Kentucky and West Virginia hemp farmers protest funding bill restrictions, with $12B from the Commodity Credit Corporation ($11B immediate, $1B reserved for specialty crops) tied to data-sharing demands exposing 186K dead "SNAP recipients" and 500K duplicate payments. USA Rare Earth leverages Roundtop Mountain’s Texas heavy rare earths—critical for aerospace, medicine, and tech—after China’s dominance made mining uneconomical, now scaling globally with acquisitions like England’s Less Common Metals (62-day purchase) for samarium-cobalt expertise. Federal stockpiling (e.g., WWII tungsten) and Pentagon loans ($700M to Vulcan) mirror efforts to secure supply chains, but success hinges on free-market innovation amid complex policy trade-offs. [Automatically generated summary]
I've spoken to hemp farmers in Kentucky and West Virginia who are deeply concerned about the provisions that we're talking to the government funding bill.
Does the administration back hemp farmers?
And do you think those restrictions should be killed back?
Secretary, on SNAP funding, you said last week that you were going to withhold funding to Democratic-led states for refusing to hand over private recipient data.
This is not Democrat versus Republican, and it's not us being mean to Democrat states.
This is those that responded to our letter this spring that we know there is so much significant fraud in the SNAP program that it is rampant.
But up until now, the federal government had never asked states for data for ensuring that dead people aren't receiving it or people using dead people's social security numbers, that people aren't getting it twice.
And in response to that letter sent to every state, by the way, I do a monthly call with the governors.
Democrat governors join too for the most part.
But as a result of that, all the states that said, here's our data, were all Republican states.
And when we got that data later this spring, that's when we found the 186,000 dead people and the 500,000 people.
And these are in red states where arguably there's often more control and less spending on some of these government programs.
So yes, we are very serious about this.
We're continuing to work out exactly what that looks like.
We'll be making another announcement on that probably early next week on what that looks like.
But the message is this: just let us work together and figure out and ensure that these taxpayer dollars, $100 billion a year, 42 million recipients, that we're actually getting the aid to the people that need it the most and not to a system that's rife with fraud.
unidentified
If you withhold that funding, though, would that be a violation of the San Francisco judge's order?
So we'll make sure that we're doing everything we can.
But again, my hope is that these governors will step up and say, yes, we want to get rid of this fraud too.
We understand there's nothing nefarious going on here.
We just want to make sure that the people that need it are getting it and that the taxpayers are protected in that.
All right, y'all.
Thank you so much, everybody.
Thank you, Roland.
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...of China are the grittiest people on earth, but many of them are reaching retirement age now.
So what USA Rare Earth is doing is actually scouring the globe looking for companies where we can make an investment, where we can tie them into this integrated supply chain.
And a lot of people ask me, oh, does that mean you're verticalizing?
Does that mean you're focused on what it takes to produce your magnets?
I'll say yes, and horizontally scaling at each link in the chain, serving others in the supply chain.
There are other magnet makers.
There is a small number of metal makers.
There are a few processors.
There are mines all around the world.
And our job is to look across that value chain and determine if there are weak links where an investment and ownership by a US-based company is going to allow that business to thrive and grow, we want to bring them into the fold.
So let's dive a little deeper, because I want you to be able to explain that supply chain in relationship to through your U.S. interest here.
Walk us through roundtop.
still water and what the difference are from the ore all the way to the processing.
Would it be great to explain that?
This may be the most exciting part of our story in this moment.
There are some developments happening, even as we speak.
There's a very rich deposit of heavy rare earths in Roundtop Mountain in Texas.
It's on state lands, it's outside of El Paso, and USA Rare Earth has the lease, the mining rights for that deposit.
Question is, why hasn't anyone actually turned this into a mine?
And the answer is very simple.
You couldn't afford to do it over these last three decades.
We had very inexpensive goods coming, and who was willing to pay the price to actually go and extract these heavy rare earths out of rock in Texas?
Well, it turns out that with a couple of changes in process, with a little bit of advanced thinking about how we might sequence things, the team is, we've just announced that we've moved into the preliminary feasibility study.
For those who know mining, these are the early stages of being able to convert that deposit into a mine.
Why do heavy rare earths matter?
Because if you look at the bottom of the periodic table, here are these 17 elements.
We call some of them light, we call some of them heavy.
The heavy rare earths are absolutely essential to high performance metals and magnets that are used in aerospace medicine and electronics, et cetera.
Without them, nothing moves.
I love this that they brought up to the periodic table.
One of the things I remember you and I have talked about this that maybe we should really collaborate on this is that because there's not a great framework of understanding or a great visual, maybe we need to revisit the periodic table and create a patriotic periodic table so that we understand that the ones that are really critical in how we compete in the globe.
Well, one of those pieces in that supply chain that in even the 62 days, you've closed your first acquisition.
So let's talk to us about that acquisition and why it matters.
Well, and this is why I gave Siemens two-week notice.
We wanted to time my arrival at USA Rare Earth with the acquisition of less common metals.
Less common metals, I mean, the name says it all.
They're one of only a couple of providers outside of China and the only metal maker working with samarium and samarium cobalt.
For those in the aerospace industry, you would know how critical that is.
Less common metals is craftspeople in Cheshire, England, who have been pursuing their craft, doing this for quite some time, have not had the wherewithal to invest.
Their owners had said, it's not really worth it in our portfolio of things to invest and grow this business.
We spotted them and said, wait a minute, this is the linchpin in the whole chain, ultimately leading to magnets.
How do you make magnets?
With metals that have been formed into strip cast, term of the supply chain.
That strip cast that gets produced, gets put into metal make into the permanent magnet makers everywhere around the world.
So less common metals now gives us the ability to work across the entire network, supporting other magnet makers.
And because they've spent all these many years searching for the sources of minerals outside of China, they know that upstream supply chain very, very well.
So I feel like on the day I arrived, I was introduced into a ready-made network, and now we're just moving as fast as we can to make sure that we tap into that network, strengthen the supply chain, and grow.
I would imagine that that was taking place before you arrived, and that by hiring you, that getting that deal across the line is important, but also hiring you because of your great track record, but also your relationship to government.
We're seeing a lot of ideas about what's the role of federal government at this particular moment.
We were at a lunch recently that some ideas were thrown out around the Wolfram crisis in World War II that caused the U.S. to create a stockpile of tungsten.
We've seen yesterday Vulcan got $700 million through the Pentagon loan program.
And what do you think about these types of initiatives?
How does it fit into your own matrix?
And are you going to do a deal like this?
I won't comment on that.
But what I will comment on is the work that the federal government is doing right now is vitally important.
I mean, how do we switch the equation around so that we don't fall smack dab back into the same box canyon that we find ourselves in?
What's happened through the years is the public has figured out that, hey, China is using some element here, permanent magnets, for leverage, but it's cheap.
So we're going to buy that.
How do we compete against non-market behaviors?
That's the question.
So what I am thrilled about is the Trump administration has pulled together experts.
And in my interactions with the government, what I'm finding is experts in mining, experts in the mineralogy, the metallurgy, the chemistry, experts all the way up through the magnet production who are then capable of looking across the supply chain, seeing how various private sector actors are pursuing their objectives.
And really, the only question I have for the U.S. government is how can we help?
So I think the best way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones out.
And so all, you know, any of these comments, like, you know, whether we need stockpiles, whether we need pricing support, whether we need permitting support.
You know, I think what I've found in the U.S. government is a willingness to use any available lever to solve this critical economic and therefore national security problem.
I know they say there's no bad ideas in a brainstorm, but come on.
We've been in some brainstorms.
Well, I've had some bad ideas.
We put those in the parking lot.
But the aspect here of thinking through those ideas and this moment, one of the things that we've talked about is that whether it's policymakers or even the way media covers it,
is not understanding some of the interdependencies here as we think about what incentives might, we had Grover Norquist talk, resurface an idea that he threw out at our up next event about perhaps creating a tax incentive to companies around how they store critical minerals.
But then there's a question that I'd love for you to talk about.
Well, then what do we do about the refining?
What do we do about these other pieces?
What do we do about getting taxed on metals that are going through that you're getting taxed on right now?
Can you just talk us through some of those interdependencies?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, here's the magic thing about our free enterprise system is that innovative people find ways to understand.
We're going to step away here, but you can continue watching this at C-SPAN.org.
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