Establishing a National Manufacturing Foundation
Summary
Emerging technologies developed in the United States are routinely scaled up overseas due to a lack of domestic engineering skills, manufacturing know-how, investment capital, and supply chains. A new national initiative is needed to ensure that discoveries and inventions made in the United States are manufactured at scale in the United States. Such an initiative will create good-paying jobs, strengthen defense preparedness, and protect intellectual property (IP) created through federally funded research. Building a strong manufacturing base at home will also strengthen the domestic innovation cycle, as the knowledge gained through manufacturing supports process improvements and new product iterations. We propose the creation of a new agency—a National Manufacturing Foundation (NMF)—to address this gap.
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