In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks to USA Rare Earth CEO Barbara Humpton.
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Good morning. Ronald Reagan once joked that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’
There may be an exception to that saying: helping U.S. companies compete in rare earths, a realm where China now dominates mining, refining, and manufacturing.
That commitment certainly matters to Barbara Humpton, who last month left the top job at Siemens USA to become CEO of USA Rare Earth. Founded in Oklahoma in 2019, the company’s mission is to develop a domestic supply chain for magnets made with rare-earth elements, which are critical in everything from electric vehicles and computers to renewable energy and advanced manufacturing. “I’m delighted that I’ve arrived to find that the Trump administration is laser-focused on this,” she told me. “In the case of semiconductors, the U.S. holds some really important cards, but in rare earths, it’s rather the opposite, right?”
Washington has not yet bought a stake in USA Rare Earth (market cap: $1.62 billion), but Humpton said she has been in close communication with the Administration. As MP Materials CEO James Litinsky, whose mining company is now one of several partly owned by the U.S. government, recently told my colleague Jordan Blum: “This is really a Manhattan Project-style effort with all-out intensity.”
What’s surprised Humpton most during her first weeks on the job is that, as an industry, “we have not yet begun to operate as a healthy market outside of China.”
Her plan: Go to the most fragile parts of the supply chain, invest, and scale to fix any bottlenecks in supply and production. As a first step, the company recently announced the acquisition of Less Common Metals, a U.K.-based company that Humpton describes as “the only scaled metal and alloy maker outside of China, so we can dramatically scale that weakest link in the supply chain.”
As for Reagan’s warning: “I think government engagement matters right now,” said Humpton. “Once the flywheel gets going and we have robust capabilities outside of China, I believe the market will sustain itself, but we have to be on a sharp lookout for dumping.”
Then again, as we’ve seen with renewables, what one President giveth, another can taketh away. But, as she argues, “this is probably the most bipartisan issue in our government right now, to make sure that we are not dependent on China.”
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com