The US gave Mountain Pass, CA money to develop their rare earth mine and refinery.

There was a certain amount of shorthand in Lapsody's post that needs to be expanded upon. The issue with most rare earth mining and refining operations is that these (really not that rare) elements tend to co-locate with radioactive elements. Separating the useful elements from the radioactive dross in a way that keeps the mining and refinery workers safe and the downstream inhabitants un-irradiated is expensive. The Chinese operations tend to take a more casual attitude towards those concerns. It sounds like some of these concerns were also expressed by the Malaysian greens. It is straight-forward to mitigate the risks but to do so at a cheaper price than what the Chinese are offering is a challenge. So the US choice is to subsidize a more environmentally (and worker) friendly operation or to buy from the lowest bidder, which currently seems to be the Chinese.

During the cold war the US irradiated large numbers of miners and their families digging uranium ore in Southern Utah near Moab. There is a large site just north of Moab where the processing facility was built and the Department of Energy has spent decades cleaning up the results of that "damn the torpedoes" effort. The US has to decide what price to pay for on-shoring mining and manufacturing. It is considerably cheaper to let other people deal with the environmental consequences of these operations.

Rgds,
HH/Sean