Well, well...
How does it feel to be entangled in mountains of onerous and conflicting regulations that prevent you from doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done?
Welcome to the real world you (the Congress) have created piece by piece over the past 25 years.
Hopefully a lesson will be learned here (but I won’t hold my breath).
There is no law of the universe that says all precious minerals are going to equally distributed around the world.
So when the US can’t produce any, that doesn’t mean government got in the way, and often, when that is the claim, it is made by some mineral company that gets paid to explore, regardless of what the find.
USGS says 80% of the Antimony supply of planet Earth is in China, Russia and Bolivia. That’s just the way it is. It doesn’t have to mean politics got involved. Geology doesn’t care about politics.