For the United States to onshore its mineral supply chains, policymakers and business leaders first will need to invest in the social, regulatory, and economic experts who build the scaffolding for sound policies and business models.
This summer, the US Department of Energy and US Department of Defense announced the largest-ever investment in the minerals workforce—$180 million targeting the expansion of education and training in mining sciences and technologies. The United States badly needs such a workforce; without engineers and scientists to build and run mines and processing plants, the United States won’t be able to build a domestic mineral supply chain. But the workforce gap is not just technical. It is also social, regulatory, economic, and institutional—and those dimensions are largely overlooked in federal investments into the mineral supply chain.
Social scientists—including economists, legal scholars, and sociologists—support the entirety of the mineral supply chain, from extraction and processing to manufacturing and beyond. Their work affects whether projects can earn public trust, navigate permitting, attract workers, withstand market volatility, and contribute to a sustainable and growing domestic supply chain.
Community Trust and Social License
One of the major workforce challenges facing the mineral industry is that mining has an image problem. Given the legacy of environmental damage and harm from past projects, community trust in the mining industry is low. Though many modern projects are subject to stronger environmental standards than historical operations, and modern mining technologies can be less damaging, communities often view new mining proposals through the lens of past harm.
Building trust requires effective and equitable community engagement, and social scientists—particularly anthropologists, human geographers, and sociologists—have the specialized training and know-how to do this work. For example, the Sociology Action Network provides a network of academics ready to engage with communities. Yet too few social scientists have ended up in the minerals sector. As a result, human resources departments and community-facing project teams in mining companies frequently don’t have adequately trained staff that can build community trust. Communities, students, and workers are less likely to participate in an industry they distrust, and projects will struggle to secure the social license needed to move from proposal to operation.
Policy Design and Regulation
Building trust also requires credible and durable environmental regulations that are effective, fair, and do not harm communities. Legal and policy analysts have a major role in helping policymakers design these rules. Sociologists and governance experts also can help ensure that regulations are ethical and socially sustainable. Economists can conduct analyses to assess or predict the effectiveness of policies and proposals, helping policymakers ensure that policies are able to achieve their intended outcomes. Unfortunately, not many economists are focused on mineral markets and supply chains, and recognition of the need for this specific expertise in minerals policy still has not fully spread through academic circles.
Social scientists also can help reduce industry risk by developing market and financial tools and policies. For example, economists, business scholars, and finance experts can help the government identify effective ways for industry to cope with price volatility. Innovative tools, such as government-organized mineral inventories to protect the private sector against price shocks, can help reduce costs and strengthen the industry as a whole.
Yet the federal research-to-policy pipeline has eroded, making researchers’ ability to inform policymaking tenuous at best. Opportunities for researchers to comment on policy are increasingly limited, and decisionmaking at the federal level is frequently behind closed doors. For example, the US Environmental Protection Agency is working to end the requirement that states give the public an opportunity to comment on air-pollution permits for large projects, including industrial plants within mineral supply chains.
What Do We Need to Move Forward?
To build up social sciences in the domestic minerals workforce, three areas are especially important: funding, training pathways, and the connection between research and real-world decisionmaking.
First, federal funding for the minerals workforce largely focuses on technical training, with the social sciences left out of most investments, or even targeted specifically for funding elimination. While education initiatives overall have faced budget cuts under the Trump administration, the 2027 White House budget has targeted the US National Science Foundation’s Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences directorate, which funds 63 percent of social science research across all universities in the United States. These funding cuts come on top of major cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency initiative, which pulled $91 million from social science research in 2025. These cuts are not just damaging to universities; the cuts will affect the country’s ability to successfully build a domestic mineral supply chain. The $180-million investment in technical training from the Department of Energy and Department of Defense illustrates one element of building workforce capacity; a more interdisciplinary approach would account for the social science researchers who will be crucial in helping to expand the supply chain.
Credit: Parilov / Shutterstock
Second, training programs have an opportunity to make room for underleveraged disciplines. Minerals and mining remain niche topics in fields such as economics and business. Research tracks that connect economics and business to minerals programs could help build the knowledge base needed for policy development, market analysis, and institutional design.
Finally, stronger connections among academia, industry, and policy can help move social science expertise into the places where decisions are made about mineral supply chains. Social scientists already have the tools to help build community trust, expand workforce participation, assess policies, and improve regulation; the challenge is making sure those skills are connected to the institutions that need them. Fellowships, embedded research programs, cross-sector training, and more opportunities to comment on policy are examples of pathways for connecting this expertise to real-world decisionmaking.
Making the Hidden Workforce Visible
The conversation about the minerals workforce needs to expand beyond the focus on missing engineers, geologists, and materials scientists. These disciplines are essential, but social scientists are also central for the United States to achieve its goals for domestic mineral supply chains. Successful supply-chain projects depend on public trust and credible and durable regulations, and smart policy design can help industry face market challenges.
Social scientists are trained to address some of the mining industry’s biggest challenges. Making these fields of expertise visible when investing in the minerals workforce would enhance the country’s ability to build the trust, policy capacity, and market resilience that are necessary to turn its ambitions for domestic supply chains into a reality.
