From the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy:

Posted by Deborah Stine on April 07, 2010 at 02:52 PM EDT
Today, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) launched a website to gather public opinion on the future of advanced manufacturing. We hope you will join the conversation at http://pcast.ideascale.com.

PCAST is an advisory group of the nation’s leading scientists and engineers, appointed by the President to augment the science and technology advice available to him from inside the White House and from cabinet departments and other federal agencies. One topic it is currently addressing is advanced manufacturing. PCAST has a number of questions regarding advanced manufacturing that could best be answered with the help of public input. PCAST asks that you provide responses to any or all of the following questions by 5:00 p.m. EDT Tuesday, April 20, 2010.

Many questions follow to encourage comments, fitting under the categories:

• Support for new manufacturing technologies
• Support for new manufacturing firms
• Support for existing manufacturing firms
• A national manufacturing strategy

Although, for the sake of accuracy, the categories might be better listed as:

• Federal support for new manufacturing technologies
• Federal support for new manufacturing firms
• Federal support for existing manufacturing firms
• A national manufacturing strategy directed by the federal government.

The premise, it appears to us, is that industrial policy is a given and it should be directed more toward applied R&D. An informed debate would also consider the question: How would reducing the federal government’s role in the private sector encouraging advanced manufacturing?

Yesterday’s forum at The New America Foundation, “Manufacturing a Better Future for America,” featured a discussion of federal support — the term “bailout” was used — for GM and Chrysler.

The context: Speakers advocated a national industrial policy and more restrictive trade policies to invigorate the U.S. manufacturing sector. We think of the panel as representing the organized labor wing of the Democratic Party.

Asking a question, Bill Frymoyer, director of government relations at the Stewart and Stewart and a former Gephardt aide, hailed what he described as the apparently successful rescue of the domestic auto industry. He elicited this response from Leo Hindery, Managing Partner of Intermedia Partners, chairman of the foundation’s Smart Globalization Initiative, and an influential Democratic activist. Hindery:

The reason the auto recovery worked so well is Ron Bloom largely steered it. And Ron Bloom, for those of you who don’t know, came out of the Steelworkers. He spoke more cogently and capably about the need for a manufacturing policy before a lot of us…and I think he brought a sense of manufacturing policy to that initiative, not strategy but policy.

And this is an issue that Scott [Paul] and I have gone back and forth on: Are what we talking about here, is it a strategy or is it a policy? And we think, Scott and I and Ron, I think, would say, it’s a policy. And when you have a policy, then you save CIT if it needs saving, because it does certain things, you approach GM and Chrysler as he tried to drive the administration, because it would fit under his sense of policy. Strategy is transient. Policy’s the same.

Also commenting was Scott Paul, executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing: (continue reading…)