U.S. President Donald Trump wants to transform the United States into a mining power, but the country may not have enough people to make that happen—at least not yet.
Since his return to office, the U.S. leader has pushed an all-out effort to slash Washington’s dependence on China for critical minerals, the 60 or so raw materials that U.S. agencies have deemed essential to U.S. economic and national security. At home, the Trump administration has secured equity stakes in a raft of companies, launched a $12 billion critical minerals stockpile, and pushed to expand mining. Abroad, it has pursued a flurry of partnerships and pitched a global minerals trading bloc to dozens of countries in its bid to boost U.S. supply chain security.
U.S. President Donald Trump wants to transform the United States into a mining power, but the country may not have enough people to make that happen—at least not yet.
Since his return to office, the U.S. leader has pushed an all-out effort to slash Washington’s dependence on China for critical minerals, the 60 or so raw materials that U.S. agencies have deemed essential to U.S. economic and national security. At home, the Trump administration has secured equity stakes in a raft of companies, launched a $12 billion critical minerals stockpile, and pushed to expand mining. Abroad, it has pursued a flurry of partnerships and pitched a global minerals trading bloc to dozens of countries in its bid to boost U.S. supply chain security.
Yet Trump’s big push has also raised questions about whether the United States has the skilled workforce to realize his mineral ambitions. No matter how eager the U.S. leader is to herald a mining renaissance, industry experts warn that challenging labor realities could complicate that plan.
“There are not enough mining engineering programs and mining engineering graduates to satisfy current domestic demand,” said Elizabeth Holley, a professor of mining engineering at the Colorado School of Mines.
That wasn’t always the case. Back in the early 1980s, the United States was home to a robust mining industry and touted more than two dozen accredited mining schools that fed the sector’s workforce. But pollution and environmental harms drove public anger that plagued the industry, at the same time as domestic firms struggled to cope with depressed commodity prices.
Facing those pressures, U.S. lawmakers saw mining as a dirty sector that could and should be outsourced to other countries, even going so far as to shutter the U.S. Bureau of Mines in 1996. In a sign of the industry’s decline, between about 1981 and 1984, the mining workforce plummeted from 109,000 to 44,800 people, according to a 1984 Business Week article titled “The Death of Mining.”
“The pangs of mining are the latest example of what may be an industrial megatrend: the inexorable shift of the production and processing of all basic materials from the industrial countries to the Third World,” the article read.
The impacts of that shift have been stark. The United States is now home to just 12 accredited mining schools—less than half the number it boasted in 1982. Graduations, too, have fallen in recent years, plunging by nearly 40 percent between 2016 and 2023, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington, D.C., think tank.
“There’s been a tremendous attrition in the number of schools, and with it, the number of students that graduate every year,” said Debra Struhsacker, a hardrock mining policy expert.
At the same time, many of the United States’ most experienced mining experts are nearing or even past retirement. The Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration (SME), a professional association, estimates that more than half of the current mining workforce—or more than 200,000 workers—will be retired and replaced by 2029. Even in the last year, the mining and logging industry saw a decline in employment, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Current graduation rates don’t come close to meeting industry demand, either. Bill Zisch, the head of mining engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, told Foreign Policy that all U.S. mining schools collectively graduated about 300 mining engineers last year—falling way short of demand, which he said neared 600 mining engineers. (China, by contrast, is home to about 45 mining engineering programs and churns out about 3,000 graduates every year, according to 2024 estimates.)
It’s also challenging to find teachers to educate a mining workforce, Zisch said, particularly since the United States hasn’t focused on developing master’s and Ph.D. programs that tend to feed into faculty recruitment.
“Workforce issues and education are one of the many pieces of solving this minerals emergency that we find ourselves in,” said Struhsacker, who also consults for SME.
The Biden administration also recognized this problem, and in 2022, U.S. lawmakers introduced bipartisan legislation aimed at boosting support for U.S. mining schools. That legislation, called the Mining Schools Act, would establish a hefty grant program for U.S. mining institutions, but it still has yet to cross the finish line.
But the issue has become even more high-profile in recent months, with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum singling out the workforce challenge in front of an audience of industry and government officials at CSIS earlier this month.
“We graduated 36,000 lawyers in America last year. We graduated 300 undergrads with mining and metallurgical degrees—300. I mean, we’re off by a thousand to one,” Burgum said. “We’ve got to get back to this business where young people and universities and scientists say: ‘Look: This industry that you’re all in, this business you’re in really, really matters, and there’s an exciting future here, and it’s going to solve some of the world’s biggest problems,’” he added.
U.S. lawmakers are ramping up efforts to close the gap. Last month, Reps. Young Kim and Ami Bera introduced bipartisan legislation to help shore up U.S. mineral supply chain security, including by establishing a new Fulbright fellowship and visiting scholar programs to boost domestic mining education.
The Fulbright program would be expanded to include a dedicated focus on critical minerals and mining engineering, Kim told Foreign Policy, while a reciprocating visiting scholars program would bring foreign mining experts to the United States, especially at the university level.
There are other promising signs. With critical minerals dominating news headlines, mining engineering programs are seeing a surge in interest. Zisch, who is at the Colorado School of Mines, said that over the last four years, the school has seen a nearly 80 percent increase in enrollment in mining engineering.
“The general public awareness has helped to knock down some of the barriers to entrance that we had in the past with people’s perception of mining,” he said. “Mining, frankly, has always been essential. Now it’s also critical.”
And more educational programs may soon come online. Columbia University plans to once again offer students a mining engineering degree, while the University of Texas at El Paso is rebooting its mining engineering program with a $7 million investment from mining giant Freeport-McMoRan and a $20 million commitment from the University of Texas System Board of Regents.
“If we continue to see demand for various elements increase,” said Holley at the Colorado School of Mines, “we’re going to need more students who are able to develop those deposits in a responsible way.”
