U.S. firms still struggle to get critical minerals from China, lobby says

U.S. firms were still struggling to get critical minerals from China as export controls and licensing delays squeezed supplies, and some rare-earth inputs were described as nearly unobtainable. The pressure matters far beyond mining: these materials feed magnets, batteries, phosphors and catalysts used in wind turbines, electric vehicles, screens, petroleum refining and defense systems, so the first damage would likely show up as production delays and higher costs in American factories.

The U.S.-China Business Council said its survey of 38 impacted companies found that 29% were actively shifting to non-Chinese suppliers, while 47% were still searching for viable alternatives. Taken together, that meant roughly three-quarters of affected firms were trying to move away from China, but the search was slow and incomplete. Sean Stein, the council’s president, said China was forcing diversification away from China and creating strong interest in alternatives, but he also said it would be difficult to eliminate supply issues over the next three years.

That warning reflects how concentrated the market has become. The Congressional Research Service has said supply chains are vulnerable when extraction or processing is concentrated in only a few locations, and the U.S. Geological Survey’s final list of 50 critical minerals, published in February 2022, shows how broad the strategic exposure has become. Rare earth elements are now embedded in everything from consumer electronics to clean energy, chipmaking and defense procurement, which means shortages can ripple quickly from one sector to another.

China’s restrictions have been at the center of the squeeze since April 2025, when Beijing imposed export controls on seven rare earth elements and magnets in retaliation for President Donald Trump’s tariffs. In October 2025, Trump and Xi Jinping reached a deal that the White House said would effectively eliminate current and proposed export controls on rare earth elements and other critical minerals. But the latest survey suggests the commercial reality still lagged behind that diplomatic pledge, with licensing delays and restricted access continuing to constrain U.S. buyers.

Washington has been trying to blunt that dependence, but the fix is measured in years, not weeks. On February 4, 2026, the State Department said representatives of 54 countries and the European Commission took part in a Critical Minerals Ministerial, where the U.S. signed 11 new bilateral critical-minerals frameworks or memorandums of understanding and had signed 10 more in the prior five months. JPMorganChase said in April 2026 that governments and industry had moved from diagnosis to action after China’s export controls exposed the concentration risk, but it warned that building scalable processing, refining and recycling capacity would take several years. For U.S. manufacturers, the vulnerability is not abstract: it is the risk that one chokepoint in China can still slow a line in America.