Since Donald Trump’s return to office, the administration has prioritized critical minerals deals. Aaron Schwartz/Zuma
Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.
Today, the consumer protection watchdog group Public Citizen released a report detailing the Trump administration’s secretive web of critical minerals deals around the world. The report, exclusively shared with Mother Jones, shows that the number of deals the administration has publicly claimed to have does not match up with the number of countries known to have signed these agreements. The researchers also detail the many ways these deals can exploit countries experiencing violent conflict—and the ways they might enrich the President’s backers.
“This is now a huge web of deals that are being negotiated behind closed doors without any public scrutiny or oversight,” said Melinda St. Louis, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch research group. “Even the things they are announcing, the numbers don’t add up.”
It’s clear that Donald Trump and his administration are fixated on critical minerals— things like cobalt, lithium, and graphite, used for purposes as wide-ranging as building batteries or building missiles. “It’s really striking just how much President Trump is personally involved in this,” St. Louis said. Trump has released 12 executive orders related to critical minerals since the start of his second term, and the country has signed on to a bevy of trade agreements related to critical minerals. But, according to Public Citizen’s research, there’s no publicly available database of what exactly all those agreements are, which countries are involved, or who might be profiting. And many of these moves, based on executive orders, don’t require congressional approval.
“The most complete information available is from a February 2026 State Department fact sheet that stated that at least 38 international critical minerals agreements have been completed or were pending at that time,” today’s report says. But that fact sheet only names eleven of the countries involved, meaning 27 are unaccounted for. Public Citizen’s review of available documents was only able to confirm the existence of some of those agreements. “Less than half of the memoranda of understanding announced have been made fully public, only two of which were released by the US government,” they wrote. The rest are only public because the other country involved publicized them.
The Biden administration prioritized trade deals for critical minerals—like one signed with Japan—with the justification that securing resources for the green transition was a priority. “Now of course under the Trump administration, even the pretext of a clean energy transition is not even part of this. It’s really to seize these minerals for AI, military dominance, et cetera,” St. Louis said. In particular, the president is interested in military dominance over China.
“Trump and his acolytes all use this very apocalyptic language, that it’s about our security, that it’s about the future of Western Civilization,” Nghia Nguyen, a lead author on the report, said. “I think that says a lot about why the government is throwing so much into it.” Report after report says that military contractors are being pressured to limit their reliance on trade with China for weapons components, and the US government is now seeking out those same minerals wherever they can find them.
Sometimes, Trump’s own family members might profit. A group of American investors including two of the president’s sons got access to a massive untapped reserve of Kazakhstan’s tungsten (a mineral widely used in missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips) through a government-brokered deal. And agreements with other countries are even more exploitative. The Trump administration’s “minerals for security” deals with Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo sign over portions of those countries’ mining sectors to US actors as they experience active conflict.
The US deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo may have even been a pretext to make the country amend its constitution. “In practice, the deal gives sweeping financial and regulatory incentives to U.S. mining companies and grants the U.S. government unprecedented control over Congolese mineral resources,” the Public Citizen report says. “These are binding agreements devoid of meaningful labor, human rights, or environmental safeguards.” And in Zambia, as the New York TImes reported, the State Department has considered making medical aid contingent on a $2 billion critical minerals deal.
“In seeking to encourage mining, the Trump administration is prioritizing speed over corporate accountability and ethical safeguards,” the researchers wrote.
