With names like neodymium and dysprosium, rare-earth elements sound exotic — and their perceived scarcity has only added to the mystique.

In reality, rare earths aren’t that rare, but just difficult to extract and refine. Yet they’ve become indispensable to modern life, embedded in everything from our smartphones and electric-vehicle motors to wind turbines and medical imaging machines.

And demand is climbing.

The real choke point is processing and refining — a complex and environmentally sensitive step that the U.S. has lagged behind in and that China now dominates, controlling nearly 90% of global output.

The need for high-torque, compact EV motors — which use rare-earth magnets that are three to four times stronger than conventional magnets — is helping drive demand. Production of these motors is soaring by roughly a third each year. Military aircraft also rely heavily on these elements; one RAND estimate suggests an F-35 contains over 900 pounds of rare-earth materials in its engines and electronics.

Taking a private-public approach

To reduce reliance on foreign supply, the White House is pursuing U.S. self-sufficiency in rare-earth production. The federal government under President Trump has supported the sector in ways that depart from traditional free-market principles. Rather than relying solely on private industry, the federal government has followed a strategy similar to China’s, providing hundreds of millions in loans and even taking stakes in key mines and startups.

Indiana-based ReElement Technologies is among the beneficiaries of this government backing. Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced a partnership between the Pentagon, via its Office of Strategic Capital (OSC), ReElement and Vulcan Elements, a North Carolina based firm that produces rare-earth magnets for military applications.

ReElement says it has developed a more efficient, environmentally friendly method of rare-earth processing and recycling that involves chromatography. The company operates a commercialization facility in Noblesville, Ind., with a larger production site in Marion, Ind., slated to come online next year.

Stacks separate rare earths at ReElement’s Noblesville, Ind., plant.

ReElement Technologies Corp.

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ReElement Technologies Corp.

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ReElement Technologies CEO Mark Jensen says confidently that by the end of 2026, “we’ll be the largest producer of rare earth oxides in the United States.”

Because China’s dominance in refining is so great, the U.S. benchmark for success is modest, according to Bert Donnes, a research analyst at investment banking firm William Blair.

ReElement, in partnership with Vulcan Elements, aims in the next few years to produce 10,000 metric tons of neodymium-iron-boron magnets used not only in EVs, but also wind-turbine generators, hard-disk drives and MRI machines. Even that ambitious target is a fraction of the approximately 230,000 tons produced globally in 2024, according to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE.

“I would say if you see those numbers, you think this is going to be a massive facility,” says Donnes of ReElement’s current operation. “It isn’t.”

Compared to a traditional processing facility, ReElement’s operation is compact, he says, helping avoid any “not-in-my-backyard” (NIMBY) backlash. “So it’s not like people are scared of this process. Maybe they don’t know about it as much because you can keep the process so small,” he says.

How the U.S. lost its lead

Starting in the 1980s, China began surging ahead of the U.S. and the rest of the world in rare earth production. Around the same time, environmental concerns mounted at the only major U.S. rare earth mine, Mountain Pass in California, where spills of radioactive and toxic wastewater — byproducts of refining — raised alarms.

Mountain Pass is an open-cut mine where they “drill and blast, blend their types and locations in the pit” before grinding the solid materials into smaller particles, according to Kelton Smith, a lead process engineer for mining at Tetra Tech, a global consulting and engineering services firm. A flotation process then concentrates the rare earths that are in turn leached with hydrochloric acid.

The California mine had to halt production multiple times over the years due to environmental concerns. During that time, it changed ownership and ultimately filed for bankruptcy protection before being acquired by MP Materials in 2017, which reopened the mine.

The troubles at Mountain Pass helped China to gain a foothold and eventually overtake the U.S. in rare earths — just as demand for them was rising. Beijing now produces about 60% of the world’s supply of these substances, according to the International Energy Agency. China also holds a substantial amount of the world’s proven reserves of the ores that contain these elements — roughly 34%, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, but several other countries — including the U.S. — have substantial reserves as well.

Trump’s trade war with China has made the squeeze in rare earths even more acute. Because the U.S. lacks the ability to process rare earths on a large scale, MP Materials has had to send its ore from Mountain Pass to China for refining. But no more. Instead, the company is having to ramp up its limited capability to process the ore on-site.

Further complicating the issue are expanded export controls that Beijing announced last month that require foreign companies to obtain a license in order to sell products overseas that contain Chinese-sourced rare earths.

Aaron Mintzes is deputy policy director and counsel at Earthworks, a national group focused on preventing the adverse impacts of mineral and energy development. “What we’re urging … is to do that processing in ways that reduce energy and water intensity and toxicity,” he says.

Brent Elliott, a research associate professor of geology at the University of Texas, estimates the U.S. has sufficient resources to meet demand. “It’s about the extraction potential and the logistics of getting it out of the ground in a way that is environmentally sensitive but also socially responsible,” he says.

Partly because it is environmentally messy, with toxic byproducts, Beijing has gained an advantage by ignoring those consequences. “China can do it faster and better because they don’t have the environmental concerns that we have,” Elliott says.

Many experts agree that the U.S. has enough reserves but lacks the processing capability to go along with it. Simon Jowitt, a geologist and the director of the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, says there are a number of rare earth deposits in the U.S. that have potential, but it’s rarely a straightforward proposition.

“You need a source of the rare earths, some way of transporting the rare earths, some way of concentrating the rare earths, and some way of putting those rare earths into a form that they can then be extracted,” Jowitt says. “If you don’t have one of those, then you end up with something that isn’t a mineral deposit and you’ll never get anything out of it.”

Last year, China decreed new regulations for rare earth processing that include strict environmental and safety regulations, but it remains to be seen how stringent enforcement will be.

Meanwhile, it not only processes its own ore, but it imports raw ore from places like Southeast Asia and Africa. It’s part of a broader strategy by China to set itself up as a global hub for rare earths, according to Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“They put a lot of state resources behind building processing capabilities, such that the minerals come from different places and then they get sent to China for refining,” Baskaran says. “What China has been extraordinarily good at is connecting their foreign policy to secure rare earths from around the world.”

A new process and federal investments

Refining is where ReElement comes in. The company uses large columns in a specialized filtration process developed at Purdue University to extract and purify valuable metals from raw ore, but also recycled rare earths from old magnets. The process is more efficient and less environmentally damaging than older methods, such as those used by China.

Jensen, the ReElement CEO, says that method, known as solvent extraction, is “ecologically challenging” and difficult to scale. “It’s a dead technology,” he says, adding that his company’s ultimate goal isn’t necessarily to achieve U.S. dominance, but to produce enough rare earths domestically to break China’s monopoly.

The One Big Beautiful Bill passed in July appropriated $7.5 billion toward securing critical minerals. Days later, the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital announced a $400 million investment  in MP Materials, making the U.S. government the company’s largest shareholder. The Pentagon agency plans further investments in “[c]ritical components, raw materials, and rare earth elements utilized in microelectronic manufacturing.”

As part of the deal with ReElement, Vulcan Elements will get a $620 million loan from the Pentagon’s OSC with an additional $50 million provided by the Department of Commerce under the CHIPS and Science Act signed by former President Joe Biden. ReElement Technologies will receive an $80 million loan to support the expansion of its recycling and processing operations.

“I think we’re making big strides now because of all the grants and all the critical-mineral-focused grants coming out,” says Elliott, the University of Texas geology professor. “I think it really can set us up for success.”

President Donald Trump has yet again suggested that his political opponents deserve to be executed. And yet again, he’s basing this argument on a rather novel legal theory and a dubious interpretation of the facts.

A half-dozen congressional Democrats cut a video this week urging members of the military not to obey unlawful orders that Trump might issue. Trump then responded by issuing a series of social media posts suggesting these members had committed sedition and possibly even deserved to die.

Trump went from saying they should be arrested, to re-posting someone who said George Washington would “HANG THEM,” to saying “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified Thursday that Trump does not, in fact, want members of Congress put to death.

But she otherwise stood by the idea that these members were acting dangerously and undermining the commander in chief. She said the members were urging members of the military to “defy the chain of command.”

“They are literally saying to 1.3 million active-duty servicemembers to defy the chain of command – not to follow lawful orders,” Leavitt said.

But that is not what they were literally saying.

In fact, the members were not urging anyone to disobey “lawful orders.” They explicitly referred in the video only to unlawful orders – and repeatedly so.

The other problem is that “defying the chain of command” isn’t just something military servicemembers are allowed to do in such cases; it’s something they’re often required to do.

The section of Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice dealing with failing to obey orders states that members can only be sanctioned for disobeying lawful orders. And servicemembers are generally obligated to not follow orders that are “manifestly unlawful.”

If there’s a potentially more legitimate objection to Democrats’ video, it’s that they’re erecting a straw man – basically that they’re inventing out of whole cloth the prospect of Trump issuing illegal orders, in order to make military servicemembers hesitant to abide his orders.

This is the argument that some of Trump’s allies have gone for on Fox News.

“If you can’t name the unlawful orders that these guys are bringing up in their video, you know, that just shows me that you don’t have the courage to even call out what you’re talking about,” Republican Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona said.

Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum in a separate segment pressed Democratic Rep. Jason Crow, one of the lawmakers in the video, repeatedly on the same subject.

“What specific order from the commander in chief that we are asking our military to carry out are you objecting to?” MacCallum said. “This is very, very vague.”

But it’s not as if this is a prospect Democrats have invented out of whole cloth. Trump has given them plenty to work with, including some things Crow mentioned in the interview.

Trump has repeatedly proposed doing things – with the military and otherwise – that appear to be illegal. People who served with him have said he suggested illegal action. And Trump is certainly testing the bounds of the law with his use of the military even as we speak.

The big example right now is Trump’s strikes on alleged drug vessels in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean – strikes that have killed more than 80 people without a legal process.

CNN has reported that both the United Nations and top allies like the United Kingdom regard the strikes as illegal extrajudicial killings. Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has echoed those claims, while other GOP senators have questioned their legality as well. The administration has also declined to publicly detail its legal justification, even as the Justice Department has produced a classified legal opinion authorizing the strikes. It has released survivors of the strikes who, if they had been kept in US custody, could have forced it to defend itself in court. Also, a top commander who CNN has reported raised questions about the legality of the strikes is now retiring early.

There is a very real question about whether the servicemembers involved in those strikes are carrying out illegal orders. And the administration has proactively avoided a more robust legal process that could settle that question.

But that’s hardly all. Here are some other key data points:

It’s certainly provocative for Democrats to raise this issue like they have. But it’s not as if they’ve conjured it out of thin air.

Eleven years ago, Paul Lundy was dying a slow, workingman’s death under fluorescent light.

For three decades, he had worked in facilities management — an honest trade that ground him down until, in his mid-50s, he had money, an authoritative title and a soul that was being sucked dry. He managed buildings for Seattle-area biotech firms, where people in lab coats made discoveries that saved lives. He kept the infrastructure running. He was good at it, maybe great, but facilities managers are overhead, essential but invisible. Nobody notices until something breaks.

Lundy had reached a ceiling. No college degree meant no room to grow in a world that valued credentials above experience. Retirement at 65 stretched before him like a prison sentence. The three-hour commute was killing him — a ritual that thousands endure to afford living near Seattle.

“Fun was not what you would call it anymore,” allows Lundy, a trim, neatly pleated man with a soft, welcoming face.

One Sunday morning in 2014, he opened The Seattle Times and found a feature story about Bob Montgomery, age 92, known to friends, customers and locals simply as Mr. Montgomery. The article read like an obituary for a vanishing trade — fixing typewriters — suggesting that when Mr. Montgomery went, seven decades of expertise would vanish into the digital ether.

Lundy read it once, then a second time. He had never given old typewriters much thought, but something stirred in him that he could not quite name. He showed the story to his wife, Lisa.

“I think this might be it,” he told her. The next weekend, he drove to Bremerton, a weary naval town an hour’s ferry ride away and a world apart from gleaming, digitized Seattle.

Finding Mr. Montgomery’s shop required determination. No sign marked the building; no indication that inside, five floors up, a master craftsman was keeping alive skills that predated the computer age. You took an elevator that groaned. When the doors opened, you knew immediately you were in the right place: a 1916 Royal Model 10 typewriter stood guard outside an open door, and the air smelled like oil. Once inside, you encountered a shop stacked and stuffed with typewriters — Underwoods and Coronas, Royal KMMs and Remington Portable 3s.

And there, at a workbench, sat Mr. Montgomery.

He was small, frail, bent by osteoporosis enough that “he had a right angle,” Lundy says.

But his hands moved across the typewriter before him with unconscious grace, removing screws without looking, adjusting linkages by feel alone.

“Welcome to the crazy house,” Mr. Montgomery said, his standard greeting.

Lundy had planned to stay 20 minutes. He stayed four hours. What captured him was not nostalgia. What captured him was watching Mr. Montgomery work, the old man dismantling a machine while carrying on a conversation, barely glancing at the complexity beneath his fingers.

Mr. Montgomery had grown up in Depression-era Seattle, the son of a typewriter repairman who had a shop in the city’s downtown. When he was not learning the trade, he would sneak through alleyways into grand old theaters to watch rehearsals, developing a love for performance that would shape his life nearly as much as typewriters.

Then came World War II. Drafted at 18, he expected to carry a rifle through Europe. But the Army discovered his skill and put him to work fixing typewriters at Supreme Allied Command. “Probably saved his life,” Lundy says. After the war, his family opened Bremerton Office Machine Company in 1947. For the next 70 years, Mr. Montgomery stayed within a few blocks of downtown Bremerton, always fixing typewriters, even as the world abandoned them.

What Lundy discovered over the following months was that Mr. Montgomery knew how to patiently stretch everything — even a meal. Lundy began taking him to lunch every Saturday, and their meals became meditations. Mr. Montgomery would order a BLT with avocado and make it last 90 minutes, telling stories between bites and savoring every morsel as only someone who had grown up without much could.

Other than a sister in California, he had no family. He slept in the back of his shop on an orange vinyl hide-a-bed couch. At 92, he existed almost completely outside the system.

Lundy had been a 20-minute lunch guy his entire career — eat fast, back to work, back to the grind. Now, somehow, he found himself slowing down, learning a different rhythm. Lunches became a practice in patience, a different way of being in the world.

“Mr. Montgomery was such a nice guy,” Lundy says, emphasizing “such.” The old man made him feel seen. And listened to. Like everything mattered.

After a few months, Lundy noticed typewriters stacking up faster than Mr. Montgomery could repair them. Business had surged after the article. “Can I help?” Lundy asked one day.

Mr. Montgomery said yes. Lundy started coming after his facilities job, heading straight to the shop. Mr. Montgomery set him up a bench with a typewriter and photocopied repair manual pages. He left him to figure things out.

Lundy’s hands, accustomed to managing air-conditioning systems, had to learn a new language — to feel the difference between correct tension and too loose or too tight. When he thought a repair was perfect, he brought it to Mr. Montgomery, who tested it with quick fingers dancing across the keys and, invariably, pronounced: “That is not what I would have done.”

He showed Lundy the right way. No anger. No frustration. Just quiet insistence that good enough was not good enough.

Sometimes Mr. Montgomery would partly disassemble a machine and leave it on Lundy’s bench — a test, a puzzle, a method of teaching as old as apprenticeship itself.

“It’s like Zen,” Lundy says about those hours at the bench. “There are times when it is just very relaxing to be standing in front of the machine and slowly cleaning it, tweaking the adjustment so visually things start to really line up.”

One Saturday Lundy arrived at the shop to find men with clipboards pointing at Mr. Montgomery’s equipment. They were evicting him, readying everything for the dumpster; 13 months of unpaid rent had finally caught up.

Lundy could not abide the thought of all that knowledge lost, all that skill and history being tossed away. He called his wife. “They’re kicking him out!” he said. “My whole opportunity might be lost. I think this might be what I want to do.”

“You’ve done crazier things,” she replied. “Do it.”

The building manager arrived next, spelling out the cost: 13 months at $200 per month, equaling $2,600 total. For Mr. Montgomery, who had maybe $200 in the bank, this was insurmountable. For Lundy, with his steady salary, it was doable.

“I will pay his back rent if I buy his business,” Lundy told the manager. “I’ll pay monthly rent going forward.”

Deal.

The eviction crew left. Mr. Montgomery, who had watched the chaos with the remote calm of an elder, looked at Lundy and said just one word: “OK.”

Lundy bought the business at the end of 2014. Soon, he quit his job and walked away from its stultifying steadiness, its salary and benefits. His colleagues were sure he had lost his mind. But Lundy knew he was trading security for meaning, predictability for possibility. “I was happy,” he says simply.

For the next few years, Lundy and Mr. Montgomery worked side by side in that cramped fifth-floor shop. Mr. Montgomery was still the master, but he was slowing, taking longer naps. More and more often, he would look at a typewriter that had come in for repair and turn to Lundy: “You do this one.”

The teaching continued, deeper now, Mr. Montgomery pulling tools off the pegboard — tools he had organized decades ago, many he had made himself, his initials etched in the handles. “He knew everything about every typewriter, just off the top of his head,” Lundy says. “I know maybe 10 percent of what he knew. Maybe.”

Eventually Mr. Montgomery would watch his student work and deliver his highest praise: “You are OK.”

By the time Mr. Montgomery reached his mid-90s, life was catching up with him. His friends had intervened, helping him sign up for the veteran and Social Security benefits he had never claimed and finding him subsidized housing at a nearby retirement home — his first real home in decades. But he kept coming to the shop regularly, taking the bus in the morning. The bus drivers knew Mr. Montgomery and seemed to have memorized his routine — if he was running a bit late, they would wait.

Mr. Montgomery fell and broke his hip. His health declined fast, the way it does when the very old finally succumb to gravity. One afternoon, Lundy visited him in his apartment and threw out uneaten food that had accumulated in the refrigerator. Mr. Montgomery watched for a while, then said quietly: “I’m glad you did this.”

Both men knew he was talking about Lundy continuing the tradition at the shop.

Mr. Montgomery died in September 2018, at age 96. Full military honors were held at the cemetery. Lundy gave the eulogy, his voice breaking as he tried to convey the sum of a man who had lived through the Depression and World War II, who had become an iconic community fixture and spent 70 years fixing machines the world had forgotten, who had worked until the very end because work was who he was.

What neither man could have known was that they had been standing at the edge of the typewriter’s unlikely resurrection. The revival began quietly in temples of analog nostalgia — think Brooklyn coffee shops and Portland boutique hotels. Tom Hanks became an unlikely patron saint, writing a book about typewriters, collecting hundreds of them. Then came 2020. Everyone stuck at home, screens everywhere, Zoom fatigue setting in. People craved something tangible. Typewriter sales exploded.

“The kids get it,” Lundy says. “They’re not trying to be nostalgic for something they never experienced. They’re trying to escape what they experience every day.”

Now it is a Saturday morning. October 2025. Paul Lundy hunches over an IBM Selectric, a machine nearly 50 years old, probing its guts with the delicate touch he learned from Mr. Montgomery. The machine has taken its share of falls. Oil and dust have conspired over decades to form clogging sludge. Dog hair, too — there always seems to be dog hair.

He keeps solvent flowing, working back and forth through the brown muck, treating the dirt not as debris but as the accumulated record of life lived hunched over a keyboard — the residue of a marriage proposal, a first novel, a military order, a last will and testament.

His shop is different now. Brighter, airier, on the main floor of a building that was wasting away in downtown Bremerton until Lundy cobbled together enough savings to buy and renovate it, using all those facilities management skills he thought he’d left behind. He had kept the business in that cramped fifth-floor space for six years after Mr. Montgomery’s death. Management was planning apartments, Lundy says, so he wound up here — in a 1910 building that once housed a local electric utility’s headquarters.

From the basement below his wooden floors comes the thump of bass guitar, the crash of drums. Rock bands practice during many of his working hours. The structure shakes with enthusiasm. He smiles, tugs on his workman’s apron, adjusts his black-framed glasses and does not lose attention.

He clicks a return button. The Selectric whirs. He listens.

“The problems you see — and sometimes the problems you hear,” he says, wryly, as he adjusts the operational shaft, “are not always the real problem.”

Now the stubborn machine is yielding its secrets at last. Lundy has flushed its brown sludge, freed its operational shaft, oiled the precise points where metal meets metal.

Mr. Montgomery’s soul fills this space. The 1916 Royal Model 10 that stood guard at the old shop stands here now. There’s his woolen hat. There’s a photo from Bremerton’s Bob Montgomery Day, which he bristled at because he didn’t like attention. There are his community theater awards — best director, again and again — testament to the love of performance that began in those old Seattle theaters. There sit his notes, repair manuals and tools: blue-handled wrenches, metallic probes, soft-bristled brushes. Mr. Montgomery’s bench is where Lundy works.

“It’ll always be his,” Lundy says of the shop, now called Bremerton Typewriter Company. “I am just borrowing it.”

Lundy’s wife, Lisa, works at her own bench. She started learning repair work during the pandemic and became proficient, helping with the backlog.

The phone rings steadily; customers call from as far as Florida, New York and beyond. The novelist who needs an escape from the internet’s magnetic pull; the screenwriter convinced that only keys that fight back can force out good work; the teenagers who have just found a grandmother’s pristine Corona, a grandfather’s portable Hermes.

It is Lundy who takes on apprentices now. He teaches the way Mr. Montgomery did: patiently letting mistakes happen because mistakes educate best. It’s a steady transfer of knowledge, a careful passing of the seemingly arcane, a customer-is-always-right way of doing business.

Want to come in and type a poem on a 1920s Underwood? Sure, take a seat, don’t rush.

You’re over 90? Front of the queue.

“Gotta lay out the red carpet for our elderly customers,” Lundy says. “People forget that when you were younger, you did things. You made a difference. Then you get old and society just sees an old guy waiting for the bus, and it’s almost like you don’t exist.”

This year, Paul Lundy turned 65. Had he stayed in his old job he would have retired, probably on his birthday. Instead, he is working six days a week and smiling through it: “I cannot imagine stopping.”