A senior White House adviser personally directed the Pentagon to extend a $620 million loan to Vulcan Elements, a North Carolina rare-earth magnet startup partly owned by a venture firm tied to Donald Trump Jr., according to a new investigation by ProPublica.

The request to fund the company came from Peter Navarro, President Donald Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing and a close friend of the president’s eldest son, ProPublica reported, citing interviews and Defense Department records. Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing for funding at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top presidential aide, an unnamed Pentagon official told the investigative news outlet.

After receiving the White House request, defense officials pushed staff to complete the loan in a matter of weeks rather than the months companies are typically vetted, with one person involved recounting that the directive was framed as a mandate, according to ProPublica. “The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” the person said, the outlet reported.

Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, took a stake of undisclosed size in Vulcan roughly three months before the Pentagon announced the deal in November. The company was launched in 2023 and had fewer than 50 employees and under $10 million in funding around early 2025, according to the outlet. Estimates of its valuation rose from around $200 million near the time 1789 invested to roughly $2 billion after the deal, ProPublica reported, citing Bloomberg figures.

The deal was struck through the Office of Strategic Capital, a Pentagon division created under the Biden administration to fund companies reducing U.S. dependence on China’s critical-mineral supply chains, according to the report. The Trump administration expanded the office’s lending authority from about $1 billion to $200 billion and shifted it away from an open application process toward sourcing deals through officials’ personal networks.

The Pentagon announced loans to Vulcan and partner ReElement Technologies as conditional on the firms meeting certain legal and financial requirements, ProPublica said.

The reporting marks the first time the award of a federal contract has been directly linked to White House intervention, according to the report. A separate company Trump Jr. advises and holds a stake in, Florida drone-parts maker Unusual Machines, is also under review for Pentagon funding, a defense official told the outlet.