Yahoo! News reports that the US Congress is seeking to more than double the net worth of the national strategic mineral stockpile to lessen the defense industrial base’s reliance on adversaries such as China for supplies needed to build everything from bullets to nuclear weapons to night vision goggles.

The Senate’s annual defense authorization bill would authorize $1 billion in funding for the National Defense Stockpile in fiscal 2023 to “acquire strategic and critical minerals currently in shortfall,” per a summary of the legislation.

The fund is currently valued at $888 million, down from $42 billion in today’s dollars at its peak during the beginning of the Cold War in 1952. Lawmakers fear the National Defense Stockpile will become insolvent by FY25, absent congressional action, and are prioritizing shoring up the fund in this year’s defense appropriations and authorization cycle.

This would more than double the value of the stockpile of rare earth minerals, which includes many essential to defense supply chains, including titanium, tungsten, cobalt and antimony.

The $1 billion the Senate seeks to allocate would cover this while backfilling multiple funding requests the National Defense Stockpile has made in previous fiscal years and providing greater financial security in the years ahead.

There’s a lot more. Read the story here.