Silverado and the Council on Foreign Relations Release New Report

“It is hard to out-mine, out-process, or out-fund China. Rather, the United States should seek to leapfrog China’s dominance by unlocking and scaling disruptive innovation, recovery, and recycling.”

On February 5th, Silverado Policy Accelerator and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) released a new report, Leapfrogging China’s Critical Minerals Dominance: How Innovation Can Secure Supply Chains.

Coauthored by Mahnaz Khan, Vice President of Policy for Critical Supply Chains at Silverado Policy Accelerator, and Heidi Crebo-Rediker, CFR Senior Fellow for Geoeconomics and Silverado Strategic Council member, the report argues that innovation—paired with pragmatic policy, financing, and allied cooperation—offers the most viable path to securing resilient supply chains.

The report recommends that the United States:

• Make innovation a centerpiece of U.S. critical minerals strategy
• Use materials engineering to bypass, rather than replicate, China’s chokepoints
• Scale waste-based recovery as a strategic supply source
• Close the scale-up financing gap for frontier mineral technologies
• Embed innovation-led mineral security into allied frameworks

This report is the culmination of six study group sessions held between June and December 2025 through recommendations from members of the CFR–Silverado Study Group on Strategic Leapfrogging Through the Critical Minerals Crisis—a bipartisan group of policymakers, scientists, investors, early- to growth-stage companies, and industry leaders—who focused on actionable strategies to rapidly advance innovation capable of reshaping the global critical minerals landscape.

Read the full report and explore the accompanying CFR dashboard.