Congress appropriated roughly $150 billion in new defense spending through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025, and one small provision inside that bill points to where American industrial policy is actually headed. Two billion dollars went to something most Americans have never heard of: the National Defense Stockpile Transaction Fund. Understanding why that fund exists, and why lawmakers just refilled it after decades of neglect, explains a run of policy moves stretching from Pentagon procurement offices to a White House ceremony in February 2026 to a bipartisan bill still working through committee.
A Reserve Built for a Different Kind of War
The National Defense Stockpile traces back to a 1939 statute passed as global conflict loomed. Congress created the reserve to give the military and critical industries a supply of strategic materials on hand during a national emergency, insulating wartime production from dependence on foreign trade routes. The Defense Logistics Agency has managed it ever since, acquiring and periodically releasing materials as strategic priorities shift.
For most of the post-Cold War era, the stockpile shrank rather than grew. Budget writers treated its holdings as a source of savings, and a post-Cold War liquidation pattern took hold: assets got sold off whenever strategic urgency receded. That pattern reversed in 2025.
Congress Reopens the Transaction Fund
Section 20004 of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, 2025, appropriated $2 billion to the National Defense Stockpile Transaction Fund, the mechanism the Defense Logistics Agency uses to buy and hold strategic materials. Congress paired that with $5 billion for critical mineral investments through the Industrial Base Fund, a separate account aimed at expanding domestic mining, processing, and refining capacity. Together the two provisions mark the largest legislative commitment to mineral security since the stockpile’s creation.
The funding builds on groundwork Congress laid the year before. The FY2024 National Defense Authorization Act gave the stockpile authority to sign multi-year contracts for domestically processed minerals, letting the Pentagon lock in long-term supply relationships instead of buying on the spot market. That authority turned the 2025 appropriation into action rather than an idle balance sheet entry.
The Pentagon Starts Buying
The Defense Logistics Agency moved quickly. In 2025 the agency announced intent to procure up to $1 billion in stockpile materials and issued a wave of requests for information covering minerals where the United States has known deposits but limited processing capacity, along with rare earths facing acute shortages such as samarium, dysprosium, and terbium.
Those requests became contracts fast:
- United States Antimony: $245 million to supply antimony for the stockpile
- Rio Tinto and Illinois-based APL Engineered Materials: combined $45 million for scandium
- Cobalt: up to $500 million committed toward domestic supply
- Tantalum: $100 million sourced from an American supplier
Analysts have flagged that some of the agency’s target volumes exceed current domestic supply for materials like indium, a sign of how aggressively the Pentagon is now buying relative to available capacity.
Project Vault Adds a Second Track
Six months later, the administration opened a second front. President Trump signed an executive order on February 2, 2026, establishing Project Vault, a $12 billion critical minerals reserve structured separately from the Defense Department’s stockpile. The financing runs through a $10 billion loan from the U.S. Export-Import Bank paired with roughly $2 billion in private capital from institutional investors including Hartree Partners, Traxys, and Mercuria Energy Group.
Project Vault works differently from the traditional stockpile. Manufacturers such as Boeing, General Motors, GE Vernova, Clarios, and Western Digital commit capital and pay fees for guaranteed access to specified materials during a supply disruption, an insurance-style structure led by the companies that need the metals. The Council on Foreign Relations lists silver among the materials the reserve targets, alongside rare earths, aluminum, antimony, copper, germanium, and zirconium.
Congress Adds a Third Track
A bipartisan group in the Senate and House is pushing a separate approach. The SECURE Minerals Act of 2026, introduced by Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Todd Young along with Representatives Rob Wittman and John Moolenaar, would create a Strategic Resilience Reserve funded at $2.5 billion, modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The bill would place the reserve under an independent government corporation run by a seven-member board appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, tasked with stabilizing prices and expanding domestic production and recycling for minerals where the United States depends heavily on China.
Three separate policy tracks are now moving at once. The Pentagon runs one directly through the National Defense Stockpile. Project Vault operates through Export-Import Bank financing outside that traditional structure. Congress is weighing a third, an independent board dedicated purely to critical minerals. The bill sponsoring it remains in committee, but bipartisan authorship signals where consensus is building even ahead of a signed law.
Why Silver Belongs in the Conversation
Silver’s arrival on the government’s radar is recent and specific. The Department of the Interior published the Final 2025 List of Critical Minerals, developed by the U.S. Geological Survey, in the Federal Register on November 7, 2025, and silver joined copper, lead, potash, rhenium, and silicon on the list for the first time. The designation followed years of growing import dependence: net import reliance for silver reached 77 percent (as of February 2026), according to the latest USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries.
The supply picture underneath that dependence is tightening on its own. The Silver Institute’s World Silver Survey 2026 put the 2025 global silver deficit at 40.3 million ounces and projected a widening 46.3 million ounce shortfall for 2026 (as of April 2026), the sixth consecutive year of deficit. A metal running structural shortfalls while gaining critical mineral status sits precisely where a National Defense Stockpile, or a Project Vault, is designed to look.
Where King Global Fits a Widening Reserve
King Global Critical Minerals (CSE: KING | OTCQB: KGLDF | FSE: 5LM1) controls the Black Canyon Project in Yavapai County, Arizona, roughly 62 miles north of Phoenix, a land package spanning 213 concessions across approximately 4,000 acres that includes 15 former operating mines. The company’s most recent update at its Silver Cord sub-project returned 10.5 feet at 18.07 oz/t silver, including 3.0 feet at 40.54 oz/t, results reviewed and approved by Qualified Person Andrew Lee Smith, P.Geo., ICD.D. Reported intercepts represent downhole core lengths; true widths are not yet known.
King Global reports insider and management ownership above 65 percent, a structure the company says keeps leadership incentives aligned with shareholders as federal stockpiling programs build sustained demand for domestically sourced silver. As policy layers stack, from the Transaction Fund to Project Vault to the reserve now moving through Congress, explorers holding domestic silver ground sit closer to that demand than they did eighteen months ago. Learn more about the Black Canyon Project at kingglobal.gold.