On January 15, 2026, the President issued Proclamation 11001, entitled “Adjusting Imports of Processed Critical Minerals and Their Derivative Products into the United States,” following an investigation under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 (“Section 232”) in which the Secretary of Commerce found that imports of “processed critical minerals and their derivative products” (“PCMDPs” or “critical minerals”) threaten the national security of the United States. Despite concurring with the Secretary’s finding, the President did not impose tariffs or other trade measures at this time. Instead, he requested that the Secretary of Commerce and the U.S. Trade Representative initiate negotiations to address the national security effects of American reliance on foreign sources of PCMDPs. The President also left open the option of deploying other tools, such as minimum import prices, to address the effects of these imports in the future.
The U.S. government identifies critical minerals as those that are essential for U.S. national security, economic security, and supply chain resilience. These materials underpin strategic industries, drive technological innovation, and support key infrastructure. The official U.S. government list of critical minerals is maintained by the United States Geological Survey (“USGS”) within the Department of the Interior. Where a product is included on this list, projects related to such minerals may benefit from certain U.S. government support, such as development funding, incentives, or expedited permitting.
Minerals historically identified on the USGS list have included gallium, lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements (“REEs”), among others. This list is updated periodically, most recently in November 2025. Added to the final 2025 list were several commodities, including boron, copper, lead, metallurgical coal, phosphate, potash, rhenium, silicon, silver, and uranium. At present, the USGS list contains over 60 mineral commodities.
In April 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order (“EO”) 14272, ordering the Department of Commerce (“Commerce”) to initiate an investigation under Section 232, which authorizes the President to take action to “adjust” imports (including through imposition of tariffs and other measures) that threaten to impair U.S. national security. The EO defined critical minerals to encompass minerals included in the USGS list or “any subsequent such list,” as well as uranium. Pursuant to EO 14272, Commerce initiated a Section 232 investigation on April 23, 2025, to determine the national security impact of “imports of processed critical minerals and their derivative products.”
According to Proclamation 11001, in his findings made pursuant to this Section 232 investigation, which were transmitted to the President on October 24, 2025, the Secretary of Commerce made the following determinations:
- PCMDPs are critical to both the U.S. military and key sectors of the U.S. economy;
- The United States is “too reliant on foreign sources of PCMDPs,” especially given its lack of domestic processing and refining capacity for certain strategic commodities, and “lacks access to a sufficiently secure and reliable supply chain to PCMDPs”;
- The United States “is experiencing unsustainable price volatility with respect to critical mineral markets,” which discourages domestic investment in critical minerals extraction and processing capacity; and
- U.S. demand for critical minerals will only continue to grow in the future due to civilian demand.
Based on these findings, the President directed Commerce and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (“USTR”) to “jointly pursue negotiation of agreements” to address the national security implications of PCMDP imports into the United States. The Proclamation directs that such negotiations shall “consider price floors for trade in critical minerals and other trade-restricting measures,” and instructs the Secretary of Commerce to inform the President on the status or outcome of the negotiations within 180 days.
The President may also take other actions to adjust imports of PCMDPs and eliminate the related threats to national security, including if agreements are not concluded within 180 days, are not being carried out, or are ineffective. Finally, depending on the outcome of the negotiations, the President “may consider alternative remedies in the future, including minimum import prices for specific types of critical minerals.”
Given the Proclamation’s emphasis on the negotiation of agreements, such negotiations may play a key role in shaping international critical mineral supply chains. While the text of the Proclamation does not prescribe in detail what the negotiations should look like or seek to achieve, several indicators suggest what the focus of these future negotiations might be.
First, the Trump administration has already concluded several agreements related to critical minerals with trading partners in recent months, including Japan, Malaysia, Australia, Thailand, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Saudi Arabia. Recurring provisions in those agreements include commitments by U.S. partners to directly invest in U.S.-based critical minerals projects, avoid certain anti-competitive pricing practices, jointly identify and finance critical minerals projects, and share expertise and best practices. Many of these provisions, such as those concerning anti-competitive pricing practices, could provide a model for future agreements on critical minerals.
Second, the negotiations likely will include a price floor for critical minerals imports. This focus coincides with reports of similar U.S. proposals to establish such price floors in other contexts, including at recent meetings of the G7. The Proclamation also contemplates use of unilateral minimum import prices and cites price volatility in critical minerals markets as a key factor restricting private investment in U.S. domestic critical minerals extraction and processing, as well as a contributor to the unsustainability of existing international critical minerals supply chains. The U.S. Trade Representative and the Secretary of Commerce may also opt to include distinct, but similar, measures in future agreements, such as offtake agreements. These agreements, whereby buyers agree to purchase fixed quantities of minerals often before a mine is in full production, offer the benefit of enhancing predictability and stability for consumers in their access to minerals over an extended period of time, and for suppliers in their guaranteed prices and sales over that same period. Perhaps even more than price floors, the certainty provided by offtake agreements changes the economics of investing in critical minerals and can expand the financing available for extraction and processing.
Third, any agreements reached pursuant to Proclamation 11001 are likely to focus on measures to promote the U.S. processing and refining industry, consistent with the focus of the Section 232 investigation on processed critical minerals. The Proclamation notes, for instance, that—despite being the world’s second largest producer of unprocessed rare earth minerals—the United States lacks extensive critical minerals refining capacity, making it reliant on foreign producers for derivative products (such as magnets that incorporate heavy rare earth elements). The inclusion of measures addressing critical minerals processing is made even more likely by the fact that, in contrast to the United States, China currently acts as the world’s predominant critical minerals refiner, accounting for a majority of global capacity. This position provides China with meaningful leverage over the United States and its allies, as evidenced by China’s imposition of export controls on several critical minerals last year. In light of this potential vulnerability on the part of the United States, processing-related measures folded into agreements negotiated by USTR and Commerce could be accompanied by other actions by the executive branch to encourage the buildout of domestic critical minerals processing. These actions could resemble recent efforts by the administration to encourage the U.S. Development Finance Corporation to take a more active role in supporting domestic investment in critical minerals infrastructure.
Finally, it is highly likely that any resulting agreements will differentiate among critical minerals and address distinct subsets of these materials. The 2025 USGS list identifies a wide range of mineral commodities with sharply different scarcities, uses, properties, and supply chains—a diversity the Proclamation implicitly acknowledges by noting U.S. reliance on foreign sources for 31 critical minerals and by referencing different groupings of minerals as essential to sectors such as chemicals, communications, and energy. The fact that the United States faces particularly acute shortages of several specific critical minerals, such as samarium and heavy rare earth elements, also cuts in favor of the administration taking a mineral-by-mineral approach to negotiations. USTR and Commerce, therefore, would be well served to negotiate distinct, mineral-specific provisions in agreements with their counterparts, which may add to the substantive complexity of the negotiations and the time needed to conclude those agreements.
While immediate actions resulting from Proclamation 11001 will be limited to the pursuit of international agreements, the President could decide at a later time to take additional actions under Section 232, including the imposition of tariffs or other trade measures on processed critical minerals. Indeed, in the Proclamation, the President specifically reserved the right to take other actions impacting critical minerals imports, specifically identifying minimum import prices for certain critical minerals as a potential future measure. Additionally, the timeline for implementing any actions taken pursuant to Proclamation 11001 will likely extend over several years, considering the time needed for new critical minerals processing facilities to come online in the United States and elsewhere, so the window for additional actions by the President could be quite long. As a result, more extensive trade measures, including tariffs, could be imposed on imports of some or all processed critical minerals, either in parallel with or as an alternative to negotiations carried out by USTR and Commerce.
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If you have any questions concerning the material discussed in this client alert, please contact the members of our Trade Policy practice.
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