Two Days Inside the Movement to ‘Reindustrialize,’ and Rearm, America
Trump cabinet officials mingled with tech investors and manufacturers in an effort to supercharge factories.
By Farah Stockman, The New York Times, July 20, 2025
Investors from Silicon Valley and senior officials in the Trump administration descended on a convention hall in downtown Detroit last week for a conference committed to spurring a “techno-industrial renaissance” in the United States…
The convention’s founders include Atomic’s chief executive, Aaron Slodov, who last year penned “A Techno-Industrialist Manifesto,” which called on investors and the tech community to focus on manufacturing physical goods…
Titans of industry have been pledging to reindustrialize the United States for decades, but the idea is particularly potent at this moment, when more Americans recognize the nation’s dependence on other countries for everything from electronics to batteries to medicines…
Speaker after speaker emphasized that military power flows from industrial power, which they said had been eroded by the offshoring of factories and an overemphasis on software, apps and financial products…Maintaining the country’s superpower status requires regaining the ability to produce physical goods at scale… [end quote]
I’m cheering the awareness that America needs to rebuild manufacturing to sustain superpower status and provide jobs for millions of blue-collar workers. But it’s going to be a tough slog.
I am for manufacturing coming back. But wishing it to come back is different than helping pay for it to come back. Aren’'t they cutting education funding ? Doesn’t this “movement” put out a lot of negative rhetoric toward teachers ? And it’s hard to see an admin that appoints Kennedy, who imo is about as anti-science as can be, is going to lead the charge to educate Americans for high-tech manufacturing jobs.
I’m deeply skeptical. But lets see if they put their money where their mouth is.
A link to an Atlantic article that talks about the “talking out of both sides of the mouth” doubletalk that prevails in this admin.
So yeah,color me skeptical that this admin will lead the charge to reconfigure the nation’s economy and workforce.
“Some of the tenets might be difficult to apply in practice—one can’t simply reproduce the results of studies on the health effects of climate disasters, for example, and funding is rarely available to replicate expensive studies. But these unremarkable principles hide a dramatic shift in the relationship between science and government.”
“Trump’s executive order promises to ensure that “federal decisions are informed by the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available.” In practice, however, it gives political appointees—most of whom are not scientists—the authority to define scientific integrity and then decide which evidence counts and how it should be interpreted.”
As proposed in other threads, the plan could be to provide manufacturing “jobs” for members of the “base” with only Bantu education, while offshoring the “knowledge work”, because a lot of that cohort aren’t in “his” base anyway. Offshoring “knowledge work” also allows further defunding education, to cover another “JC” tax cut.
Supposedly, USA gonna rehome the critical manufacturing, things that strategically we cannot rely on foreign Countries to supply these critical products. Take chips, for instance. I don’t think that the “Bantu” educated are going to get work in these fab plants. So like it or not, this admin will have to provide money ( via tax breaks, incentives, etc ) to accomplish these stated goals. I look no further than the appointee to head up the Department of Education to see the conflict between the flowery rhetoric, and reality. I’m not buying their rhetoric. Hope I’m wrong.
I think we need AI generation manufacturing. Whole new concepts with lots of automation. Creating new good paying union jobs looks like a loser to me. We need people who can operate machine tools. Program robots. I hear lots of welding is done by robots these days. Operators program the robots.
The traditional high school graduate with no job skills who goes to work in an auto plant is an endangered species. Yes, we need machinists and welders but they need good training and willingness to learn and keep us with technology. That’s a tall order for many.
Programming is “knowledge work” that can be offshored. The pump seal company had a flock of NC machine tools that ran on paper tape. They sent the drawings out to a vendor. The vendor worked out the machining process, produced the tape, and mailed it back to the seal company. All the machine “operator” had to do was load the tape in the reader, load a length of bar stock in the chuck, then catch the chips as they came off of the cutter: Bantu work. It stands to reason that, somewhere in the shop, was one person who maintained the cutters, and installed them in the machines.
Industrial AI is coming and is something Jensen Huang has talked about. So far the emphasis has been on large language models. However, for a factory first program in the applicable laws of physics and chemistry. Then model your manufacturing processes for, say, a particular auto part. Optimize for efficiency, reliability et cetera. Huge gains to be made.
(And, I suspect, a good portion of the robots in the factory – and elsewhere – will contain Nvidia chips.)
We don’t need a “human” with any sort of skillset beyond basic understanding of the process in manual operation.
The program in the video is a “ToolKit”, which only needs an integration routine at the start of any new sequence. Instead of 12 people at location who do this plus to additional tech support Level 2 backups, you only need 1. (2 if you actually care about bench strength).
Well, we need good paying jobs. Union or not. But… union does tend to give the employees some leverage and protection that we lost the past 4 decades (by design). So, gotta say, Joe’s path to economic greatness seemed like a good idea to me, and has been completely dismantled.
(Joe’s pro-union stance, combined with his demand the rich and the corporations pay their fair share, I’m convinced is a big part of why so many turned against him. Seems even rich liberals want to keep their cash).
The problem is, I’m just not seeing a future with enough good paying jobs out there to make things better for people. People to program the robots? Do you know how little CNC programmers and operators make today? And as pointed out, that work can be outsourced anyway. Unless you have a union shop demanding local work at decent wages.
Let’s face it, employers haven’t wanted to pay people decent wages to support themselves and a family for too long now. That isn’t changing.
They do tell us machinists and welders still are sought and well paid. But they do need training to get those jobs. And employers say they have difficulty filling those jobs. Few people seem to train for them. Too dirty? Out of style.
That’s the fundamental issue. Those good paying jobs that don’t require training are going away. AI is merely the latest aspect. Those are the jobs that built our middle class and gave a decent standard of living for many. So what will those people do? Decide to get training? Or make do flipping hamburgers? Construction jobs are out there. Are they willing to do that work? Does it pay well enough?
Used to be you could get trained for jobs like that as a union apprentice, and get paid doing it. Heck, I got hired out of college by Texas Instruments into a sales training program. Years later I was at Motorola and we had a formal training program for new engineers (Engineering Rotation Program). And Motorola at that time (roughly 95 to 05) had a formal in-house Motorola University, that provided continuing education for their employees. One to two weeks per year mandatory! Today? You’re expected to come out of college already hitting the ground running. Continuing education for your job is your responsibility, on your time. Companies no longer want to train and invest in their people. Welders or engineers.
I read several years ago that “jobs” were coming back to American shores because overseas manual labor was too expensive compared to production floors filled with robots. So, yeah…the jobs were coming back in the form of automation. Doesn’t help the actual workers.
The actual workers are screwed because they are expensive, and live in an expensive country. Skilled trades like carpenters, plumbers, and crane operators** are very different from someone working an assembly line. I don’t mean to sound like I’m looking down on them. It’s hard work, and it needs to get done. I totally respect that. But if it can be done by a machine more cheaply, it will be. Similar to if it can be done overseas by a person making $10 per day, it will be. Corporations aren’t charities. They only look at the bottom line. They -mostly- don’t care about the people.
To quote John Travolta from one of his movies: “muscles jobs go where muscle labor is cheap, and that just isn’t here”. It’s Bangladesh, or Vietnam, or China.
**Those crane operators make more than I ever did, and I have a graduate degree in physics. But there aren’t enough crane operator jobs to occupy the people that used to work on factories.
Those are good examples of jobs that don’t export very easily. Add electrician. HVAC. Earth moving–digging basements and foundations. Apprenticeships are still available.
The fundamental issue is standard of living. How do we maintain our lifestyle with so much low cost competition out there.
Encouraging young people to get training is still in our best interest. Its much easier then compared to retraining in mid-career when you are older and have more expenses to support.
Based on casual observation that model is making a comeback. This summer I’ve had HVAC, porch repair and water line work done. In each case there was a second guy along learning the ropes.
Our Roundtable had a speaker in from IBEW (local 1 in St Louis). He said they have an apprenticeship program and are practicing diversity. Some say you need a relative or a payment for a recommendation to get accepted. Apprentices do the hard work.
Carpenters is probably largest. Plumbers and steam fitters must be strong. Maybe lots more.
Mobile Crane Union labor is up to $68/hr for travelers who will work and live near the jobsite. The per diem is nice, too.(can be $225/day additional!)
($8700/week)
My brother is trained (but no longer operates) on sidebooms, friction cranes, lattice boom, LTC and just about any other type of crane.
He gave all of that up to support local living arrangements and better availability for his children.
I suspect he will be back on the road chasing that money again as soon as the kids are out of the house.