Boosting domestic production of critical minerals and rare earth elements has been a key talking point in the early days of the second Trump administration. The returning president has suggested he wants to take over Greenland for its resource potential; pursued a deal to access Ukrainian mineral reserves; and cited a lack of reliable critical minerals as a threat to national security under an executive order declaring a National Energy Emergency — all with the ostensible goals of bettering the military technology supply chain, and gaining a general geopolitical advantage.
Critical minerals are also, of course, essential for the clean energy technologies the administration has said it will not support, including electric vehicles. But regardless of how they’re ultimately used, there’s one major problem: the country doesn’t have enough geologists.
The American Geosciences Institute projects that 27% of the existing geoscience workforce in the U.S. will retire by 2029. And in the last few weeks, major cuts to government agencies including the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), a science bureau within the Department of the Interior, have accelerated an already dire shortage.
Joshua Elliot, chief scientist at Renaissance Philanthropy, told Latitude Media that teams within USGS created to work on critical mineral assessment have been “completely gutted” in recent weeks. In practical terms, that has meant already small teams are losing 80% of their employees, right as economic geologists — those focused specifically on mineral resources with potential value as commodities — are nearing retirement age, “and a new generation is desperately needed.”
In light of the Trump cuts, Elliot is worried that those people are “essentially gone for good” from the field, and there isn’t a pipeline to replace them.
“Our STEM talent pipeline is being dismantled: from K-12 education, through graduate students having their acceptances revoked, to postdocs who don’t see any future in academia because all their grants and their supervisors’ grants have been frozen,” he explained. “Across the board we are taking a hammer to this incredible talent juggernaut that has sustained American innovation and the American economy for basically the last 100 years.”
USGS declined to respond to questions from Latitude Media about how many staffers have been cut from the office, and specifically from the energy and critical minerals group. However, roughly 2,300 have been cut from the Interior Department as a whole.
And it’s not just jobs that are being lost. Elliott emphasized that key research programs and the insights they’ve gleaned about critical minerals are also essentially being gutted.
For instance, Elliott spent six years as a program manager working on information innovation at DARPA, the Defense Department’s research arm, which included work on a USGS-DARPA partnership to accelerate critical mineral assessments using AI and machine learning, have largely been laid off. It’s not currently clear, he added, whether the remaining agencies will be able to put those tools to use, because the engineers who designed them and know how to use them are gone.
One development that could encourage the office’s critical minerals work, however, is the fact that President Trump nominated longtime USGS geologist Ned Mamula to lead the agency. Mamula himself is an economic geologist, and has long advocated for the country to expand its domestic mineral extraction.
Mamula was a member of the Trump transition team in 2016, and was the critical minerals program director at USGS under both Presidents Trump and Biden, from 2019 to 2023. He has spent the last two years as chief geologist for the critical mineral infrastructure company GreenMet.
Broader economic impacts beyond USGS
Just this week, USGS published a report projecting global production capacity for seven critical minerals, as well as helium, for the next five years.
According to the report, “information regarding expected country-level mine production and production capacity is becoming increasingly important,” given the expansion of demand for mineral commodities — information that requires economic geologists to uncover and disseminate.
“In particular, production capacity can limit future supply, depending on how rapidly that capacity is able to expand,” the report added.
Tom Moerenhout, a research scholar at Columbia, who specializes in energy transition supply chains, told Latitude Media in a 2023 interview that countries around the world, including the U.S., are often guilty of “lazy industrial policy” when it comes to various energy supply chains.
Governments often hope that local content requirements, or tariffs, will be enough to boost an industry, without realizing that additional incentives focused on the talent pipeline are absolutely crucial. Examples of those incentives include both work visa certainty and job security — both of which have been thrown into chaos by the Trump administration’s firing of federal workers, and especially targeting those on visas.
One country that hasn’t underinvested in that talent pipeline, Moerenhout said, is China. To date, China has far more geologists than the U.S. or any other major Western market, he added.
As federal capacity collapses at USGS, some may be looking to other sectors — like private industry and philanthropy — to fill critical knowledge and funding gaps, Elliot said. And while entities like the Gates Foundation may be able to “staunch at least some of the worst bleeding,” it’s ultimately a “zero sum game,” he added; reorienting those dollars means other key areas get deprioritized.
“The fact is that we can’t fill the gap,” he said. “We’re talking about billions upon billions of dollars being lost…countless programs across the DOE alone being dismantled.”
