By Jarrett Renshaw and Gram Slattery
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The White House has tapped a former mining executive to head an office at the National Security Council focused on strengthening supply chains, three sources said, as a pared-down NSC zeroes in on a few of President Donald Trump's most oft-stated priorities.
David Copley, who was chosen earlier in the year to serve as the top mining official at the U.S. National Energy Dominance Council, or NEDC, an interagency body chaired by the interior
secretary, is now a senior director at the NSC, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss non-public personnel moves.
The shift in roles reflects the White House ramping up its efforts to gain ground against China in a critical minerals arms race that touches a broad swath of global industries.
China recently demonstrated its leverage by withholding exports of rare earth magnets, upending global markets and forcing U.S. officials back to the negotiating table, before reversing course.
At the NSC, Copley will focus on strengthening U.S. supply chains and boosting U.S. access to the critical minerals that are often vital components of advanced military technology, two of the sources said.
A White House official said Copley, who did not respond to a request for comment, will be overseeing the NSC's "international economics" component. Copley's precise title was not immediately clear, nor was it clear if he has formally left the NEDC.
The decision to tap a mining expert for a top NSC position offers a window into how national security priorities have shifted under U.S. President Donald Trump.
The NSC has been sharply downsized in recent months. Offices overseeing Africa and international organizations have been among those shuttered or downgraded, in line with the administration's skepticism of multilateral institutions. A special forces veteran was recently tapped to head the Latin America office, a move that comes as Trump has openly considered unilateral action against Mexican drug cartels.
But Trump's focus on obtaining critical minerals like cobalt and nickel has never waned, and China's near-total control of the critical minerals industry has long rankled the president.
In May, Reuters reported that Copley was among a clutch of officials who had been working on plans to pull Greenland deeper into America's sphere of influence, in part to ensure access to the island's vast deposits of rare earths.
One of the sources said Copley's remit is, broadly speaking, "geostrategic affairs." Geostrategy is a field of international relations that focuses in part on the interplay of resource wealth and security, a matter of particular relevance for an administration that has made securing access to foreign resources a central element of its foreign policy.
In April, the U.S. and Ukraine signed a sprawling deal to give the United States preferential access to Ukrainian minerals.
An economist by training, Copley is an intelligence officer with the U.S. Navy Reserve, and he worked on Iraq-related issues for the State Department during Trump's first term.
He previously held roles at minerals producer U.S. Silica. Copley consulted for Boston Consulting Group earlier in his career and served as an intelligence officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency, a component of the U.S. Department of Defense.
Copley until recently had worked in a strategic development role for Denver-based Newmont, the world's largest gold miner by production with a market value of $54 billion.
(Reporting by Jarrett Renshaw and Gram Slattery; Editing by Chris Reese)
