A top Pentagon official joined a cadre of other federal officials Tuesday in pitching private mineral companies to do more business with the Trump administration but warned they need to clear out their supply chains of any links to specific Chinese companies.
James Mismash, deputy assistant secretary of war for industrial base growth at the Defense Department, invited companies gathered at a Benchmark Minerals conference in Washington to consider participating in a recently launched program dubbed the Civil Reserve Manufacturing Network, or CRMN, an emergency-readiness system created by the National Defense Authorization Act.
That program, he said, is an “opportunity for any company of any kind in the United States to say, I will step up and be a patriotic business in the event of a conflict, and we want to flag that for all of you as an opportunity, even if you’re not looking to crack into the defense space quite yet.”
The Trump administration has been moving to work with a larger number of mineral producers more quickly, boosting federal funding for them and, at times, taking equity stakes. But Mismash also warned companies that the Pentagon has issued an updated list of 188 Chinese-affiliated companies that the federal government can’t do business with as of July 1, 2027. Republicans on Capitol Hill have also called on companies to cut ties with the list of Chinese military companies.
