THE GOVERNMENT STAKE
Equity, Speed and the Limits of Disclosure
Final Paper in the Fortress America Series
Equity, Speed, and the Limits of Disclosure
Author: Adam Wood | Publication: Blue Collar Analytics | Series: Fortress America, Paper IV | Date: June 2026 | Version: 1.0
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
In a single five-month window beginning in March 2025, the federal government built the legal foundation for a fundamental shift in how it secures critical supply chains: from grants, tax credits, and loan guarantees toward direct equity ownership in private companies. Executive Order 14241 expanded Defense Production Act authorities and directed the Department of Defense and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to create a joint mineral investment fund. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, appropriated billions of dollars and gave the Department of Defense (DoD) explicit statutory authority to take equity positions in private companies. In the same legislative season, DFC’s own authority was reauthorized and dramatically expanded — its investment ceiling raised from $60 billion to $205 billion, its equity authority raised to a 40 percent ownership ceiling, and a statutory exclusion barring investment in the world’s wealthiest economies lifted for the first time since the agency’s creation, specifically for energy, critical minerals and rare earths, and information and communications technology.
Four federal entities — DoD’s Office of Strategic Capital, the Department of Energy’s newly renamed Energy Dominance Financing Program, the Department of Commerce’s CHIPS Program Office, and DFC — built or substantially empowered a dedicated equity-and-loan vehicle within roughly the same twelve-month period, then deployed those tools jointly against the same targets. The Pentagon’s $400 million equity stake in MP Materials, announced in July 2025, made DoD the company’s largest shareholder and remains the single most fully documented example. It is not an isolated case. At least a dozen domestic companies — among them Vulcan Elements, Trilogy Metals, Lithium Americas, and USA Rare Earth — have received some combination of federal equity, loans, price floors, or offtake guarantees since mid-2025, several from more than one agency simultaneously. The same toolkit now operates internationally as well, with documented federal capital commitments reaching at least eleven countries across four continents, including sovereign co-investment partnerships with the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
This paper maps what has been disclosed. It does not claim to map what exists. Disclosure of these transactions follows no uniform federal transparency requirement; it depends almost entirely on whether the private party to a deal happens to be a publicly traded company subject to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reporting rules, or whether the government and the company simply choose to announce. Where the counterparty is privately held, there is no legal mechanism requiring either party to disclose the size, terms, or even the existence of the arrangement. The dollar figures and deal counts that follow are therefore best understood as a documented floor, not a ceiling. What has not been voluntarily disclosed is, by definition, not counted here.
SECTION 1 — THE INSTRUMENTS AND THE AGENCIES
The legal foundation for this entire shift was built in a single five-month window. In March 2025, Executive Order 14241, “Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production,” expanded the federal government’s authority under the Defense Production Act, reduced the approval and notification requirements that had previously slowed such actions, and directed DoD and DFC to establish a joint mineral investment fund. On July 4, 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act became law. Section 20004 of that act appropriated $2 billion to expand the National Defense Stockpile, $5 billion to a new Industrial Base Fund with explicit statutory authority allowing DoD to take equity positions in private companies, $500 million to DoD’s Office of Strategic Capital for loans, guarantees, and technical assistance, and $1 billion for Defense Production Act financing through September 2027. In the same legislative season, Congress passed the DFC Modernization and Reauthorization Act of 2025 as part of the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law on December 18, 2025, raising DFC’s investment ceiling from $60 billion to $205 billion, increasing its equity authority to a 40 percent ownership ceiling, creating a new $5 billion equity revolving fund, and lifting, for the first time since DFC’s creation, the statutory exclusion that had barred the agency from investing in the world’s wealthiest economies — an exclusion now waived specifically for energy, critical minerals and rare earths, and information and communications technology.
What followed was not one agency acting alone but four building or empowering a dedicated internal vehicle for direct equity and loan deployment within roughly the same twelve-month period. DoD’s Office of Strategic Capital made its first direct loan — $150 million to MP Materials — in July 2025. The Department of Energy rebranded its Loan Programs Office as the Energy Dominance Financing Program in 2025–2026 and stood up a new Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation. The Department of Commerce began exercising direct equity authority through its CHIPS Program Office, the same office originally built to fund semiconductor manufacturing incentives. DFC, already in existence since 2019, was simply handed a far larger ceiling and a wider mandate. Four different parts of the federal government did not coincidentally arrive at the same solution; they were directed to by the same six-month run of legislation and executive action.
The deals that followed show the toolkit in practice. The Department of Defense’s partnership with MP Materials, signed July 9–10 and closed July 11, 2025, is the clearest and most fully documented example: $400 million in newly issued Series A Cumulative Perpetual Convertible Preferred Stock, convertible at $30.03 per share; a separate $150 million unsecured loan to expand heavy rare earth separation capacity at Mountain Pass; a ten-year price floor of $110 per kilogram for neodymium-praseodymium products; and a ten-year offtake agreement guaranteeing the purchase of magnet output from a new production facility. The arrangement, together with an accompanying warrant, made DoD the company’s largest shareholder, at approximately 15 percent of outstanding shares on a fully diluted basis. Four months later, DoD’s Office of Strategic Capital and the Department of Commerce jointly backed Vulcan Elements, a North Carolina magnet manufacturer, with a $620 million loan and a $50 million equity stake respectively, as part of a package that also included $550 million in private capital. In October 2025, DoD acquired a 10 percent stake in Trilogy Metals, with warrants for an additional 7.5 percent, to advance copper and cobalt development in Alaska. That same month, the Department of Energy restructured a $2.2 billion loan to Lithium Americas, taking a 5 percent warrant-based equity stake in the company and its joint venture as a condition of the renegotiation.
These deals do not run through separate, walled-off channels. They overlap, often on the same company. Vulcan Elements drew simultaneously on DoD and the Department of Commerce. MP Materials drew on three distinct instruments — equity, a loan, and a price-floor guarantee — from DoD alone, later extended into an international joint venture with the same agency and Saudi Arabia’s Ma’aden. When four agencies build the same kind of tool within the same year and then deploy those tools jointly against the same targets, the overlap itself is a finding: this is not a single program responding to a single company’s need. It is a coordinated, multi-agency posture toward an entire sector, assembled in months, and it raises an immediate question the rest of this paper takes up directly — who is required to tell the public when it happens, and what happens when no one is?
SECTION 2 — THE TRANSPARENCY PROBLEM
The Department of Defense, the largest instrument in this entire toolkit, is notoriously bad at passing basic accounting practices, with formal outside independent audits still failing every year since they began in 2018. That is the baseline condition of the agency now taking equity stakes, setting decade-long price floors, and guaranteeing future purchases across a fast-growing list of private companies.
The legal and procedural avenues for outside oversight of these specific new actions have also narrowed rather than expanded. Executive Order 14241, issued in March 2025, reduced the approval and notification requirements that had previously applied to Defense Production Act actions and delegated to DFC certain authorities traditionally reserved for the president. The concern this raises is not speculative; it has been flagged from inside DFC itself. DFC’s own Inspector General has warned that the agency’s expanding domestic responsibilities risk distracting it from its statutory development mandate, and a prior Government Accountability Office review of DFC’s use of similar emergency lending authority during the COVID-19 pandemic found that the process was slowed by “more applications and more complex interagency involvement than DFC expected” — a finding that suggests the same agency now handling a far larger and faster-moving portfolio may not have the internal capacity to track it carefully. Separately, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), a nonpartisan watchdog organization, has identified a specific legal ambiguity in how several of these deals have been justified more broadly: officials have described certain equity arrangements as voluntary agreements between consenting parties, a characterization that, if accurate, means no statute needs to be invoked to authorize them at all. An arrangement that requires no statutory authority to create also requires no statutory reporting obligation to disclose.
That gap matters most because of who is and is not required to say anything. Publicly traded companies must file a Form 8-K with the SEC within four business days of a material event, under Section 13(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 — the only reason any of these deals become visible to the public in specific dollar terms at all. Privately held companies carry no equivalent obligation: that statutory reporting duty attaches only once a company either lists its securities on an exchange or, under Section 12(g) of the same Act, exceeds 2,000 total shareholders (500 of whom are non-accredited investors) and $10 million in assets — thresholds a small, recently founded, venture-backed magnet manufacturer like Vulcan Elements does not come close to meeting. There is no form, no agency, and no statute that requires a private company below those thresholds to disclose that it has received a government loan, sold the government equity, or agreed to a price floor, unless the company or the government chooses to announce it.
And the deals themselves are not waiting around for any of that machinery to catch up. DoD’s $400 million equity stake in MP Materials, announced in July 2025, was negotiated in roughly eight weeks, beginning in late April 2025. Andrew Castaldo, J.P. Morgan’s co-head of Mid-Cap M&A and the deal’s lead advisor, called it “the most unique transaction I’ve been involved in throughout my career in M&A” — adding that, despite the deal’s novelty, it largely followed the standard diligence and structuring steps required of any complex M&A transaction. Four months later, DoD and the Department of Commerce backed Vulcan Elements, a privately held company with no SEC obligations at all, in a matter of weeks — a pace Pentagon officials described to journalists as a deliberate departure from the agency’s normal multi-month process, reportedly set in motion by a direct request from Peter Navarro, a senior White House official and friend of Donald Trump Jr., rather than the office’s standard review. Even after that deal was announced, basic terms went unanswered: when asked the size of the government’s stake, Vulcan referred the question to the Department of Commerce, which did not respond. It took a letter from Senators Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, and Andy Kim to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, dated January 22, 2026, to produce any further public accounting of the deal’s terms at all — and as of this writing, the questions the senators posed, including whether the loan followed a competitive process, remain unanswered beyond their February 5, 2026 deadline.
Both deals moved faster than the people executing them considered ordinary. The Vulcan case shows the only mechanisms that surfaced to catch a deal moving this fast were: a public company’s legal filing, a watchdog’s research, or a sitting senator’s letter, deployed only after the fact and only when someone happens to ask. None of those three is fast, and none is guaranteed to fire at all. A system of accountability built around mechanisms that move at the speed of ordinary bureaucracy is poorly matched to a set of transactions now closing faster than ordinary bureaucracy can track, especially when the company on the other side of the table has no legal obligation to say anything until someone outside the deal happens to ask the right question.
SECTION 3 — GOING GLOBAL
The toolkit documented in the first two sections of this paper does not stop at the U.S. border. Federal equity and loan commitments tied to critical minerals now reach at least eleven countries across four continents: Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Mozambique, Brazil, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ukraine, Greenland, South Korea, and Jamaica. The mechanism behind that reach is the same one this paper has already traced domestically — equity, loans, price floors, and offtake guarantees — now extended outward through DFC and, increasingly, DoD acting abroad.
What makes the international footprint different from the domestic one is not the instrument. It is the partner. Domestically, the federal government takes a position in a private company. Internationally, in several of the largest and most recent deals, it takes a position alongside another government. In October 2025, DFC partnered with Orion Resource Partners, a private metals and materials investment firm, and ADQ, an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, to form the Orion Critical Mineral Consortium — an initial $1.8 billion commitment split evenly among the three partners, with a stated goal of growing to $5 billion. By January 2026, DFC had closed $600 million of its share. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund occupies a similar position in a separate deal, holding $180 million in the critical minerals company TechMet alongside DFC’s own $105 million equity stake in the same firm. In both cases, the United States is not investing in a foreign asset. It is co-investing with a foreign government, as a financial peer, inside the same instrument.
That posture is recent enough to date precisely. The statutory authority that formally permits DFC to operate this way in wealthy economies — the exception carved out for energy, critical minerals and rare earths, and information and communications technology — was signed into law on December 18, 2025. The Orion Critical Mineral Consortium with the UAE’s ADQ was announced two months before that, in October 2025, and DFC’s portion of it closed the following January, under authority the agency held before its formal expansion took effect. The agency, in other words, was already operating at the edge of its mandate while Congress was still finishing the paperwork to expand it.
The Iran war supplied the clearest evidence yet of how quickly this toolkit can be redeployed when a new shock arrives. The conflict closed the Strait of Hormuz to shipping beginning March 4, 2026, cutting off a corridor that carries roughly half of the world’s seaborne sulfur trade — the feedstock for sulfuric acid, the reagent used to process copper, nickel, uranium, and rare earth ores. Mining companies producing those materials reported output reductions of 20 to 30 percent within weeks. The day before the United States and Israel launched their opening airstrikes on Iran on February 28, 2026, the Pentagon had already asked mining companies in its Defense Industrial Base Consortium for proposals to boost domestic supply of thirteen critical minerals. Days after the Strait closed, President Trump ordered DFC to insure maritime trade through the Gulf directly, and the agency announced a reinsurance facility covering losses of up to $20 billion on a rolling basis — a new, multibillion-dollar federal mandate, created by presidential order, inside a single week, layered on top of the equity and loan architecture already in place.
An interim memorandum between the United States and Iran was signed in mid-June 2026, calling for an end to hostilities and the reopening of the Strait without Iranian tolls for at least sixty days. As of this writing, that reopening is contested rather than settled: Iran’s military command has separately declared the Strait closed again, citing unrelated fighting in Lebanon, while U.S. Central Command maintains that commercial traffic continues to move and that the waterway has not, in practice, shut down. The legal and physical status of the Strait remains genuinely unresolved at the time of publication, which makes the underlying point of this section more durable, not less: the federal financial architecture built around this crisis — the insurance facility, the equity stakes, the supply chain mobilization — was constructed for a shock that has not actually concluded, and that architecture does not appear designed to unwind quickly even if a ceasefire eventually holds.
The pattern is the same one this paper has documented domestically. A shock arrives, and the response is not retreat or negotiation alone. It is an expansion of direct federal financial participation, assembled and deployed faster than the institutions involved consider normal, now extending to cover not just American companies but the shipping lanes and sovereign partners that connect them to the rest of the world.
SECTION 4 — THE SNOWBALL
The pattern across all three preceding sections has a shape, and the shape is acceleration. It did not begin large. DoD’s first rare earth investment in MP Materials, in 2020, was a $9.6 million Defense Production Act Title III award. The Biden administration continued the relationship at a similarly modest scale — tens of millions of dollars across individual awards, including $45 million for Mountain Pass processing and $35 million toward MP’s heavy rare earth separation project in 2022, plus a formal five-year mine-to-magnet investment strategy announced in 2024 rather than a financial instrument of comparable size to what followed. For most of this decade, the toolkit this paper documents existed in outline only: a recognition that China’s dominance of critical minerals was a problem, addressed through grants and loan guarantees of a size that drew little public attention because there was little, in dollar terms, to attract it.
That changed in 2025, and it changed in stages that compound rather than simply add. DoD’s $400 million equity stake in MP Materials in July was roughly forty times the size of its first investment five years earlier. The legislative foundation behind it — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the DFC reauthorization, Executive Order 14241 — arrived within the same five-month window, each piece expanding what the next deal could do. By the time Vulcan Elements closed its loan in November, the pace had compressed from months to weeks. By February 2026, DFC reported to a State Department-hosted gathering of senior officials from 54 countries — the 2026 Critical Minerals Ministerial — that the U.S. government had mobilized more than $30 billion in letters of interest, investments, loans, and other support over the preceding six months alone. None of this was one decision. It was the same decision, made repeatedly, at a larger scale and a faster pace each time it was made again.
Then the snowball stopped rolling and started falling. A snowball that rolls down a hill gathers mass gradually, picking up what is already in its path. What happened when the Iran war closed the Strait of Hormuz in March 2026 was not gradual. It was a shock that hit a structure already in motion and threw it forward at a different velocity entirely. Within a single week, a sitting president ordered a federal development agency to underwrite up to $20 billion in maritime insurance it had never been asked to provide before, for a purpose — protecting the shipping lanes that move the sulfur needed to process rare earths and other critical minerals — that did not exist as a stated mission until the war made it one. The Pentagon had already been moving in this direction; the war did not start the acceleration. It picked up something already rolling and threw it down the back half of the hill. As of this writing, the Strait’s reopening remains contested rather than confirmed, which means the federal apparatus built around that shock has not yet been tested by an actual, settled peace — only by a temporary truce that one side has already declared broken at least once.
But every figure in this section describes only the visible part of the snowball. Section 2 of this paper established that disclosure of these transactions is voluntary, uneven, and dependent on whether a counterparty happens to be publicly traded or whether someone chooses to announce. That limitation does not pause for this section’s argument. The $30 billion figure, the eleven-plus countries, the compressed timelines — all of it is a measure of what has surfaced, not a measure of the toolkit’s true size or true speed. If the pattern documented elsewhere in this paper holds, the gap between what is visible and what exists does not shrink as the activity accelerates. It is reasonable to expect the opposite: a faster-moving, less scrutinized process is, if anything, more likely to outrun disclosure than a slower one was. Whatever rate of change this section can document is therefore a floor on the true rate, not a ceiling. The snowball could be larger and moving faster than any figure in this paper is able to show.
CONCLUSION
This paper has argued that the federal government is moving with increasing speed to secure equity stakes and ensure the flow of the raw rare earth minerals necessary for advanced manufacturing, both at home and abroad. The pace and the dollar figures are now part of the public record: a $9.6 million Defense Production Act award in 2020 grew into a $400 million equity stake in 2025, the legal authority behind it built in a single five-month legislative window, and by early 2026 the government itself was reporting more than $30 billion in commitments mobilized in six months alone, reaching at least eleven countries on four continents. The mechanism for the public to learn any of this has not kept pace with how quickly it is happening. Disclosure depends on whether a company happens to be publicly traded, or on whether the government and its private counterparties simply choose to announce. What this paper has presented is therefore a floor, not a ceiling — the documented minimum of an activity whose true scope cannot currently be measured from the outside.
The entire series has built toward this point. Paper I traced the decades-long, multi-administration pattern of hemispheric consolidation. Paper II identified the technology, humanoid robotics, that makes domestic manufacturing an urgent defense question rather than an economic preference. Paper III mapped where the physical buildout is landing, in the fabs and processing facilities of the southern spine. This paper has shown how the government is paying for all of it: not primarily through grants and tax credits, but through direct ownership, in deals that move faster than the public can track and disclose less than a public company would be required to.
Recent commentary has rebranded hemispheric consolidation as one president’s personal project, the Don-roe Doctrine. The record this paper has assembled argues against that framing, but it does not argue from a position of full visibility. The cloak does not open on its own. It opens when the law requires it, as it does for the handful of publicly traded companies in this story, or when the government opens it for its own reasons, or, rarely, when a senator’s letter forces a partial look at what is underneath. Most of the time, by this paper’s own accounting, it stays closed. An institution that has failed eight consecutive financial audits and spent decades unable to account for trillions of dollars clearly knows how to move slowly when it wants to. It has chosen not to here. A boat moving fast leaves more wake than one moving slowly, whether or not the captain wants to be seen, and the cloak of empire slips the same way — not because anyone has chosen to reveal what is underneath, but because nothing moving this fast stays fully covered. The senators’ letter that followed the Vulcan deal, the watchdog testimony, the public company filings this paper has relied on throughout: all of it is wake. What is known is what the law required, what someone wanted credit for, or what speed left visible by accident. What remains hidden is not measured here, and there is no evidence that the rate at which the government is moving is making the covering any thinner.
Whether Fortress America is complete by the end of the decade is not something this paper can answer, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. The transparency gap this paper has documented means that no one outside the government currently has the information required to measure the buildout’s true size, let alone forecast its finish line. What can be said, on the evidence assembled across four papers, is narrower and more certain: every measurable point on this curve is larger and faster than the point before it, the most recent acceleration was triggered by a war whose own ending remains contested as this paper goes to press, and nothing in the record suggests that curve is bending the other way.
REFERENCES
[1] One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Public Law 119-21, Section 20004, signed July 4, 2025.
[2] Executive Order 14241, “Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production,” 90 Fed. Reg. 13673, signed March 20, 2025, published March 25, 2025, Federal Register.
[3] One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Public Law 119-21, Section 20004; Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, “U.S. Expands Critical Minerals Financing and Bilateral Partnerships Under Trump,” November 10, 2025.
[4] FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act, Public Law 119-60, Section 8701, “DFC Modernization and Reauthorization Act of 2025,” signed December 18, 2025; U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, “DFC Secures Expanded Authorities with FY26 NDAA Signed into Law,” press release, December 18, 2025; Haynes Boone, “Warfighting Procurement Authorization: 2026 NDAA Poised to Enact Sweeping Changes to Defense Contracting,” December 12, 2025; Mayer Brown, “US Government Equity and Equity-Linked Investments in Critical Minerals,” April 15, 2026.
[5] FTI Consulting, “The New U.S. Government Critical Minerals Playbook,” February 13, 2026; Department of Energy, “Office of Energy Dominance Financing,” energy.gov.
[6] MP Materials Corp., Form 8-K, July 10, 2025, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; CNBC, “Pentagon to become largest shareholder in rare earth miner MP Materials,” July 10, 2025.
[7] Mayer Brown, “US Government Equity and Equity-Linked Investments in Critical Minerals,” April 15, 2026; InvestorNews, “Follow the Money: The U.S. Government Funding Hit List for Critical Minerals Companies (2023–2026),” February 12, 2026.
[8] U.S. Department of State, “2026 Critical Minerals Ministerial,” Office of the Spokesperson, February 2026; DFC, “DFC Highlights Landmark Critical Minerals Investments to Strengthen U.S. National Security During State Department Ministerial,” press release, February 4, 2026.
[9] U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Form 8-K filing requirements, 17 CFR 249.308; Investopedia, “Form 8-K: Definition, What It Tells You, Filing Requirements, Deadline.”
[10] Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, “U.S. Expands Critical Minerals Financing and Bilateral Partnerships Under Trump,” November 10, 2025.
[11] Department of Energy, “Office of Energy Dominance Financing,” energy.gov; McAllister & Quinn, “DOE Critical Minerals Initiatives: New Offices, Major Funding Programs, and Pending Battery Materials FOA,” February 5, 2026.
[12] FTI Consulting, “The New U.S. Government Critical Minerals Playbook,” February 13, 2026.
[13] MP Materials Corp., Form 8-K, filed July 10, 2025, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (Subscription Agreement, Transaction Agreement, Certificate of Designations); StockTitan, “MP Secures $550M DoD Funding & 10-Year Offtake, Dilution ~15%,” July 10, 2025; J.P. Morgan, “J.P. Morgan Leads Groundbreaking Rare Earth Magnets Deal,” insights, October 2025.
[14] U.S. Department of Defense, “Office of Strategic Capital Agrees to Joint $700M Conditional Loan Commitment with Vulcan Elements and ReElement Technologies,” press release, November 21, 2025; U.S. Department of State, “2026 Critical Minerals Ministerial,” February 2026.
[15] Investing News Network, “Trilogy Metals Shares Rocket as US Government Takes Stake in Alaska Project,” October 2025; Axios, “US to take 10% stake in Trilogy Metals,” October 2025.
[16] FTI Consulting, “The New U.S. Government Critical Minerals Playbook,” February 13, 2026 (citing DOE Loan Programs Office, Thacker Pass restructuring, October 2025).
[17] Reuters, “MP Materials to Build Saudi Rare Earths Refinery with Pentagon, Maaden,” U.S. News & World Report, November 19, 2025.
[18] U.S. News & World Report, “Pentagon Says It Fails Eighth Audit, Targets 2028 to Pass,” December 19, 2025; Project On Government Oversight, “Fact Sheet: Auditing the Department of Defense,” October 6, 2025.
[19] Congressional Research Service, “INSIGHTi: Executive Order 14241 and DFC Authorities” (citing DFC Office of Inspector General statements and a Government Accountability Office review of DFC’s Title III lending under Executive Order 13922, May 2020), congress.gov; Project On Government Oversight, “Fact Sheet: Auditing the Department of Defense,” October 6, 2025.
[20] U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Form 8-K filing requirements, 17 CFR 249.308.
[21] Securities Exchange Act of 1934, Section 12(g) and Section 13(a), 15 U.S.C. § 78m and § 78l; U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Investor.gov, “The Laws That Govern the Securities Industry.”
[22] J.P. Morgan, “Rare earths, real impact: Inside the MP Materials deal,” What’s the Deal podcast, recorded August 25, 2025, jpmorgan.com/insights/podcast-hub.
[23] ProPublica, reporting on Vulcan Elements loan approval process and Peter Navarro’s involvement, cited in: Cato Institute, “White House Intervention Bolsters Trump Jr–Connected Rare Earths Firm,” Cato at Liberty Blog, May 2026; Wikipedia, “Vulcan Elements,” accessed June 2026.
[24] The Wire China, “The Magnet Makers,” March 20, 2026.
[25] Senators Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, and Andy Kim, letter to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, January 22, 2026, warren.senate.gov; U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, “Warren, Blumenthal, Kim Sound Alarm on Potential for Donald Trump Jr.-Linked Companies to Profit Off Department of Defense Contract Awards, Loans,” press release, January 23, 2026.
[26] InvestorNews, “Follow the Money: The U.S. Government Funding Hit List for Critical Minerals Companies (2023–2026),” February 12, 2026; CSIS, “G7 Cooperation to De-Risk Minerals Investments in the Global South,” May 16, 2025; Mercuria, “Gécamines and Mercuria Launch Copper-Cobalt Joint Venture in DRC with Backing from U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC),” December 2025.
[27] DFC, “DFC Joins $1.8 Billion Consortium to Secure Critical Mineral Supply Chains and Bolster U.S. Economic Growth and Security,” press release, October 23, 2025; Mining.com, “US, Orion partner on $5B critical minerals fund,” October 23, 2025.
[28] DFC, “DFC Highlights Landmark Critical Minerals Investments to Strengthen U.S. National Security During State Department Ministerial,” press release, February 4, 2026.
[29] CSIS, “How to Reform the DFC to Meet U.S. Critical Minerals Security Needs,” January 31, 2025; CSIS, “G7 Cooperation to De-Risk Minerals Investments in the Global South,” May 16, 2025.
[30] GIS Reports, “Iran war squeezes critical supplies, alliances,” June 2026; The Soufan Center, “The Iran War: A Crisis for the Defense Industrial Base Now Too,” March 25, 2026.
[31] GIS Reports, “Iran war squeezes critical supplies, alliances,” June 2026.
[32] The National, “Iran war exposes fragilities in global critical minerals supply chain,” March 17, 2026; The Soufan Center, “The Iran War: A Crisis for the Defense Industrial Base Now Too,” March 25, 2026; Wikipedia, “2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis,” accessed June 2026.
[33] Congressional Research Service, “Iran Conflict and the Strait of Hormuz: Impacts on Oil, Gas, and Other Commodities,” congress.gov, R45281; statement of President Donald Trump, March 3, 2026, cited in CRS report; CNBC, “Iran reportedly closes Strait of Hormuz again, casting shadow over nuclear talks,” June 20, 2026; Newsweek, “Iran Army Declares Strait of Hormuz ‘Closed’ Over MOU ‘Breach,’” June 20, 2026; Euronews, “Tehran says Strait of Hormuz remains open after confusion,” June 19, 2026.
[34] Heatmap News, “The Pentagon’s Rare Earths Deal Is Making Former Biden Officials Jealous,” July 2025.
[35] The White House (Biden-Harris Administration Archives), “Fact Sheet: Biden-Harris Administration Takes Further Action to Strengthen and Secure Critical Mineral Supply Chains,” September 2024; Global Policy Watch, “Made in America: The Outlook for Critical Minerals,” October 2025.
[36] U.S. Department of State, “2026 Critical Minerals Ministerial,” Office of the Spokesperson, February 2026.
FORTRESS AMERICA SERIES
Paper I: Fortress America — Hemispheric Consolidation, Infrastructure Cascades, and the Regional Transformation of the American Economy
Paper II: If It Can Work, It Can Fight — The Case for Domestic Humanoid Robotics Manufacturing
Paper III: Where Fortress America Lands — The Southern Spine and the Race to Build It
Paper IV: The Government Stake — Equity, Speed, and the Limits of Disclosure
DISCLAIMER: This paper represents independent analytical and systems research and is the fourth and final paper in the Blue Collar Analytics Fortress America series. Nothing contained herein constitutes financial advice, investment recommendations, or legal counsel. Readers should conduct their own due diligence and consult qualified professionals before making investment decisions.
