Last month, legislators introduced a bipartisan bill in the U.S. Senate that could prohibit defense contractors from procuring rare earth metals from China by late 2026 and force the Pentagon to create a strategic reserve of those elements by 2025.
Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, one of the bill’s sponsors, said the goal is to end “America’s dependence on the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) for extraction and processing of these elements,” which he described as “critical to winning the strategic competition against China and protecting our national security.”