The critical minerals powering the U.S.’s defense systems, semiconductors, and electric vehicles are being extracted by forced labor. As the world’s democracies gather for the G7 summit this week, President Donald Trump has the opportunity and strategic interest to do something about it.
Reducing dependence on Chinese critical minerals, which are tainted with state-imposed forced labor and the repression of the Uyghur population, is already central to Trump’s G7 agenda. However, the United States and its G7 allies, the leading industrialized nations, should use this moment to demonstrate commitment to collective national security by rejecting the use of forced labor in global commerce and increasing America’s economic competitiveness.
Currently, most U.S. companies are not sourcing critical minerals directly — they are buying components, materials, and finished goods that contain them. Most have no clear picture of which minerals are inside those products, whose labor extracted them, or what supply chain they traveled through to get there. Critical minerals power everything from batteries and semiconductors to defense systems and renewable energy technologies. Yet for too long, U.S. companies and consumers have been unwittingly dependent on supply chains where transparency is deliberately obscured.
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The U.S. Geological Survey 2025 list identifies roughly 60 such minerals essential to our economy and security. China dominates approximately half of the minerals’ production or processing. In regions such as Xinjiang, credible evidence links state-sponsored forced labor programs to the extraction and processing of minerals, including polysilicon, beryllium, magnesium, and titanium. Through ownership stakes, offtake agreements, and global processing facilities, Chinese control extends across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, obscuring the origin of tainted minerals as they move through global supply chains toward American markets.
Trump recognized this reality during his first term and has made confronting it a priority in the second, including launching comprehensive Section 301 investigations into trading partners’ failure to impose and effectively enforce prohibitions on goods produced with forced labor. These policies are not protectionist; they are principled and level the playing field for ethical industry while denying adversaries the economic oxygen of unfair advantage. To translate principle into practice, we need better tools that counter Beijing’s ambitions at scale.
Last year, Global Rights Compliance published an investigation into four critical minerals that showed the pathways China uses to move these materials through global supply chains while obscuring their origin. GRC traced the provenance of those critical minerals from Xinjiang and followed the routes used to bring them to Western markets. That work needs to scale.
Through its 15th five-year plan released in March, Beijing has broadcast its ambitions to continue to dominate critical mineral supply chains, to continue to exploit Uyghurs, and to export its model of unfair labor practices beyond China’s borders. The influence can be mapped through mine ownership, processing capacity, export leverage, and state-directed investment across Africa, Latin America, and Central Asia. To keep pace with China’s ambitions, this work needs to be faster, broader in scope, and available in real time to the governments and companies making decisions that will shape supply chains for decades.
The Trump administration has both the means and the strategic interest to invest in exactly that: a consolidated, real-time intelligence resource that maps mineral exposure to Chinese control and forced labor, tracks that exposure across jurisdictions, and updates as the picture changes. This would give American companies the evidence to source responsibly and give U.S. and allied governments the intelligence they need to prioritize domestic production incentives, direct reshoring investment, and deploy procurement power with precision.
This intelligence would also directly bolster and strengthen key national security initiatives related to critical minerals, including Project VAULT, the landmark private-public strategic critical minerals reserve, by helping identify and de-risk reliable sources for the stockpile. It advances the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement by providing the data needed to diversify global supply chains away from adversarial control. It could also support Trump’s Pax Silica initiative by enabling transparent supply chain integrations free from coercion.
At the G7, Trump will prioritize collective action to diversify and secure resilient critical mineral supply chains through alliances. This action must include rejecting supply chains built on coercion and strengthening alternatives grounded in the rule of law. This is economic statecraft at its most effective: using transparency, procurement policy, and allied coordination to reduce the U.S.’s and our allies’ dependence on tainted critical mineral supply chains.
Trump is also focused on reshoring critical mineral production and processing here at home, a strategy he indicates will create thousands of high-paying American jobs in mining, manufacturing, and advanced technology sectors by delivering real economic opportunity to workers and strengthening the backbone of U.S. industry. The path forward is clear: enforce high standards at home, demand them abroad, invest in supply chain intelligence, and reshore production built on fair competition rather than exploitation.
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Allies and American industry should support the investment in forced labor intelligence tools that trace provenance, expose risks, and support American competitiveness.
On the 250th anniversary of this nation, we should invest in upholding human dignity and freedom by ending our economic reliance on forced labor once and for all.
Martha E. Newton served as deputy undersecretary of Labor in the first Trump administration. Samir Goswami is director of Forced Labor Programs at Global Rights Compliance.