An American Industrial Technique for U.S. Tech Management: Investing in Competitiveness, Innovation, and Fairness
Thanks to the Informational Expertise Business Council for bringing us collectively for this summit. It’s an honor to be right here.
In the present day’s Tech and Coverage Summit comes on the proper time, as the US and our allies are in a high-stakes know-how competitors with authoritarian adversaries.
How this competitors performs out will profoundly form our financial safety – our means to innovate, develop exports, create jobs of the longer term, and supply alternatives to all our individuals. It should additionally form our nationwide safety – our means to guard our benefits whereas preserving our freedoms and democratic values at dwelling and overseas.
And allow us to not be mistaken, who leads on know-how will form the way forward for a secure, inclusive, rules-based world order – whether or not one based mostly on democratic norms just like the free move of data, information privateness, and an open web, or the choice.
Because of President Biden’s management – a renewed sense of urgency and goal on the a part of enterprise, authorities, and communities across the nation – we now have a generational alternative for enterprise, authorities, and communities to work collectively to make sure continued U.S. tech management.
This work is already underway. I noticed it firsthand once I traveled to Upstate New York final yr and visited the Albany Nanotech Advanced on the SUNY Polytechnic Institute.
The advanced is a complicated R&D facility led by NY CREATES, which is a useful resource for public-private and educational partnerships, and it makes a speciality of commercialization tasks, enabling entry to semiconductor design and prototyping for startups, smaller companies, and universities, in addition to serving to to draw funding for entrepreneurs.
Alongside this effort is SUNY’s Profession Alignment Platform Initiative, partially funded by the Commerce Division. It gives college students and employees with coaching and help by the Nanotech Advanced, in addition to robust college partnerships with Traditionally Black Schools and Universities and different premier analysis universities, in an effort to entry jobs within the chips trade.
This ecosystem is laying the groundwork to create lots of of recent chip firms and construct a world class semiconductor workforce proper right here within the U.S.
The non-public semiconductor trade is taking discover: Micron Expertise has dedicated to construct a semiconductor manufacturing advanced – a chips cluster – in Syracuse.
That is how we’ll set up U.S. tech management – not with silver bullets – however, step-by-step, with authorities, enterprise, academic establishments, and communities working collectively to create the situations that may drive innovation, appeal to funding, and develop high quality, middle-class jobs.
We’ll want to copy the Upstate New York instance many instances over, particularly in applied sciences that may have an outsized impression on our financial and nationwide safety. However we haven’t all the time completed that.
The Problem We Face
For years, policymakers took a hands-off strategy, pursuing deregulation and tax cuts, fairly than making investments in industries, infrastructure, communities, and employees.
Some state and native leaders pursued a race to the underside, prioritizing the attraction of firms on the expense of native communities and employees.
Many firms, for his or her half, prioritized short-term cost-savings and didn’t consider provide chain dangers. Tech firms, for example, centered on software program and companies to the detriment of home {hardware} manufacturing, like chips.
Alongside the way in which, too many Individuals have been left behind. Manufacturing jobs have been outsourced, our industrial base was hollowed out, actual wage development declined, inequality elevated, and our workforce was left undertrained and disconnected from the alternatives and coaching and help they wanted.
And within the meantime, our opponents and adversaries – particularly China – moved aggressively to determine their tech benefit – and erode ours. They’ve completed this by large authorities help for their very own home industries; strategic use capital to achieve entry to our early-stage industrial tech and know-how; unfair commerce practices together with utilizing loopholes in our circumvention and countervailing duties; and in lots of circumstances, rampant know-how theft. They’ve additionally sought to acquire U.S. dual-use applied sciences to additional their navy modernization.
These efforts are permitting them to train leverage by provide chain choke factors, undertake financial coercion, and undermine democratic establishments right here and in allied international locations. It’s crucial to counter these efforts and deepen our partnership with international locations that abide by the worldwide rules-based order with democratic norms and ideas.
The Biden Administration’s Strategy and the Commerce Division’s Agenda
The Biden Administration understood early that we would have liked a unique strategy: a contemporary industrial technique centered on teams of applied sciences that would be the supply of development, innovation, and jobs for the subsequent technology, and—as Nationwide Safety Advisor Jake Sullivan specified by a speech final fall—are key to our nationwide safety and our geostrategic benefit.
One is computing-related applied sciences – comprising chips, quantum, and synthetic intelligence – that are re-shaping each sector of our financial system. From family home equipment to protection capabilities, from the vitality sector to transportation, and in nearly each scientific discipline, computing-related tech is creating new sources of development and innovation and driving the navy modernization that’s important to our safety.
One other is clear vitality tech that may scale back our dependence on fossil fuels and defend in opposition to the prices of the local weather disaster.
And third is biotech and bio manufacturing. Because of our means to learn, write, and edit genetic code, biology is now programmable. And along with computing tech, these are enabling breakthroughs in every little thing from drug discovery to chemical and materials manufacturing.
Throughout these areas, the Administration and the Commerce Division are centered on doing three issues to make sure U.S. tech management for the subsequent technology:
First, reinvesting in our techno-industrial base and tech workforce with strategic, place-based investments in innovation ecosystems. These ecosystems are usually not about selecting winners however enabling and jump-starting many winners throughout the nation.
Second, defending our tech benefit and nationwide safety from malign actors, particularly authoritarian regimes that search to expropriate our tech and alter the norms that underpin a secure, inclusive, rules-based world order.
And third, increasing our worldwide tech engagements to forge high-standards, strategic partnerships with allies that develop alternatives for our employees and communities, and theirs.
I need to take a couple of minutes to develop on every of these things.
Reinvesting in Our Techno-Industrial Base and Workforce
First, reinvesting in our techno-industrial base and workforce. To rebuild our industrial capabilities and keep our geostrategic tech benefit, the Biden Administration is making strategic public investments – and leveraging non-public investments – in manufacturing, R&D, and workforce improvement in key applied sciences.
The bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act that President Biden signed into legislation final yr gives $50 billion to the Commerce Division to revitalize our home semiconductor trade. We’re administering this funding by our new CHIPS for America program to offer manufacturing incentives that may facilitate home manufacturing of essentially the most superior chips and develop manufacturing of mature chips important to our nationwide and financial safety.
How we intend to make these investments can also be essential. Certainly, public-private partnerships are a necessary constructing block of contemporary industrial technique. As we assist construct out semiconductor clusters in communities throughout the nation, we’re enlisting producers and suppliers, in addition to customers, universities, and analysis establishments. The objective is to foster situations for these clusters to be extra the norm than the exception.
I’m additionally very excited concerning the CHIPS program’s R&D portfolio, led by our Nationwide Institute of Requirements and Expertise, or NIST, which is able to assist us – the non-public sector, authorities, scientific and academic establishments – push the analysis and tech commercialization frontier. NIST’s collaborative R&D efforts are already preserving us forward of the curve with quantum-resistant cryptography.
Our work on tech isn’t simply restricted to semiconductors. Below the Inflation Discount Act, the Administration is making the largest-ever federal funding in clear vitality innovation and leveraging non-public capital to scale clear applied sciences of the longer term—from electrical automobiles to scrub hydrogen to offshore wind.
And utilizing funding from the American Rescue Plan, the Commerce Division launched the billion greenback Construct Again Higher Regional Problem to spend money on a brand new form of group improvement that helps enterprise, labor, native authorities, and academic establishments, and leverages non-public capital.
The 21 awardees vary from biotech clusters in Oklahoma to a regional vitality hydrogen hub in Louisiana and can present tens of 1000’s of employees with new expertise to adapt to altering tech and entry good jobs.
We’re additionally constructing on these efforts with the Regional Expertise and Innovation Hubs, lately enacted as a part of the CHIPS and Science Act. Congress has appropriated $500 million for these Tech Hubs to assist U.S. areas proceed to construct and evolve into the Tech Hubs, Valleys, and Corridors of the longer term for important, rising applied sciences.
We even have to acknowledge {that a} techno-industrial technique that doesn’t give attention to employees, particularly traditionally underserved communities, together with communities of shade and rural communities, is doomed to repeat the failures of the previous.
Hundreds of thousands of employees are sitting on the sidelines of our financial system or on the sidelines of industries that desperately want their expertise, particularly within the high-tech, high-demand industries that drive America ahead.
Authorities, enterprise, and academic establishments must work collectively to develop workforce pipelines, prepare employees to fill high-paying jobs, develop entry to finance to small enterprise and small producers, and be certain that traditionally underserved communities have the instruments to take part and thrive within the financial system.
To this finish, we’re deploying practically $50 billion underneath the Bipartisan Infrastructure Legislation to carry inexpensive, dependable high-speed web to each American, with a devoted give attention to equitable entry in order that unserved and underserved communities aren’t left behind.
We additionally lately introduced that the Commerce Division’s Minority Enterprise Improvement Company is allocating practically $100 million underneath the Capital Readiness Program to offer technical help to equip underserved entrepreneurs with the instruments and expertise to entry capital and help in an effort to construct progressive and scalable companies. And that is simply a part of the billions of {dollars} that President Biden has made out there to help companies and entrepreneurs throughout the nation.
For all these investments, the place we make investments, together with investing in employees, issues an excellent deal. That’s the reason a central function of our investments in tech competitiveness is a place-based strategy that seeks to leverage the aggressive benefit of numerous communities and areas.
We additionally need our regional and native leaders to assume extra collaboratively about how they’ll leverage current strengths to raise up their very own communities.
The objective is to see tech clusters and tech jobs in all varieties of areas of the nation – city and rural, coastal and heartland – in order that the financial prosperity that comes with innovation is shared past our current famous person cities.
Defending Our Tech Benefit from Malign Actors
However it isn’t sufficient to only spend money on our tech competitiveness.
Our adversaries are looking for to expropriate our applied sciences and achieve a foothold with tech that threaten our nationwide safety, together with techniques that underpin our important infrastructure.
That’s why our second space of focus is defending our tech benefit from malign actors.
By our Bureau of Business and Safety, the Commerce Division is administering and implementing controls on delicate items, software program, and know-how to make sure our merchandise are usually not utilized by unhealthy actors.
The Biden Administration has damaged new floor in our export management partnerships. Nowhere is that this higher illustrated than the measures we imposed in opposition to Russia for invading Ukraine. In document time, we constructed a coalition of 38 like-minded companions from Europe to the Indo-Pacific, all of whom agreed that Russia’s actions represented a world safety menace that might not go unanswered.
This momentous and unprecedented collaboration is having its desired results. Russia is struggling to entry important technological inputs.
We all know these measures have made it troublesome for the Russian navy to switch a lot of its weapons techniques, as evidenced by the lengths to which it has gone to seek out microchips. Starved for microchips, the lifeblood of their navy, Russia has been cannibalizing semiconductors from dishwashers, fridges, and even electrical breast pumps in an effort to repair its navy {hardware}.
The aerospace controls we put in place are additionally proscribing Russia’s means to generate income, resupply, and help its navy aviation sector. Russia could also be compelled to floor between half and two-thirds of its industrial plane by 2025 in an effort to use them for spare components.
Our instruments don’t finish there. We’re pushing again in opposition to unfair commerce and funding practices by world opponents by rigorously implementing our antidumping and countervailing obligation legal guidelines to degree the taking part in discipline for American firms and employees. We’re additionally monitoring commerce agreements to make sure overseas governments are complying with their obligations.
And we’re bolstering our funding screening capabilities, together with our evaluation of inbound funding in U.S. firms and operations underneath CFIUS, the Committee on International Funding in the US, to establish adversarial capital, particularly in rising tech fields.
We’re additionally contemplating outbound funding screening in areas the place we might inadvertently be furthering our adversaries’ efforts to undermine our financial and nationwide safety pursuits.
Increasing Our Worldwide Alliances
The third space I discussed is increasing our worldwide alliances. We can not set up U.S. tech management with out working intently with allies and like-minded companions on shared guidelines of the street and excessive requirements that align with our pursuits throughout commerce, know-how and cybersecurity, provide chains, infrastructure, local weather motion, and workforce improvement.
Along with our allies, we are able to create extra resilient provide chains that allow us to keep away from manufacturing facility furloughs at dwelling and handle prices for client items. Simply as importantly, we are able to preserve important know-how out of the fingers of our enemies.
And by setting requirements at dwelling – like NIST did final week with its new AI Danger Administration Framework – and elevating requirements in different international locations all over the world, we are able to alleviate downward stress on American wages and environmental requirements. We are able to set the principles of the street for worldwide requirements for rising applied sciences like AI and biotech, and defend important mental property that ensures a degree taking part in discipline for the longer term. Listed here are just some examples of what we’re doing with our companions within the Indo-Pacific, Europe, Latin America, and Africa:
We created the U.S.-E.U. Commerce and Expertise Council – or TTC – to assist form the principles of the street on rising know-how, together with by technical requirements our bodies.
President Biden additionally lately signed an Government Order to implement the U.S. commitments of the EU-U.S. Knowledge Privateness Framework, which is the fruits of essential work and negotiations by the U.S. and the European Fee to revive belief and stability to transatlantic information flows.
We’re negotiating the Indo-Pacific Financial Framework for Prosperity with 13 accomplice international locations. IPEF consists of commitments across the digital financial system, the place, for example, we’re selling trade-enabling environments for digital and rising applied sciences; supporting non-public sector digital upskilling; facilitating information flows; enhancing cybersecurity practices; and growing 5G provider variety.
We’re additionally working with companions by the Quad and the TTC to advertise trusted telecom infrastructure that’s safe, efficient, and promotes current U.S. and allied technological benefits. We imagine that open radio entry networks are a key a part of the equation.
We labored with Canada, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan to collectively announce the institution of the International Cross-Border Privateness Guidelines Discussion board. The CBPR is a government-recognized and multilateral information privateness certification that’s facilitating cross-border information flows throughout completely different information privateness regimes and permitting firms to certify their world operations to internationally acknowledged information privateness requirements.
I used to be additionally thrilled to journey to Romania final yr to assist elect Doreen Bogdan-Martin as the primary feminine Secretary Common of the Worldwide Telecommunication Union. By the ITU, we’re partnering with growing nations to handle broadband deployment, join the unconnected, improve digital adoption and inclusion, and develop digital expertise.
We’ve already amplified these efforts by facilitating non-public sector infrastructure offers – together with digital and clear tech tasks – that featured prominently within the $15 billion in offers introduced by President Biden on the current U.S.-Africa Enterprise Discussion board right here in Washington. It is a main alternative for the U.S. companies – and hopefully simply the beginning, as leaders of many of those international locations repeatedly inform us that they view the U.S. non-public sector as companions of selection.
All these worldwide engagements that I’ve simply outlined are the results of an amazing quantity of labor each contained in the Commerce Division and throughout the Biden Administration. And they’re price celebrating.
But it surely’s going to take participation from the U.S. non-public sector – particularly within the type of public-private partnerships and industrial offers in areas like digitization, area commerce, clear tech, well being safety, R&D, upskilling, and SME improvement – for us to achieve success.
Conclusion
And that’s a part of my broader ask to you right now. You signify a few of the most progressive firms throughout our non-public sector.
The investments, actions, and engagements that I’ve outlined are all geared towards preserving U.S. tech management. But when we’ve realized something in recent times, it’s this: our long-term competitiveness is about greater than what authorities can do for enterprise. It’s additionally about how U.S. companies can lean ahead.
From my conversations with CEOs, entrepreneurs, and small enterprise homeowners, I do know that the non-public sector will get this. They need to be a part of the answer, and we’re glad they’re collaborating.
Think about how one can innovate not simply what you’re producing, however how you’re employed, your small business fashions, and your human capital and expertise administration methods, together with variety and inclusion.
Interact with our division, and with the Biden Administration as an entire. Lean into public-private partnerships that additional our shared objective of U.S. tech management.
If we work collectively on this agenda, I imagine we protect our technological benefit; spur innovation, productiveness, exports, and jobs into the subsequent technology; and guarantee our nationwide safety in ways in which promote democratic values and norms all over the world.
Thanks once more to ITI for bringing us collectively right now.