The U.S. Department of the Interior, through the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has released the draft 2025 List of Critical Minerals and a report detailing a new approach to evaluating how supply chain disruptions could impact the national economy.
The list is intended to inform federal decisions on strategy, investment, and permitting for minerals essential to economic activity and national security. It also influences direct investments in mining, resource recovery from mine waste, tax incentives for domestic mineral processing, and streamlined permitting processes.
“President Trump has made clear that strengthening America’s economic and national security means securing the resources that fuel our way of life. This draft List of Critical Minerals provides a clear, science-based roadmap to reduce our dependence on foreign adversaries, expand domestic production and unleash American innovation,” said Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. “By working with industry and state partners, we are ensuring that the minerals powering our energy, defense, and technology supply chains are produced and processed in the United States by American workers.”
For 2025, the draft list contains 54 mineral commodities. Fifty were included based on an assessment of their potential economic impact if disrupted; zirconium was added due to risks associated with single points of failure in its supply chain; three more were retained after qualitative evaluation. Potash, silicon, copper, silver, rhenium, and lead are recommended for inclusion this year while arsenic and tellurium are recommended for removal.
This update marks the second revision since a 2017 executive order initiated efforts to assess vulnerabilities in critical mineral supply chains. The Energy Act of 2020 established requirements for updating this list every three years.
“The draft 2025 list and methodology reflect USGS advances in forecasting potential mineral supply chain disruptions, as called for in the Energy Act of 2020,” said Sarah Ryker, acting director of USGS. “Minerals-based industries contributed over $4 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2024, and with this methodology we can pinpoint which industries may feel the greatest impacts of supply disruptions and understand where strategic domestic investments or international trade relationships may help mitigate risk to individual supply chains. This is a next generation risk assessment that can be used to prioritize securing the nation’s mineral supply chains.”
The new model assessed over 1,200 trade disruption scenarios involving 84 mineral commodities across more than 400 industries. Each scenario's economic impact was weighted by its probability—such as restricting rhodium imports from South Africa: although such an event could decrease GDP by $64 billion according to estimates (with a probability-weighted impact closer to $2.5 billion given its low likelihood).
According to USGS analysis published at https://doi.org/10.3133/ofr20251047 , samarium tops the list when ranking minerals by their estimated probability-weighted economic impact from possible disruptions; others include rhodium, lutetium, terbium, dysprosium, gallium, germanium, gadolinium, tungsten and niobium.
Although these impacts may seem small compared with total U.S. GDP (about $29 trillion), actual losses from real-world disruptions could be much higher due to ripple effects throughout sectors like semiconductors or defense systems.
Secretary Burgum retains authority under law to add further minerals before finalizing the list; metallurgical coal and uranium are among those being considered pending further analysis.
On August 26th ,the proposed list will appear in the Federal Register for public comment over a period of thirty days—comments are especially encouraged regarding metallurgical coal or uranium inclusion as well as suggestions about other additions or shifting toward annual updates informed by USGS technical input.
Further details on methods used—including machine learning models estimating disruption probabilities—and select supporting data can be found at:
- Scientific journal publication
Additional information about USGS research on critical minerals is available at USGS Mineral Resources Program.
