Biden Is Using A Cold-War Era Act To Ramp Up Battery Metal Production

As we noted in the Rare Earths MMI report, President Joe Biden recently called upon a provision of the Defense Production Act to boost domestic production of materials needed for large-capacity batteries and infrastructure. The move comes over a year after the president’s executive order on supply chains.

In that order, Biden called for 100-day reviews of critical U.S. supply chains. The president specifically targeted semiconductors, high-capacity batteries, critical minerals and pharmaceuticals. Meanwhile, in his use of the Cold War-era…