On the recordMay 9, 2012
Mr. Chairman, day after day, or at least week after week, my colleagues and I are here on the floor talking about jobs. It is about jobs and jobs and jobs again. Our agenda, which we call ``Make It in America,'' is an agenda that would rebuild the American manufacturing sector, a sector that has lost about 40 percent of its jobs in the last 20, 25 years from just under 20 million to just over 11 million Americans who are working in manufacturing today. One of the innovative ways of improving manufacturing has been developed. It's called the Manufacturing Extension Partnership. It's actually modeled after another Federal-State program that's been in existence for more than 100 years. Anyone that's in agriculture would recognize the Agricultural Extension Program. This is the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a program that has actually added another feature to the old and still very successful Agricultural Extension Program, and that is a public-private partnership. In this program, the Federal Government, through the National Institute of Standards and Technology, runs a program in which funding is provided for local, private, or nonprofit organizations to become extension program managers. In California, this has been a very, very successful program. Some $447 million in new retained sales have occurred, $128.8 million in new investments, and some 3,769 jobs have been created. Some examples exist throughout California.…





