A new investigative report is drawing attention to the Pentagon’s growing role in critical minerals investing and to the web of professional relationships surrounding one of its top civilian officials.
The American Prospect says Alan Waldenberg, a longtime Cerberus Capital Management lawyer, managed Stephen Feinberg’s personal trust and served as outside counsel to Cerberus while also representing the Department of Defense in a major minerals deal. Feinberg, the number two civilian official at the Pentagon, has broad influence over budgets, contracts and strategy. The report says Waldenberg worked on the July 2025 MP Materials transaction, in which the Pentagon announced a $400 million equity stake and a further $150 million loan to expand the company’s Mountain Pass, California, site.
The piece argues that the overlap is more than an optics problem. According to the report, Waldenberg has for years been a trusted lawyer for Cerberus and for Feinberg personally, while also participating in the government’s push into battery storage and mining investments. It says Waldenberg told the Prospect that Feinberg chose him to represent the Defense Department because of that long relationship and that ethics staff had been informed. Waldenberg rejected the suggestion that the arrangement created a conflict.
The report also places the deal in a larger policy context. The Pentagon has increased direct equity investments and loans to companies tied to battery storage and mining, with the total said to exceed $2 billion. The stated goal is to reduce reliance on China for critical mineral supply chains. That objective gives the transactions a strategic rationale, but it also means the department is now making highly consequential investment decisions in sectors where private financial interests and government policy can intersect.
Critics quoted in the story say that is precisely why the staffing and legal arrangements matter. Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer, told the Prospect that if Feinberg had a personal relationship with the lawyer, Feinberg should not be involved in deciding whether that lawyer was hired by the department. He argued that a government official should not steer work to a personal lawyer while the relationship is still active.
The Defense Department, for its part, said the Office of Strategic Capital maintains a rigorous ethics framework and detailed screening process and operates in compliance with federal ethics law. The report says the department did not explain the protocols in detail or say whether Waldenberg was involved in other Pentagon matters. It also notes that Waldenberg’s firm had a $1.5 million Defense Department contract running through August 31, 2026.
The Prospect’s reporting is especially notable because it does not rest only on theory. It says Waldenberg confirmed his role in the MP Materials deal and in other related work, which makes the disclosure more concrete than a general allegation of influence. The piece also says Cerberus has no known direct connection to MP Materials, though it has invested in adjacent rare-earth and battery-storage companies.
The broader question is whether the Pentagon’s push into industrial policy can be cleanly separated from the private-sector networks of the people running it. The report suggests the answer is not always obvious, particularly when a trusted lawyer is wearing multiple hats at once. That kind of arrangement may be defensible under a formal ethics screen, but it is also the sort of setup that invites scrutiny when the government is placing large bets in strategically sensitive sectors.
For now, the key fact is simple: the Pentagon is spending heavily to reshape supply chains, and one of the lawyers involved in that work is also deeply tied to the private interests of the official with the most influence over it. That combination is enough to keep ethics questions alive even before any formal finding of wrongdoing.
