New manufacturing initiative short on details, long on revamps

The Obama administration announced its latest manufacturing promotion initiative in late October. The announcement covered a set of previously announced initiatives, packaged together, to bolster approval ratings prior to the 2014 elections. More specifically, the White House basically shuffled around or extended existing programs at the Departments of Energy, Labor, Commerce, and Defense.

It is hard to fault the administration’s intentions. Republicans in Congress have been loath to support the president‘s new programs, much less fund them.

"To give him credit, this president has given more attention and resources to American manufacturing than any president in the past 20 years," said Taylor Garland, a spokesman for the Alliance for American Manufacturing. "But we need to track progress through manufacturing employment, not the number of manufacturing institutes we create. R&D is vital to the strength of the industry, but so are jobs."

The announcement from the White House on Oct. 27 came with few substantive details. For example, the DOE will create additional facilities modeled on the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), which the White House press release said “has helped close to 150 small businesses access cutting-edge manufacturing technologies and research this year alone.”

Actually, Jennifer Palmer, ORNL’s business development and outreach manager, said the lab is currently working with about 50 companies on cooperative research that involves helping companies experiment with new processes. One is Cincinnati-based metal components supplier Queen City Forging, which adopted a rapid heating technology for aluminum forging for auto and truck part manufacturing. It first learned about the manufacturing technique at the ORNL three years ago.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) program will not be expanded, but reoriented. The MEP is conducted through 60 centers in the U.S., all of which get federal funding based on a formula set 15 years ago.

Last March the Government Accountability Office (GAO) unleashed severe criticism of the MEP funding formula. The agency essentially said some centers get too much money and some too little.

The NIST initiative essentially puts MEP contracts in 10 states up for competition again. These states were chosen because the contractor that currently represents MEP efforts in each state has either held the contract for 10 or more years or because the contract is deemed underfunded based on the state’s manufacturing needs. No state will have its funding cut when the new contractors, which may be the current contractors, are announced, probably in December. In fact, the NIST will be providing an additional $6 million a year for five years to these 10 states.

NIST spokeswoman Jennifer Huergo said that extra $6 million per year will come from “reductions in contractor expenditures and savings at the national level.” The White House stated that the additional funding will allow the 10 states to "deploy new tools" to help small manufacturers access advanced technologies, new markets, and growth capital. Asked about what new tools are anticipated, Huergo said the centers will determine them based on their manufacturing clientele.

The White House announcement also touched upon the $100 million American Apprenticeship Grants Competition, which was announced last February. That $100 million, spread around to community colleges, will be funded out of reprogrammed DOL funds already approved by Congress. The funds originally were designated for the H-1B technical skills training grants program.

For several administrations now, the GAO repeatedly has criticized the profusion and overlap of federal training programs.