President Obama will introduce a package of new administrative actions Monday intended to spur manufacturing, one of the U.S. industries that the White House considers a bright spot amid a slow and fragile recovery.
Obama will introduce the measures Monday afternoon at an event thanking the White House group that developed recommendations for the proposals.
The actions include $300 million on spending by the departments of Defense, Energy, Agriculture and NASA on new manufacturing technologies such as advanced materials.
The second measure is a $100 million Department of Labor grant competition to encourage apprenticeship programs a manufacturers, an effort meant to help improve the talent pipeline for U.S. manufacturing companies.
The last step is a $130 million Department of Commerce pilot competition in 10 states for small manufacturers to adopt new technologies.
Those three measures stem from recommendations made by a working group of the President’s Council of Advisors in Science and Technology tasked with focusing on manufacturing. The group is chaired by the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the head of Dow Chemical, and is comprised of members from a number of U.S. universities and manufacturing companies.
President Obama in recent speeches has touted the fact that U.S. manufacturing has added more than 700,000 jobs since 2010, the fastest pace of job growth since the 1990s.
Nevertheless, with roughly 12 million workers on manufacturers’ payrolls, according to the Labor Department, manufacturing employment remains about 2 million below its precession level.
Manufacturing employment peaked just below 20 million in 1979. Manufacturing output, however, is at an all-time high.
