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Secretary Rubio Holds a Press Availability on the Critical Minerals Ministerial, Feb. 4, 2026

February 4, 2026 · U.S. Department of State · 0:16:19

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed reporters during the Critical Minerals Ministerial on February 4, 2026, according to the State Department broadcast. “We have 55 partners that we’re hoping to enter into collaboration with; many have already signed on,” he said — 54 countries and the European Union in the room. Supply today, he argued, is “heavily concentrated in the hands of one country,” which lends itself “to being used as a tool of leverage in geopolitics” and to disruption; foreign competitors undercut new mines and processing “through state subsidies and unfair practices” until projects become unviable.

Rubio laid out the day’s machinery: the new FORGE initiative, launched that morning to succeed the Minerals Security Partnership (he thanked the Republic of Korea for its MSP leadership); an afternoon session with Trade Representative Greer on a price-floor mechanism “designed to make sure that these commodities will never fall below a certain price”; sessions with Energy Secretary Wright, the Development Finance Corporation, the Export-Import Bank and the Department of War on financing tools; and a close by Treasury Secretary Bessent. He credited the demand signal to “the announcement of a strategic stockpile of critical minerals” by the President the day before, said new framework agreements with several partners would be signed later that day, and cited “the billions of dollars the United States Government has already committed towards this endeavor.”

Why it matters

The availability is the ministerial’s operational record — the partner count, the FORGE launch, the price-floor concept and the financing lineup — the measurable outputs against which the framework agreements paged elsewhere on this site can be checked.

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Sources: U.S. Department of State, “Secretary Rubio Holds a Press Availability on the Critical Minerals Ministerial” (official upload, embedded above); remarks as delivered 2026-02-04; transcript via state.gov as linked in the upload description and reviewed in the site’s private research store.