It’s a good starting point!
It’s not easy to have a globally competitive manufacturing sector these days. But having one is crucial to a healthy and growing national economy, as well as our national defense in a potential emergency.
That’s the kind of thing regular readers of this blog would expect to find here, on this blog, but it wasn’t us saying it today! It was the gist of a conference hosted in Washington, D.C., by the Alliance for Manufacturing Foresight (MForesight), a University of Michigan-based research organization that analyzes technology policy issues, emerging trends in manufacturing research and development, and thinks up ways to share scalable tech solutions with small- and medium-size manufacturing firms.
In short: MForesight spends lots of time studying how to encourage manufacturing activity in the United States. There’s a lot of political support for that mission nowadays.
At MForesight’s conference – its fourth annual summit – you could find legislators from Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) offering their thoughts on how to foster innovation in America’s manufacturing industries.
And you could also find big policy ideas: Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) delivered the gathering’s keynote address, and he used the moment to propose the creation of a national industrial policy housed under a new National Institute of Manufacturing (NIM).
The senator has pointed out that federal support for the manufacturing sector is spread across 58 programs in 11 agencies, and coordination between them is not great. On Monday he told the Washington Post:
“These programs do not always work in concert with each other. In some cases, there are layers and layers of bureaucracy that prevent an idea from seeing the light of day. We cannot let bureaucracy and disjointed programs stifle innovation.”
Peters suggests a new role be created: a manufacturing czar who would report directly to the president (NIM would be housed under the executive branch). It wouldn’t dedicate new funding for these programs, or replace private-sector money with federal dollars for R&D; its goal instead would be to create a strategy that will more effectively prioritize the competitiveness of American manufacturing industries.
That’s a very ambitious idea! And it’s not a bad one. We fully agree with a central thrust of the senator’s proposal: Manufacturing is a critical economic sector, and the more attention paid to it the better.
But while this plan gets fleshed out on Capitol Hill, there are specifics that should be included for any successful national manufacturing policy.
Things like:
A clear role for labor in NIM decision-making, Buy America procurement rules in our manufacturing strategy, and plenty of attention paid to capital-intensive, trade sensitive manufacturing sectors.
So good on Peters for putting this idea out there. Now for some details! We want more details! Put some meat on these bones! Read about the senator’s idea for a national manufacturing institute on his website.
Alliance for American Manufacturing interns Luke Ferguson, Libba McCraw and Joseph Swindal contributed research (did all the real legwork) for this blog post.