[thisisnotauser]

I used to work on a DoD special project that required rare earths that we could only get from China and we had to write a monthly memo about the risk to our $10B program that China would just stop selling it to us.

The problem boiled down to the Chinese government buying out and shutting down any competitors anywhere in the world, plus Congress requiring the DoD to go with the lowest cost, which was always China. We knew what the problem was, we made the problem clear, no one did anything about it.

Maybe this administration blowing up the government is good, actually.

[btreecat]

> Maybe this administration blowing up the government is good, actually.

My house was so difficult to walk through with the years of stuff piled up. Much easier now that it's all been burned to the ground!

[lmm]

> My house was so difficult to walk through with the years of stuff piled up. Much easier now that it's all been burned to the ground!

For anyone who's dealt with a hoarder house that's not the reducto ad absurdum you think it is, just the tragic reality.

[baby]

It's funny that you chose to use this analogy because most people improve old buildings by blowing them up and rebuilding everything

[coldtea]

Well, sometimes the only realistic solution is to burn the whole mess to the ground and build a new one...

[scotty79]

I often have this sentiment. Ultimately I compromised and moved to a new one leaving the old to be a storage space for old stuff.

[turkishdelight]

Actually...that sort of works.

[beebmam]

Please say sike

[e40]

And some number of years ago, the government restarted a rare earth ore processing plant (somewhere in the west, like CO... I forget). Of course, after a year or two, the will to maintain it (because it was operating at a loss) evaporated and it went under.

Japan broke their habit of buying rare earths from China because of an extortion incident between the two... they process the ore in far off places (Australia and other places), before importing the final products.

The issue is that the US is (and has been for some time) mired in short-term thinking. The short term being how to win the next election, not how to solve problems. Of course, now, the problems being solved aren't really ones that people want, unless you are rich already.

[Tangurena2]

Part of the trouble with refining "rare earths" [1] is that the undesired residue (commonly called "slag") is radioactive and toxic. Smokestack emissions are also toxic enough that countries with pollution controls don't want them inside their borders. In the US, that means that every rare earth refinery becomes a SuperFund site [2].

China doesn't want to keep refining the metals - they want to move up the value chain by making things out of these metals. Instead of selling the refined neodymium & dysprosium for $50, they want to sell the electric motors that sell for $1,000.

Notes:

1 - They aren't rare at all, they're the bottom 2 strips/rows of the periodic table (of how it is most commonly displayed). Chemically, they're rather similar so the separation process is more complicated and annoying than, say, refining iron ore. Many people like to specifically exclude the actinides (the bottom row which includes uranium & plutonium) from the category "rare earth" because scary! radioactive! nuke! stuff! tends to divert discussion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element

2 - A major problem with SuperFund sites is that every person/corporation who owned that land at any time is responsible for cleaning up the toxic waste. Just like asbestos waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund

[CGMthrowaway]

The US mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_Rare_Earth_Mine

It went bankrupt in 2015, but came out of it and is still operating today. $MP, up 300% YTD

The Japan incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Senkaku_boat_collision_in...

tldr: Japan arrested a Chinese fishing boat captain in disputed territory. China responded by restricting exports of rare earth elements to Japan. Japan responded by forming a new partnership with Lynas Rare Earths which mines in Australia and processes in Malaysia. $LYS, up 150% YTD

[alephnerd]

> Japan broke their habit of buying rare earths from China

Nope. They are still dependent on transshipment via Thailand or processing in 3rd countries like India or Vietnam.

Heck, Toyota's India JV has been halted [0] from exporting processed rare earths to Japan from India right now because China has blockaded Indian access [1] to rare earths which China promised to remove recently but still hasn't [2], which lead to India blocking it's export of REEs.

And people wonder why countries have continued to engage with the US despite Trump.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-moves-conserve-its...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-taking-steps-mitig...

[2] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250916VL202/tata-group-rar...

[h2zizzle]

If the US were to engage in long-term thinking, we might come to dangerous conclusions like, "Having a permanent racial underclass of perpetually-exploited and dissatisfied residents is a bad thing, and maybe we should train/pay the ones that are already here, inculcating them the righteousness of the American project, rather than constantly importing workers because their lack of direct experience with our country's institutions as they currently exist makes them easier marks." It would devastate the poverty-retail-financial-service complex.

The funniest part is our current admin's inadvertent exposure of this situation. Tinfoil hats on, but I hear tell of difficulties in the subprime auto-lending space because so many of immigrants who were targeted for those loans either stopped making payments because they're too afraid to go to work, or else self-deported with their cars. Lender bankruptcies are in-process, which is probably not good for all of the derivatives that are about to go to zero in sympathy. So much for consumer strength, and completely avoidable if not for our insistence on squeezing our least for every last cent.

[evanjrowley]

It's amazing how the general public seems to think people involved with the bureaucracy would never support cuts and downsizing. They should get a moral compass and try working there for a while.

[throw10920]

Yes, and here's some nuance: based on my experience, the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient.

To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable.

Those in the general public who thinks that government budgets should increase monotonically are a linear combination between total idiots and outright politically malicious.

[guappa]

The problem with random cuts is that the same people whose only skill is to play office politics are the only ones who will be left after.

[rowanG077]

Every individual can support efficiency and downsizing and yet it will not happen. With such an extremely large organization it's not enough people just want something. You need concrete drivers for change.

[coldtea]

The public is totally right, those people would never support cuts and downsizing, unless it affects a rival department.

[mothballed]

I'm shocked DoD doesn't have straw buyers in friendly (or neutral) 3rd party countries to deal with that possibility.

[Animats]

They do. DoD made a deal with MP Minerals (Mountain Pass, CA) in 2024. DoD will buy rare earths at a guaranteed price which is well above the world price.[1]

This followed a 2021 deal with General Motors to insure GM's magnet supply.[2] That resulted in building a modest magnet plant in an industrial park in Texas, using MP Minerals ore.

This deal expanded in 2025, with DoD taking a majority stake in MP Minerals.[3]

The history here is that the price goes up and down so much that the Mountain Pass mine has been shut down twice since the 1990s. There were two bankruptcies. The most recent glut and price crash was in 2015.[4]

The process has four steps: 1) mining, 2) beneficiation, where mixed rare earth ores are separated out, 3) chemical separation, where the individual rare earths are separated, and 4) magnet metal making. For years, 3) wasn't done in the US, and MP Minerals was shipping ore to China for processing.

[1] https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...

[2] https://investor.gm.com/news-releases/news-release-details/g...

[3] https://mpmaterials.com/news/mp-materials-announces-transfor...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP_Materials

[reenorap]

There is nothing rare about rare earth minerals. The only thing is that it's expensive to extract them by American workers vs Chinese workers which is why all the business went to China. The prices will have to go up in order for it to be "worth it" but now that it's a national security issue, maybe more effort will be put into this.

[jm4]

Of course they do. The SR-71 was built with Russian titanium that the Russians believed was going to be used in pizza ovens. There’s no reason to think schemes like that ever stopped. Or that that was the first time. My guess is most countries have been doing it for as long as they have been trading.

[alephnerd]

Ever wonder why there was a sudden spike in antimony, gallium, and germanium shipments from Thailand - a country that does not produce either of the 3 at scale - this summer?

That said, much like smuggled GPUs - it is difficult to transship an export controlled material at scale.

[iancmceachern]

There is historical precedent for this. As I understand it the US was only able to make the SR71s by sourcing Soviet titanium for the airframe in this manner.

[daedrdev]

nope, china has 90% of the market, and some of the rest are probably just secretly from china

[marcosdumay]

> friendly (or neutral) 3rd party countries

Well... In 2024 there were things like that.

[dgfitz]

I’m shocked you thought the government was ever functional enough to do something like that.

[necovek]

I hear about something that does not seem to really be a problem portrayed as a problem.

China did not stop selling to USA before USA decided to introduce tariffs and stopped selling to China advanced tech like GPUs and NPUs.

In a sense, mutual economic dependency has worked in the past, would work in the present, but "blowing up the government" is leading to one strong-arm play after another — and really, it only leads to everybody being unhappier, and prices being higher for everything, yet the trade will continue very similar to how it did before.

And really, this trade inter-dependency is really the only guarantee (if there is such a thing) of no big military conflict coming out between the two countries. And I am pretty sure that's worse.

[nostrademons]

> plus Congress requiring the DoD to go with the lowest cost, which was always China

Are second-sources no longer a thing? Going with the lowest cost is fine, but it used to be that every critical project lined up a second domestic source for its supply chain. A lot of prominent semiconductor companies (eg. AMD) got started this way.

[somanyphotons]

I'm sure Australia would be happy to supply for a slight premium

[alephnerd]

That's the plan as part of the Minerals Security Partnership - US, Japanese, Korean, Emirati, EU, and other members capital would go into Australian, Canadian, and other countries with large enough deposits to build an ex-China supply chain.

The current admin has made it rocky, but the rest of the countries are still participating in it.

[yard2010]

No free country can compete

[perihelions]

I don't see it. I don't see what this Administration has done to erode China's rare earth monopoly; or actions that could erode it in the future. They've spent a lot of brain cells[0] on the opposite: on trying to convince China to continue exporting rare earths to the US (in clownishly inept ways).

Trump's signature accomplishment is to unintentionally convince China to enact a total ban[1,2] on the exports of several rare-earths (and some other minerals)—something he didn't predict, and is now trying to undo.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/26/trump-tariffs-china-rare-ear... ("Trump threatened 200% tariffs on China if Beijing does not export rare-earth magnets to the U.S.")

[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-bans-expor... ("China bans export of critical minerals to US as trade tensions escalate")

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/business/china-rare-earth... ("China’s Grip on [Samarium] Threatens the West’s Militaries")

[alephnerd]

It's not just the US. China has blockaded the entire West (EU, UK, Japan, South Korea, Australia) and non-China aligned countries (India) access to rare earths.

The EU, UK, and India are working on scaling out EESM production and Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India are working on building an ExChina processing and supply chain for a number of materials. This played a role in the recent Japanese pledge to invest $60B in India and transfer processing tech IP to Indian firms.

[rat87]

> Maybe this administration blowing up the government is good, actually.

Of course it's not. Imagine how difficult it will be to rebuild things to function half as well after all the corruption and disruption with less money

[cogman10]

Right, especially since we've made anyone that knows anything in the government unemployed. It'll be almost impossible to hire back even a small portion of the experts in 3 years.

It's going to be a rough couple of decades.

[raincole]

> We knew what the problem was, we made the problem clear, no one did anything about it.

(Insert here a logical gap wider than the ocean between the US and where the rare earth is produced)

> Maybe this administration blowing up the government is good, actually.

[gjsman-1000]

The idea behind DOGE made a mountain of sense, even if the execution was all over the place.

Americans get sympathetic when they hear about the Air Force $1280 coffee mug. They don't forget that, even half a decade later, when they hear the word "waste." Apple's monitor stand has better build quality than what it's known for.

https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/23...

[Jtsummers]

That's not even the real waste in DOD. The real waste is mostly in failed projects. Projects that either never deliver, or deliver years late and millions or billions over budget, typically with reduced features. They'd have to buy a million of those hot cups to come close to the waste that occurs due to these failed projects.

DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem.

[dangus]

The idea never made sense, the government isn't particularly wasteful, and the entire premise is based on bad math that misunderstands how much money the federal government actually spends on things, especially salaries.

On top of that, the premise was based on defying congressional appropriations. Congress decides how money is spent. When the Clinton administration undertook this, they went through Congress to enact legitimate and lasting reform. [1]

The federal government has a much lower employee to citizen ratio than it used to have, it's quite efficient.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/1237991516/planet-money-doge-...

[rat87]

The idea behind DOGE was to

1. fire people who don't automatically support Trump regardless of the law/constitution/good of the nation 2. Fire people who Trump or maga dislike for some reason (LGBTQ, minorities, people who have ever criticized Trump) 3. Destroy government in general (from people on the ideological right who are willing to set aside any principles to work for Trump)

Reducing waste or making government efficient was never one of the goals. Otherwise they wouldn't have gotten rid of people doing actual oversight work for the government. They also wouldn't have fired so many people on whims (that they had to take back in many cases)

[jiggawatts]

I've been the one selling the "$1,280 mug", not in America, and not to the military, but to state and federal governments all over the place.

It's always the same problem: They write "requirements" that end up being total nonsense, they have an unlimited budget, and they're terrified that they'll get "in trouble" for some slight oversight. This is a recipe for overspending, and is the bane of all such organisations everywhere.

The reason that DOGE had a snowball's chance in hell of fixing government overspend is that this can't possibly be achieved by merely cancelling a few hundred contracts out of millions!

The dynamic has to change, by realigning incentives and changing the rules, but DOGE did not have that power.

Not to mention that nobody knows how to do this at the scale of the US government! Nobody. I don't have the answers, Elon doesn't, neither does anyone else like Peter Thiel.

They keep talking about how the government is bad, but they don't have an alternative that wouldn't be subject to the exact same forces and produce an equally bad (or even identical) outcome.

[stirfish]

Thanks for this link. I always assumed that things like $1280 coffee cups were like dad's "business trips", where we all know that's not really what's going on but we're all politely not talking about it.

Like a coffee cup might've been in the shipping manifest, but that wasn't all of it and we still needed to pay to ship it to [redacted]

[stirfish]

Ten billion sounds like a lot, but it's not really for an organization like the DoD that has so many projects and so much money. I bet someone above you assessed the risks and decided your project was good to run for as long as it could, but wouldn't be a crippling loss if it had to shut down. It would be like Google having to decide to keep selling Chromecasts until they can't and just stopping, or buying up the entire supply chain to secure their ability to produce Chromecasts indefinitely.

[mulmen]

I don’t see the problem. You explained the risks, leadership said they accept those risks. What was supposed to be done differently?

[micromacrofoot]

accelerationism often looks appealing

as long as if you're willing to ignore the people it will kill

[thrance]

DoD? You mean the DoW?

[defrost]

Still the DoD ...

  A September 2025 executive order authorized the usage of "Department of War" as a secondary name. Department of Defense remains the legal name.

Even had the primary name legally changed the Department of Defense would still be the correct name of the organization at the time that @thisisnotauser worked for it.

[bjourne]

It is not realistic to expect a modern supply chain to be completely uninterruptible. The US has large stockpiles of (not very) rare earth metals and there are multiple ways of acquiring them in case China stops exporting. If China ever embargoes rare earth metals, the US can embargo Windows updates. Who do you think will last the longest?

[Bender]

the US can embargo Windows updates

That's actually a funny and real example. For a long time there was a heat map that showed where the concentration of MSIE 6 was. It was China because every copy of Windows was pirated and may have also had government keys hard coded in the pirated copies. They were locked at the patch level the pirated version was made from and it was impossible to patch it otherwise.

Either way the US has nearly unlimited amounts of rare earth material in raw form. Its just much more expensive and time consuming to process it in the US and US regulations make it even more expensive. China does not follow our environmental laws and we breath the output of that. That's why they are processed in China. Processing it in the US would reduce global pollution for a hefty price.

[Anarch157a]

It's much easier to smuggle a USB drive with Windows updates than it is a few tonnes of metal.

Then China will switch a billion desktops to Linux and the US will still need rare earths.

[wakawaka28]

Is this a serious question? China probably has the full source code of Windows, which has leaked before and could be obtained easily by spies abroad who are employed at Microsoft. They also don't need Windows. They make practically all the computer gear, or enough of it that they can get by in a war. We need to make real essential goods to sustain ourselves, not a bunch of spyware products and "service industry" gigs.