EXCLUSIVE: Secretary Doug Burgum: Inside Our Strategy to End China’s Stranglehold on Critical Minerals

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “President Trump talks about ‘drill, baby, drill.’ We’ve also got to mine, baby, mine. We’ve got to get back into this business,” says U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.

China has a stranglehold on rare earths and critical minerals, controlling at least 85 percent of the refining of the 20 most important rare earth minerals, Burgum says.

As secretary of the interior, Burgum oversees nearly half a billion acres of federal land and plays a key role in the Trump administration’s energy dominance agenda.

In this episode, we dive into what the Trump administration is doing to end America’s rare earth minerals dependency on China, accelerate energy production, and win the AI arms race against China, which will require major increases in energy supply.

We also discuss the government shutdown and how it impacts the Department of the Interior and the American people.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Secretary Doug Burgum, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Secretary Doug Burgum:

Jan, great to be with you. Thanks for having me on.

Mr. Jekielek:

You recently discussed something that’s very, very close to my heart, or the thing that I’m really concerned about. It’s this issue of critical minerals. You said China today controls 85 to 100 percent of all the refining of the 20 most important rare earth minerals. Please break that down for us.

Secretary Burgum:

It’s a shocking fact that we’ve allowed ourselves to get in a position where China has a stranglehold on all of these essential minerals that are needed for our technology, for our defense, for automotive, essentially everything we need for energy security, national security, and economic security. China has been at this over a period of decades, and they’re not only, in many cases, controlling the mining around the world with their investments as part of their Belt and Road Initiative, but they bring all those materials back to China, do the processing there, and then sell them to the world, like last spring when we were going tit for tat during some trade wars, if you will. They withheld shipping a certain type of magnet to all Western countries, not just the United States. We were facing within weeks the shutdown of every auto plant in the world. 

I think this is a wake-up call for everybody in the West to say we’ve got to have secure supply chains. President Trump understands that. As part of the national energy emergency that he’s created, we’re using every authority we have to try to bring those supply chains back home. That includes us getting back in the mining game in this country. It’s absolutely important that we do it here, but also we’ve got to get into the refining of those minerals, rare earth minerals, and critical minerals here in the United States.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, you’ve got a few initiatives here. You know, you’re doing this list of critical minerals and actually explain to me briefly why it’s important to just have this list in the first place be codified. 

Secretary Burgum:

It’s important because we want to go beyond the periodic table but start right there. If you want to take what your lead-in question was, take the periodic table and then color it red if 100 percent of the refining for the free world is done in China on those minerals, and that should be the wake-up call for everybody. 

But when we create the list as part of a federal procedure, that gives it a different designation. We’ve got the opportunity to have more authority in terms of the work that we do to make those investments, whether it’s the Defense Production Act or whether it’s under the national security emergency that we’re under. But we’ve taken extraordinary steps since this time last spring. 

The United States is now, the Department of War has made actual equity investments in multiple mineral companies because if the capital markets had stopped working successfully for private companies in the United States, if a rare earth mineral company became profitable, China would dump that particular mineral onto the market, depressing prices and essentially driving these companies out of business. 

In the case of the Mountain Pass mine, which was the first deal that was done with the Department of War earlier this summer, when these guys had made a couple hundred million dollars, they were getting ready to go to an IPO. They had plenty of access to capital markets, commercial loans, and bonds. 

Then all of a sudden, boom, the next year they’re losing 200 million because China is dumping in the market. They have no access to capital, and they’re at the brink of shutting down. This is just a playbook that China has used to avoid market forces and just strategically, as a country, subsidize certain industries to gain control.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. I mean, what we call unrestricted warfare is just one of the methods. But so let’s discuss that. Like, how do we actually defend against that meaningfully? Because, you know, we’ve kind of known about these vulnerabilities for a while. I mean, whether it’s, you know, the generic drug precursors, which are somewhere in those high 80 percentages and so forth, or these critical rare earth minerals, how is it that you can kind of speed that process now? 

Secretary Burgum:

Part of it is this, again, the extraordinary step. And having spent almost my entire life in the private sector, I was one who thought, oh, the government should never be an equity participant in a company. We’re not picking winners and losers. But in this case, where we can come in, take a minority position, and send a signal to the market that there’s going to be a partnership here where they can receive and thrive in a capital market. And then the combination of the tariffs. When we put the tariffs up, that creates a measure of protection for U.S. companies to be able to restart this mining industry. 

I would just tell you one indication of how bad it’s become. This is from the climate ideology, climate extremism that said somehow that mining was a bad thing, not just energy production, but mining, that we should stop mining in America. We should export mining to third-world countries. We graduated over 36,000 lawyers last year in the United States. We graduated about 300 people with mining and metallurgical degrees.

When President Trump talks about drill, baby, drill, we’ve also got to mine, baby, mine. We’ve got to get back into this business, and we’ve got to help people understand this is a high-tech, sophisticated industry. Mining today, the amount of technology that goes into both identifying the resource, extracting that resource, and refining that resource. It’s an exciting industry. And the U.S., you know, innovation, not regulation, is what’s always been the source of American greatness. And we’ve effectively regulated this entire industry out of existence in the U.S. That’s turning around. 

Just yesterday, President Trump in the Oval Office, using his presidential powers to agree with an appeal from the state of Alaska. The Biden administration shut down this 211-mile-long Ambler Road that leads into one of the richest mining districts in the world. Biden shut that down. Trump had approved it. Biden shut it down, this time on the appeal. It’s an irrevocable appeal. The presidential power gets to say this road’s going to happen.

He said it yesterday. There are over 1,700 mining claims along Ambler Road in Alaska. That’s got to have lifted the economic value of every single one of those mining claims because, for the first time in history, there’s going to be infrastructure that will allow people to mine those minerals and also to be able to bring them back out.

Mr. Jekielek:

Mr. Secretary, to your point about understanding what America actually has, you instructed a while back now the U.S. Geological Survey to unleash America’s balance sheet, to understand what’s in the public land, the subsurface mineral rights, and the offshore areas. How is that coming now?

Secretary Burgum:

We’re making progress, but it’s a big lift, and it’s going to take a whole government approach. But every time there’s a presidential election, every American gets educated on how much debt America has. We’ve got $36 trillion of debt. Then they’ll divide it by household and say this is what each person owes. We talk about that. Why don’t we talk about what each American owns in terms of assets? Because the Biden administration was systematically restricting access to the balance sheet of America. 

The Department of the Interior alone, which I have the honor of leading, controls over 500 million acres of surface land, 700 million acres of subsurface minerals, and 2.5 billion of offshore resources, ranging from everything from the U.S. Virgin Islands to American Samoa. All those U.S. territories and their offshore waters are also part of the U.S.’s balance sheet. When you throw in the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of Agriculture, you add in another couple hundred million acres of surface land. 

So if the Dept. of the Interior were a standalone company, it would have the largest balance sheet in the world. It would also have among the largest balance sheets; it would have the worst returns in the world because we’ve restricted access to it. We’ve tried to shut down the timber industry. We’re trying to—not we, but the Biden administration— the Biden administration is putting the clamps on timber production, on grazing, and on mineral production on these public lands. 

When Theodore Roosevelt set aside these hundreds of millions of acres, he specifically said that this was for the benefit and the enjoyment of the American public. Yes, for recreation, but also the benefit of accessing all of these minerals. So codifying that balance sheet has been something that we’re working on across the government. 

But just the Gulf of America offshore, $28 trillion, $28 trillion in oil and gas resources that are there, coal resources, close to $10 trillion of coal resources on public lands. And again, some of this stuff, like the Biden administration, was basically not leasing any coal. They’re saying, we’re going to just wipe $10 trillion off the U.S. balance sheet. They shut down millions and millions of acres for any kind of offshore activity in the Gulf of America. That also wiped trillions of dollars off the balance sheet. 

When they did that, no one in the news could ever write a story about the financial impact. There’d be a story about, oh, they’re saving XYZ territory or land. They’re saving the planet. But there was never a financial number attached to it. But there are ways to save the planet. 

One way to save the planet is to do all the energy and mining in the U.S. because we do it cleaner, better, safer, and smarter than anywhere. If you want to save the planet, you don’t shut off the ability to develop in the country that actually has the track record of carrying the most, innovating the most, and doing the safest and most environmentally sound work of any country in the world. The U.S. has always led in that area.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. So, I mean, unleashing energy production is, of course, I know you’re collaborating with the Department of Energy in this whole realm. I understand that the energy companies, you know, oil and so forth, have kind of rejigged around these kinds of policies in the previous administration. Are they shifting back? It takes some time to actually, I guess, prepare to exploit these resources. How is that coming? Is that something we can see in the near term, that growth, or is it something that’s coming further out? 

Secretary Burgum:

I think the place we’re really seeing it is in LNG [liquefied natural gas] exports. One of the things that, of course, under President Trump, energy dominance is really about energy abundance. It’s nothing short of two words: peace and prosperity. Prosperity at home is important because energy, whether it’s the car you drive, the food you eat, or the clothes you wear, has an energy component to all of those. If we can get energy prices down through a combination of opening up the supply, reducing the permitting times, and cutting the red tape that burdens these industries, we can lower the cost of energy.

In terms of peace abroad, President Trump is already solving seven global conflicts in eight months. No one has ever been the peace president like he is. He has two more to go. And which two more? We have Russia and Iran. Where are both of them getting their revenues from? They are getting them from energy sales. 

So, as President Trump says, we want to sell energy to our friends and allies so they don’t have to buy it from our adversaries. Because if you’re buying Iranian oil, like China is, you’re funding 24 terrorist groups. If you’re a European country buying Russian oil or gas, you’re funding the war that you’re actually engaged in. We have countries that are buying Russian oil and gas while providing support to Ukraine; they’re funding two sides of a war. It makes no sense. 

So, energy diplomacy is one of the ways that President Trump has been able to bring peace around the world, and he is determined to resolve the last two big conflicts that are out there. Energy and energy diplomacy are key parts of it.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s jump back to the national security dimension because really all of these things, again, whether it’s critical rights or PPE [personal protective equipment], threaten to withhold PPE back in the day on the manufacturing side, whether it’s medical precursors, or whether it’s the ability to not be dependent on energy from outside sources. It all ultimately comes down to this. The thing that keeps me up at night is that it feels to me like we have a lot of exposure on the national security side because these things have not been taken care of. And this isn’t just over one administration; this is over multiple administrations over a long time, to be fair. 

Secretary Burgum:

Yes. We do have exposure. We saw that this last spring, especially when China was withholding the magnets. Then China said, oh, well, we’ll start shipping again. You just have to fill out this export form. Well, the export form is requiring everybody from automakers to tech companies to defense companies to say exactly how they use the magnet, what product it goes into, what the dimensions are, is it for commercial or for military use? It was essentially a giant intelligence-gathering capability and episode on their part, you know, under the guise of it’s just an export form. They were doing that to countries around the world. 

We just can’t have this kind of dependence. That’s why, under the Trump administration, we are in an energy emergency. Part of that energy emergency is to make sure we’ve got enough electricity to win the AI arms race against China. It’s also that we’ve got the critical minerals and the refining of those critical minerals, so we’re not put in a stranglehold by China. 

And in my view, China played their card too early. They had a card. They played it at a time when we were not involved in any kind of kinetic war. We’re in a cold war, essentially a trade war. We’re certainly in a cyber war every day because of their attempts to steal our IP all the time.

 But amongst all the wars, we’re not in a kinetic war, but they played a trade, a pretty big trade war card. They played it early, and that woke up America, certainly woke up this administration. We’re determined as quickly as possible to reduce and eliminate any critical mineral supply chain dependence we have on China. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, so what do you make of all this chatter about the president making some sort of massive trade deal, you know, with some sort of, you know, national security restriction concessions then? 

Secretary Burgum:

We certainly hope that there won’t be any national security concessions. But China, for the choke points that they have, they’ve also got a bunch of issues, whether it’s the overblown stock market, whether it’s the real estate overhang, whether it’s the demographics that they have of an aging population that is in a slowing economic growth, that they’ve got a lot of debt in their economy. 

Look at the fact that they’re the most energy-dependent country in the world, they import 11-and-a-half million barrels of oil a day, a day into that country, just to keep the lights on and keep it going. So in that sense, they’ve got a lot of dependencies. They’ve got energy security problems, and they’ve got economic security problems as well. 

Right now, the tariffs are really having an impact on China because their whole model was built around building more supply than they needed domestically, dumping it on the world market to try to create employment at home. If the U.S. shuts its doors, and can replace those goods, that takes away the largest market in the world. That can create a lot of havoc economically back home for China. They’re starting to realize that. I think they’re going to come to the table with some concessions on their part. But again, it’s a dangerous situation that we’re in.

Mr. Jekielek:

Mr. Secretary, you raise a very good point here. The Chinese economy really only has one leg left, which is exports. And that’s something we have to pay close attention to. You know, and by the way, thank you very much for joining me here during this shutdown. I understand a lot of your department actually isn’t functioning. Could you just tell us, like, what’s the situation right now? And what are the challenges?

Secretary Burgum:

I’m a private sector guy. So this whole thing is just bizarro land to me that we would actually have a mechanism where either party could allow the federal government to shut down. Think if you’re running a small hardware store on Main Street, USA, and then all of a sudden one day you just tell your employees, hey, we’re shutting down. We don’t know when we’re going to open up again, but you guys just go on furlough and stick around. And then your customers come and knock on the door or they come online and your website’s down, and the doors are shut. 

Then you say, we’re not sure when we’re opening again. We’re waiting for some politicians to decide when they’ve extracted enough benefit from the shutdown. This is weird. If the Democrats want to pass legislation, they can introduce the legislation while the government’s running and then battle it out in Congress to see if they can pass legislation. There’s nothing good in this for the American people right now. 

I’m sitting in a building that should hold about 4,000 people. For the most part, no one’s here except a bunch of President Trump’s appointees that are in the building. They’re also working without getting paid, trying to keep the lights on and keep things moving in this country. It makes no sense whatsoever. 

If there was some large political thing at stake, I understand why people would negotiate, but we can have a negotiation about health care in America while the government’s functioning. You don’t have to shut it down to have that. As a private sector guy, it makes no sense. We’ve wasted so much time shutting down. Then we’re going to spend a bunch of time trying to gear up and start up. Meanwhile, is China shutting down this week? I don’t think so. China is not taking a week off over some internal thing.

The bigger picture here is that we, the U.S., hurt ourselves in world competition when we take these narrow, short-sighted, inside-the-beltway D.C. views of the world, because government does perform functions. At Interior, we’re finding funding sources. We’re not allowed to spend appropriated dollars, but we’re trying to keep permitting open, keeping the national parks open, and trying to keep everything going. So all the things that you and I have talked about working on, Jan, we’re not slowing down on any of that, but there’s only a period of time because we can only borrow money from so many other unappropriated buckets to keep things moving and keep the doors open. 

Hopefully, this gets resolved soon and we can get some common sense back into it. The House of Representatives has already passed a continuing resolution. If the Senate voted to keep the government open; it’s operating under the same budget we were operating under a week ago. I think we’re okay, and then we let them duke it out in Congress. But don’t stop the wheels of the American economy and the important role that we can play in keeping that going in a Trump direction. President Trump’s got this economy turning around. This is not helping.

Mr. Jekielek:

Secretary Burgum, a final thought as we finish?

Secretary Burgum:

I’m very optimistic about the future. President Trump’s leadership, whether it’s ending wars at home, helping to reshore manufacturing back, or his focus on us building up the electrical power in this country that we need to win the AI arms race. Under President Biden, we were shutting down baseload and highly subsidizing forms of electricity, wind and solar, that are intermittent and expensive. 

On the solar side, most of those solar panels were coming from China. It was discovered that there were kill switches being put in some of these, so the solar panels could be just as big a problem as Huawei was during Trump 1. Again, if we want to have solar in this country, it better be from U.S. manufacturers and in ways where we can be secure about what the supply chain is. 

But meanwhile, President Trump is just bringing common sense. We’ve got to get back in that. China added 93 gigawatts of coal last year. We need electricity. A kilowatt hour of electricity right now is worth more than it ever has been in history because you can turn electricity directly into intelligence in what I call an AI factory. They’re not really data centers. 

Data centers are one company and their customers. It’s a closed loop. AI is a general-purpose technology, a GPT. It can be used by any industry to cure cancer, change education, and transform the number of lawyers we need in America. There are all kinds of benefits that can come from having this kind of advanced intelligence going around, but we need power. We used to say that knowledge is power. Knowledge is power. That was a saying in almost every culture and every language, but it’s flipped around. 

Now power creates knowledge, and we need more electricity to make it happen. President Trump understands that. There is the nuclear energy side with the four executive orders that he put in earlier this year, which have helped bring a flood of new venture capital back into the nuclear business. There is all of the innovation that’s occurring in other forums, like small modular nuclear and geothermal. There’s a bunch of exciting things happening. Oil and gas continue to get more efficient, and it’s just essential to our economy.

So it’s exciting to see what’s happening. Again, Western Europe can thank America. Western Europe has benefited so greatly from the LNG exports coming out of the United States. Our energy abundance has literally saved the EU during this time of conflict with Russia. And kudos to all those patriots that work across America’s energy industries, because the work that they’re doing to have safe, reliable, secure, affordable energy benefits every American, but it’s certainly playing big on the world stage. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, one final thought. Is it possible that through this AI revolution and incredible growth and hunger for power, hunger for energy, the narrative, could perhaps the narrative on energy have been shifted? That’s the final thought I’d like to leave us with. Do you think that could be happening across the board? 

Secretary Burgum:

Absolutely. And I’ll tell you, it started in Silicon Valley because Silicon Valley made a 180-degree flip, and everybody that understood the AI revolution ended up showing up as a President Trump supporter. People said that wouldn’t have been possible two years ago because of the direction where Silicon Valley was focused on all kinds of issues that were not related to national security, national defense, economic prosperity, and America’s future. 

Then they woke up one day and said, wow, there’s not going to be enough electricity in America for us to power AI. There’s not going to be enough electricity to power the market caps of our companies. We better get with a team that actually understands that, get with a team that is committed to actually producing power to win the AI arms race. 

You saw virtually every major player in Silicon Valley come over. They came over; their awakening was all around energy and energy security. It takes courage, curiosity, and humility to switch your positions and change the direction where they’re going. But credit is due to all those tech leaders that stood up and showed up and were standing by President Trump at the inauguration because they’re part of the team that’s going to help us win the AI arms race against China. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Secretary Doug Burgum, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. 

Secretary Burgum:

Thank you, Jan.

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.