Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham unveiled a sweeping multi-front plan Monday to secure the state's energy grid, break China's monopoly on rare earth minerals, and expand state-led border operations — a direct challenge to a federal government that has failed at every turn to protect American sovereignty and self-sufficiency.

When Washington won't do its job, states have to step up. That's the constitutional calculus behind what Buckingham calls the "Texas Engine" — a plan grounded in the General Land Office's stewardship of 13 million acres of state land and mineral interests, but aimed at nothing less than insulating Texans from federal overreach, foreign dependency, and cartel violence on the southern border.

"The General Land Office has been an engine driving the Texas economy, but we are taking that to the whole next level," Buckingham told Breitbart. "We are going to power, produce, build, grow, and protect Texas like we've been doing, but people are going to understand more directly the impact on their lives."

The stakes are straightforward. Roughly 2,000 people move into Texas every day, straining the grid, water supplies, and infrastructure. Meanwhile, China controls more than 90 percent of rare earth magnet production — minerals essential to everything from smartphones to military fighter jets. Buckingham's answer: a "mine-to-magnet" program backed by a $1.5 billion Trump administration investment and a partnership with USA Rare Earth to build a domestic supply chain from the ground up.

"We have the largest, most complete set of rare earth minerals not under China's control. We're about to bust their monopoly, and we are super excited about that," Buckingham said. She called the Round Top deposit a "100-year supply" heavy in the most critical rare elements — the kind of resource that, if developed, could reshape the national security landscape and bring "billions and billions of dollars of revenue into Texas."

On energy, Buckingham isn't picking winners. The plan calls for more dispatchable power — natural gas, geothermal, even salt-cooled nuclear — to keep the lights on as data centers and AI facilities pile onto the grid. "We need more dispatchable energy on the grid, and we think we can be a power in that," she said. The GLO is also advancing carbon capture and produced water projects to keep traditional production viable.

But the thread tying it all together is the border. Buckingham framed the GLO's work as a bulwark against "external threats — ranging from federal overreach and global supply chain vulnerabilities to cartel activities along the southern border." When the federal government won't secure the frontier, Texas will.

Both Breitbart reports covered the energy and mineral components extensively. But the border dimension — the one that directly affects communities bleeding from cartel operations and fentanyl — received noticeably less detail. Buckingham's op-ed mentioned border security as part of the "fortifying" pillar but devoted more words to energy policy. The exclusive interview likewise touched on cartel activity as a threat category without specifics on what expanded state-led operations would look like on the ground.

The question isn't whether Texas can fuel and feed itself — the record shows it already does. The question is whether a state-led model can actually fill the vacuum left by a federal government that has abandoned its constitutional obligations at the border, or whether Washington will eventually move to reassert control on its own terms.