Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Sunday said he is confident President Donald Trump will negotiate a tariff deal with China but stressed that building up national production of rare-earth minerals is a key element of the equation.
“And this began back — you go back to Obama, Biden administration,” Burgum told host Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday.” “We’ve basically been at war on mining in this country for anything, not just rare earth minerals, critical minerals, but base minerals that we would have.”
The trade clash with China that Trump escalated in early April could cost billions of dollars. And despite the president’s confidence that a deal could be clinched “over the next three or four weeks,” his insistence on one-on-one talks with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, appears to have stalled proceedings.
In the meantime, the administration is looking to beef up domestic mineral supply, Burgum told Bream. In March, the White House announced a series of “immediate measures to increase American mineral production,” expediting permitting approvals and enlarging developers’ access to federal land and loan programs. The president had already declared a national energy emergency shortly after his swearing-in in January.
