President Trump announced on Monday that the U.S. would create a domestic stockpile of critical minerals for civilian use — essentially a Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but for lithium, copper, rare earths, and other rocks central to electronics and decarbonization.
It’s one of many experimental and unusual steps that the administration has taken to boost U.S. mineral production over the past 13 months. But are any of those plans working? What could improve — and what does any of this mean for clean energy?
On this week’s Shift Key, we talk to someone who saw these policies up close. From 2023 to 2025, Nathaniel Horadam worked on electric vehicle and mineral policy at the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, eventually overseeing the office’s critical mineral portfolio last year. The office is the department’s in-house bank (it’s since been rechristened the Energy Dominance Financing Office) and it runs some of the federal government’s most ambitious industrial policy.
Horadam is now founder and president of Full Tilt Strategies, LLC, and he writes about mineral issues for his Tailings substack. He joins us to discuss what’s working, what’s not working, and what needs to improve. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is off this week.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Nathaniel Horadam: My like third cardinal rule here: Losing money is okay. At the end of the day, you’re providing an insurance policy —
Robinson Meyer: The government losing money is okay.
Horadam: Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, one of my biggest observational complaints with the way the Trump administration’s approaching a lot of these deals right now is they’re being structured to not lose money.
Even if they’re taking risk, you’re taking equity stakes, and you’re looking to collateralize enough stuff. It’s a private equity mindset. It’s not necessarily setting up projects to succeed in the long term, and mechanisms to succeed in the long term. And the same thing — I mean, the Export-Import Bank, I applaud them for getting creative here and trying to find ways to extend its existing authorities as much as possible. But Ex-Im has a pretty strict loss cap that has traditionally constrained the amount of risk it can take. And between that and the fact that they were able to pull in outside investors to do this means it’s being structured to make a profit.
That may run against the goals of actually trying to provide the shock absorbers that you need for actual critical materials. I hope it doesn’t end up steering deal flow toward things that are more lucrative to try and keep this in the green and meet investor expectations. Certainly the encouraging bit that I saw in the Bloomberg story is that they are letting the industrial end users dictate what they stockpile. But at the end of the day, it’s still controlled by an administration that’s getting a lot of pressure to fix various markets for different materials, and it may be inclined to intervene in places that are a little bit outta scope. Let’s put it that way.
Mentioned:
Final 2025 List of Critical Minerals
Reuters: US moves away from critical mineral price floors
“What exactly are ‘Critical Minerals’?,” by Nathaniel Horadam
The Secure Minerals Act, by Senators Todd Young and Jeanne Shaheen
The Pentagon’s Rare Earths Deal Is Making Former Biden Officials Jealous
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
