The Industrial Foundation of America
In both gunpowder and policy, the Continental Congress holds lessons for today.
Two hundred fifty years ago, the Continental Congress dispatched an enterprising Connecticut merchant named Silas Deane on a covert mission to France. His orders were simple: secure gunpowder.
It was a longstanding need. For decades, Parliament had kept colonial industry under its boot. The Iron Act of 1750 compelled the colonies to ship their raw iron to Britain and prohibited the construction of furnaces and forges that would have made America industrially self-sufficient. When war severed the lifeline to British supply, there was a single working powder mill in all 13 colonies.
Upon assuming command of the Continental Army, General George Washington discovered there were only 90 barrels of gunpowder available, enough for about 10 minutes of firing. An eyewitness reported that Washington was so horrified he did not utter a word for half an hour. Thus, in February of 1776, Massachusetts delegate John Adams introduced resolutions directing every colony to “forthwith erect Powder Mills.” Adams leveraged the admittedly limited power of the fledgling Continental Congress to make that happen, sensing no contradiction between the liberty the colonies espoused and a proactive government engaging in order to defend it.
What the Founders did to secure gunpowder ought to humble anyone who believes American intervention on behalf of strategic industry is a modern invention. It also happens to be a surprisingly prescient playbook.
Today, China dominates global critical mineral supply chains. It mines roughly 70% of the world’s rare earths and processes upwards of 90%, while also holding commanding positions in lithium, cobalt, and graphite. These vital resources are essential to everything from weapons systems to the power grid. Gunpowder was the critical mineral of the eighteenth century; critical minerals are the gunpowder of ours. Without them, no missiles fly, no semiconductors are fabricated, no power flows.
The Continental Congress of 1776 realized that sovereignty, in the end, is only as real as the matter and materials that sustain it, and Deane worked diligently to make sure that Washington’s army had both. By the end of that year the diplomat Benjamin Franklin and Virginia’s Arthur Lee had joined him in France to secure a treaty of alliance. France pledged military support and, by the end of 1777, had supplied roughly 2 million pounds of gunpowder and 60,000 arms.
Congress also pledged to buy all domestic gunpowder at $8 per hundredweight, far above prevailing rates. It was a buyer of last resort for an industry that barely existed. It issued direct contracts to Oswald Eve at the Frankford mill outside Philadelphia, whose output had limped along at roughly 250 pounds per month. With guaranteed offtake, Eve reportedly scaled production to 2,200 pounds per week within two months.
The Continental Congress printed pamphlets on gunpowder manufacturing and sent Paul Revere to Philadelphia to study Eve’s mill, armed with letters from fellow delegates Robert Morris and John Dickinson urging Eve to open his works and share his mysterious methods. Revere returned to Massachusetts with acquired knowledge, built a powder mill of his own at Canton, and produced over 40,000 pounds in its first months.
The knowledge transfer also ran across the Atlantic. Antoine Lavoisier, who oversaw France’s national powder works, had revolutionized gunpowder chemistry, producing what he declared “the best in Europe.” Lavoisier’s published formulas set the standard that American powder makers would follow for a generation. His powder gave colonial riflemen fewer misfires and greater accuracy, advantages that mattered greatly in a war of inches and attrition.
The same logic holds today as the United States works to outcompete China and achieve industrial independence once again. In February, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted ministers from over 50 countries at the first Critical Minerals Ministerial, the capstone of a diplomatic sprint that produced bilateral agreements with partners as varied as lithium-rich Argentina and the nickel-flush Philippines.
The ministerial’s centerpieces are the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement (FORGE), a preferential trade bloc with coordinated price floors designed to prevent any single nation from undercutting allied producers, and Project Vault, a $12 billion strategic reserve. Just as it was 250 years ago, even the most resourceful nation cannot produce everything it needs alone.
Last July, the Pentagon took a $400 million equity stake in MP Materials, which runs America’s only large-scale rare earth mining and processing facility, and set a price floor of $110 per kilogram for key rare earth oxides, again above prevailing rates. The Section 45X production tax credit, launched in President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act but preserved and tightened by President Trump in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, offers a 10% credit for domestic mineral extraction and processing. The credit has proven so popular that Republican legislators, including Senators Jerry Moran of Kansas and John Curtis of Utah, have even introduced bills to expand it to distribution transformers and fusion energy components. Price floors, equity stakes, production credits: the playbook is older than the Republic.
Meanwhile, the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, launched by executive order last November, has marshaled all 17 national laboratories and two dozen private sector partners to apply artificial intelligence to the nation’s hardest technical problems, with critical mineral discovery and processing named among its top challenges.
The CHIPS and Science Act, the largest federal research investment in a generation, authorized $280 billion to rebuild American capacity in strategic technologies, including putting our government’s best scientists to the task of eliminating foreign mineral dependency. When Congress ordered pamphlets printed and mills opened for inspection, it was making the same bet we are making now: that American ingenuity, properly resourced and responsibly distributed, can close a gap that patience alone will not.
Two years before the Adams resolutions, the Continental Congress had adopted the Continental Association, a sweeping trade embargo against Britain and its colonies. The embargo was principled and necessary, but by 1775 had broadened well beyond its original scope, as delegates moved to choke off trade for fear that exported cargo would drain supplies at home or fall into enemy hands. John Jay of New York posited that the only way to keep American goods from the British was to “publish a law that none go from the Continent.” But the war could not be fought without powder, so the delegates carved out an exception: any ship that imported gunpowder, arms, or ammunition could carry American goods out in return. When policy threatened the cause it was built to protect, Congress tore it open.
Likewise, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970 was born of an honorable impulse to preserve our nation’s wildlife, water, air, and natural beauty built by the hands of God. Half a century later, that impulse has calcified into a regulatory regime that can hold a mine in permitting limbo for a decade while China builds processing capacity by the quarter. The United States House of Representatives passed the SPEED Act in December to clear that logjam, imposing statutory deadlines on environmental reviews and limiting the litigation that can stall a permitted project for years after approval. Like the Continental Association before it, NEPA is not the enemy. But when a good law becomes a barrier to the national interest, the law must yield.
Some 250 years after our nation’s founding, the tools are more sophisticated but the logic has not changed. The Continental Congress entered the Revolutionary War with 90 barrels of powder, a collection of delegates with more resolve than means, and the good sense to act rather than wait. The nation they built now boasts wealth, allies, and technology they could not have imagined. What America has always needed, and what no resource can replace, is the conviction to use them.
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“Antoine Lavoisier, who oversaw France’s national powder works, had revolutionized gunpowder chemistry, producing what he declared “the best in Europe.” Lavoisier’s published formulas set the standard that American powder makers would follow for a generation.”
This scenario could scarcely be imagined now. Anyone with a new formula for a critical process would obtain a patent and charge enormous license fees. Or more likely the patent would be bought by a single manufacturer who could then charge exorbitant prices. The entire enterprise would be protected by laws related to trade secrets. Indeed nowadays huge companies buy small innovative companies solely for their intellectual property, sometimes even ceasing production of a competitive product to protect the market for an inferior one.
Intellectual property law might be due for a reexamination and analysis of how it may truly benefit or harm innovation in the United States. Given that IP law is specifically designed to grant a government monopoly it might be useful to think about the consequences of how this fits in a capitalist market system that requires competition to be relevant.
I agree with the intent of the National Environmental Policy Act to incorporate environmental considerations along with economic and national security considerations in land use decisions. However, I have observed the way that, in conjunction with the Endangered Species Act it often delays or greatly adds to the cost of projects based upon highly speculative claims of substantial negative environmental impacts, or on impacts to minor allegedly endangered species like clams or spiders that nobody other than specialized biologists would ever be likely to see, recognize, or benefit from in any way. There needs to be a better balance between the multiple objectives of public land use policy.