiency problem, which changes the economic calculus for domestic project developers across the supply chain.