Section 7002 of the Energy Act of 2020 established the statutory foundation for US federal mineral security policy, directing the Department of Energy to identify critical materials, fund supply chain R&D, and support domestic processing capacity development. Enacted at a moment of acute concern about US dependence on Chinese mineral processing, it set the legislative architecture that subsequent executive orders and the IRA’s domestic content provisions would build on. The US approach — defining criticality broadly, mandating active investment in supply chain resilience, and treating both the materials list and the investment programme as live policy tools — offers a useful contrast to the EU’s more passive, methodology-driven CRM framework.