SAFE’s Center for Strategic Industrial Materials (C-SIM) advances policies to strengthen the security and diversity of steel and aluminum supply chains. Product materials are essential components of an industrial economy, energy technology, and the defense industrial base. The sourcing and production of these materials has profound effects on America’s national security and economic competitiveness.

Current Objectives and Activities

Advancing Aluminum: C-SIM provides non-partisan analysis on energy and trade policy and the federal investments required to increase domestic production and secondary recycling, while reducing over-reliance on imports.

• Securing Federal Funding: The Center played a key role last year in ensuring the Administration prioritized the aluminum industry for highly competitive grants, and in securing financing for the construction of the first primary aluminum smelter in the U.S. in four decades. C-SIM also played an influential role in the Department of Treasury’s Final Rule on the Section 45X tax credit that favored domestic aluminum producers.
• Defense Priority: The Center supported the Defense Logistics Agency’s aluminum war game in July 2025 by educating defense officials and advocating for policies that support all segments of the aluminum value chain, not just high-purity aluminum stockpiles.

Securing Steel: C-SIM addresses the need to reindustrialize and re-shore steel production to avoid supply chain dependencies on adversaries and strengthen national defense.

• Identifying Policy Solutions: The Center educates industry and policymakers on existing and additional federal funding opportunities to bridge the gap between reindustrialization aspirations and financial reality. C-SIM created and mobilizes a coalition of producers, buyers, and non-governmental organizations dedicated to finding innovative industrial policy to reindustrialize.

Revitalizing Recycling: While demand is rising and primary production is declining in the West, C-SIM is pursuing federal policies that reduce technological and economic barriers to materials processing and recycling to spur midstream production and downstream innovation.

• National Security: Recycling is imperative for modernizing manufacturing and rebuilding U.S. leadership in metals production as part of our strategic competition with China.

Industrial policy will play a meaningful role in ensuring viability of critical domestic industries that are energy intensive and trade exposed. C-SIM plans to add other important materials like copper and titanium to its policy portfolio.