U.S. President Donald Trump wants to transform the United States into a mining power, but the country may not have enough people to make that happen\u2014at least not yet.<\/p>\n
Since his return to office, the U.S. leader has pushed an all-out effort to slash Washington\u2019s dependence on China for critical minerals, the 60 or so raw materials that U.S. agencies have deemed essential to U.S. economic and national security. At home, the Trump administration has secured equity stakes<\/a> in a raft of companies, launched a $12 billion critical minerals stockpile, and pushed to expand mining. Abroad, it has pursued a flurry of partnerships and pitched a global minerals trading bloc<\/a> to dozens of countries<\/a> in its bid to boost U.S. supply chain security.<\/p>\n U.S. President Donald Trump wants to transform the United States into a mining power, but the country may not have enough people to make that happen\u2014at least not yet.<\/p>\n Since his return to office, the U.S. leader has pushed an all-out effort to slash Washington\u2019s dependence on China for critical minerals, the 60 or so raw materials that U.S. agencies have deemed essential to U.S. economic and national security. At home, the Trump administration has secured equity stakes<\/a> in a raft of companies, launched a $12 billion critical minerals stockpile, and pushed to expand mining. Abroad, it has pursued a flurry of partnerships and pitched a global minerals trading bloc<\/a> to dozens of countries<\/a> in its bid to boost U.S. supply chain security.<\/p>\n Yet Trump\u2019s big push has also raised questions about whether the United States has the skilled workforce to realize his mineral ambitions. No matter how eager the U.S. leader is to herald a mining renaissance, industry experts warn that challenging labor realities could complicate that plan.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere are not enough mining engineering programs and mining engineering graduates to satisfy current domestic demand,\u201d said Elizabeth Holley, a professor of mining engineering at the Colorado School of Mines.\u00a0<\/p>\n That wasn\u2019t always the case. Back in the early 1980s, the United States was home to a robust mining industry and touted more than two dozen<\/a> accredited mining schools that fed the sector\u2019s workforce. But pollution and environmental harms drove public anger that plagued<\/a> the industry, at the same time as domestic firms struggled to cope with depressed commodity prices<\/a>.<\/p>\n Facing those pressures, U.S. lawmakers saw mining as a dirty sector that could and should be outsourced to other countries, even going so far as to shutter<\/a> the U.S. Bureau of Mines in 1996. In a sign of the industry\u2019s decline, between about 1981 and 1984, the mining workforce plummeted from 109,000 to 44,800 people, according to a 1984 Business Week article titled<\/a> \u201cThe Death of Mining.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe pangs of mining are the latest example of what may be an industrial megatrend: the inexorable shift of the production and processing of all basic materials from the industrial countries to the Third World,\u201d the article read.\u00a0<\/p>\n The impacts of that shift have been stark. The United States is now home to just 12 accredited mining schools\u2014less than half the number it boasted in 1982<\/a>. Graduations, too, have fallen in recent years, plunging <\/a>by nearly 40 percent between 2016 and 2023, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington, D.C., think tank.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s been a tremendous attrition in the number of schools, and with it, the number of students that graduate every year,\u201d said Debra Struhsacker, a hardrock mining policy expert.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the same time, many of the United States\u2019 most experienced mining experts are nearing or even past retirement. The Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration (SME), a professional association, estimates<\/a> that more than half of the current mining workforce\u2014or more than 200,000 workers\u2014will be retired and replaced by 2029. Even in the last year, the mining and logging industry saw a decline in employment<\/a>, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.<\/p>\n Current graduation rates don\u2019t come close to meeting industry demand, either. Bill Zisch, the head of mining engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, told Foreign Policy that all U.S. mining schools collectively graduated about 300 mining engineers last year\u2014falling way short of demand, which he said neared 600 mining engineers. (China, by contrast, is home to about 45 mining engineering programs<\/a> and churns out about 3,000 graduates every year, according to 2024 estimates.)<\/p>\n It\u2019s also challenging to find teachers to educate a mining workforce, Zisch said, particularly since the United States hasn\u2019t focused on developing master\u2019s and Ph.D. programs that tend to feed into faculty recruitment.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWorkforce issues and education are one of the many pieces of solving this minerals emergency that we find ourselves in,\u201d said Struhsacker, who also consults for SME.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Biden administration also recognized<\/a> this problem, and in 2022<\/a>, U.S. lawmakers\u00a0introduced bipartisan legislation aimed at boosting support for U.S. mining schools. That legislation, called the Mining Schools Act<\/a>, would establish a hefty grant program <\/a>for U.S. mining institutions, but it still has yet to cross the finish line.\u00a0<\/p>\n But the issue has become even more high-profile in recent months, with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum singling out the workforce challenge<\/a> in front of an audience of industry and government officials at CSIS earlier this month. <\/p>\n \u201cWe graduated 36,000 lawyers in America last year. We graduated 300 undergrads with mining and metallurgical degrees\u2014300. I mean, we\u2019re off by a thousand to one,\u201d Burgum said. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to get back to this business where young people and universities and scientists say: \u2018Look: This industry that you\u2019re all in, this business you\u2019re in really, really matters, and there\u2019s an exciting future here, and it\u2019s going to solve some of the world\u2019s biggest problems,\u2019\u201d he added.\u00a0<\/p>\n U.S. lawmakers are ramping up efforts to close the gap. Last month, Reps. Young Kim and Ami Bera introduced bipartisan legislation<\/a> to help shore up U.S. mineral supply chain security, including by establishing a new Fulbright fellowship and visiting scholar programs to boost domestic mining education.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Fulbright program would be expanded to include a dedicated focus on critical minerals and mining engineering, Kim told Foreign Policy, while a reciprocating visiting scholars program would bring foreign mining experts to the United States, especially at the university level.\u00a0<\/p>\n There are other promising signs. With critical minerals dominating news headlines, mining engineering programs are seeing a surge in interest. Zisch, who is at the Colorado School of Mines, said that over the last four years, the school has seen a nearly 80 percent increase in enrollment in mining engineering.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe general public awareness has helped to knock down some of the barriers to entrance that we had in the past with people\u2019s perception of mining,\u201d he said. \u201cMining, frankly, has always been essential. Now it\u2019s also critical.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n And more educational programs may soon come online. Columbia University plans<\/a> to once again<\/a> offer students a mining engineering degree, while the University of Texas at El Paso is rebooting its mining engineering program <\/a>with a $7 million investment from mining giant Freeport-McMoRan and a $20 million commitment from the University of Texas System Board of Regents.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we continue to see demand for various elements increase,\u201d said Holley at the Colorado School of Mines, \u201cwe\u2019re going to need more students who are able to develop those deposits in a responsible way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"U.S. President Donald Trump wants to transform the United States into a mining power, but the country may…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":292507,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,30587,219,84,6958,3678,111,139,69,2627,1430],"class_list":{"0":"post-292506","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-critical-minerals","10":"tag-economy","11":"tag-education","12":"tag-homepage_regional_americas","13":"tag-labor","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-supply-chain","18":"tag-united-states"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292506\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}