Politico Pro: POLITICO Pro | Article | Lawmakers float revamp to US critical minerals diplomacy
A bipartisan pair of lawmakers are introducing a bill Tuesday developed with the Trump administration that would reconstitute the State Department’s recently shuttered energy bureau and expand diplomatic efforts in a bid to compete with China for access to critical minerals.
The DOMINANCE Act from Reps. Young Kim (R-Calif.) and Ami Bera (D-Calif.), shared exclusively with POLITICO, would give the State Department new powers to work with allies on critical mineral supply chains and consolidate efforts previously spread across multiple agencies.
The bill was crafted over the last year in close cooperation with the Trump administration, said Ellie Gilchrist, Kim’s communications director. “We will continue that collaboration as we refine and advance the DOMINANCE Act,” Gilchrist said.
Kim has made critical minerals diplomacy a key priority as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s East Asia and Pacific subcommittee, even as the administration has at times shunned working with allies. Kim said in a statement that the bill would address China’s minerals dominance head-on by “aligning our diplomacy, financing, and partnerships with allies to build trusted, resilient supply chains.”
Bera, the subcommittee’s ranking member, added that the bill “takes a thoughtful approach to strengthen our national security and economic resilience by building secure, diversified supply chains with our allies and partners.”
Details: The DOMINANCE Act would create a Bureau of Energy Security and Diplomacy at the State Department to replace the Bureau of Energy Resources that the Trump administration shuttered last year as part of a department-wide reorganization.
It mirrors a proposal from Kim and Bera that advanced out of the Foreign Affairs Committee last year with the support of all committee Republicans. The new bureau would be led by an assistant secretary and be tasked with connecting U.S. energy exporters with buyers abroad and boosting imports of critical minerals from allies.
Former Bureau of Energy Resources employees who were laid off from State last year would have priority in hiring for positions in the new bureau.
Within the energy bureau, the bill also would create an Office of Energy Security Compacts, which would be authorized to ink deals with allied countries and coordinate U.S. government support for energy projects in those countries.
State would work with the Energy, Interior, Commerce and Defense Departments, as well as the Export-Import Bank, Development Finance Corporation and U.S. Trade Representative, to implement the compacts. The concept is loosely based on the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which also signs compacts with developing countries for economic development.
The bill also includes Kim and Bera’s prior legislation to codify the Mineral Security Partnership, a multilateral initiative launched under the Biden administration aimed at boosting mineral supply chains outside China. Fourteen countries and the European Union are currently members of the MSP, which is now chaired by South Korea.
And it includes measures to boost mining education, which has severely lagged in the United States, including the creation of a Fulbright fellowship program that would send American students overseas to study mining engineering.
