The outside of the U.S. Capitol is seen at sunset in Washington, U.S., December 13, 2022.
Sarah Silbiger | Reuters
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and a member of the appropriations and foreign relations committees while Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., is a member of the House oversight, agriculture and armed services committees. The lawmakers are co-sponsors of the National Development Strategy and Coordination Act.
For a long time, america enjoyed the strongest and most progressive economy on this planet, driving growth and delivering prosperity to thousands and thousands of American employees and families. But we grew complacent. We off-shored our factories and allowed unfair trading practices from non-market economies, like China’s, to undermine our industries. Now, we’re waking as much as the implications — a scarcity of economic resilience on account of overextended supply chains, serious and potentially long-lasting vulnerabilities in national security and the lack of good-paying jobs.
Our duty is obvious. Unless we rebuild America’s productive capability and spend money on key industries, we’ll put our nation’s economic prosperity and really sovereignty in danger. The federal government has the financing tools to chart a latest and higher course, but they’re scattered across several agencies with little coordination or strategic direction. That is why we have joined forces to jumpstart a national project to revive American manufacturing leadership.
It is a shared purpose that may unify Americans. Additionally it is work that may bring together elected officials from each side of the aisle and bypass years of partisan gridlock in Washington — not a simple feat in a narrowly divided Congress.
What would our proposal entail? First, it will establish a latest committee of cabinet-level agency heads, including the secretaries of Treasury, Defense, Commerce, Energy, and Agriculture, the director of the Small Business Administration and others. This committee can be charged with developing a National Development Strategy, recommending investments to enhance national security, strengthen domestic manufacturing, create good-paying jobs and develop latest technologies.
Second, our proposal — the National Development Strategy and Coordination Act — would give this committee the authority to direct the Department of Treasury’s Federal Financing Bank to realize its goals. Under our laws, the bank would receive $20 billion to discover, complement, and “supercharge” loans made by other by other federal financing facilities, similar to the SBA’s Small Business Innovation Company or the Department of Energy’s loan program. This might bring overdue strategic coordination to our federal loan system and inject much-needed long-term capital into critical industries.
This model is not latest. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton used public investment to catapult the U.S. from backwater colonies to a rustic with a world-class, diversified economy. Franklin Roosevelt and Donald Nelson’s War Production Board helped America win World War II and develop into the best power on this planet. Ronald Reagan’s administration advanced American semiconductor production and enabled the event of the web. During all of the best periods of our past, Americans used private-public partnerships to strengthen and bolster our economy. Why cannot we do it again?
The easy answer is that we will do it again. And if we’ll compete within the twenty first century, we have now to. Because development is not a one-off achievement — it is the fruit of continuous innovation and coordination between all sectors of society. We won’t ensure American energy resilience without latest technologies and techniques. We won’t maintain national strength if inputs to our military industrial base come from China. And we will not protect public health without the power to make drugs of our own.
The American people — and the people of the world — need the U.S. to get back within the saddle and regain economic leadership. That will not occur without the labor and ingenuity of personal corporations. But it surely also won’t occur without targeted investments from the federal government. Strategic public financing is an American tradition that is behind a lot of our biggest national achievements. It is time we restored it.
