Bush Cuts Manufacturing Aid

Feb. 8, 2005
MEP is scaled back; ATP eliminated.

In his proposed federal budget for fiscal year 2006, President George W. Bush gives the U.S. Commerce Department's Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) a new name and cuts its funding by more than half. The department's Advanced Technology Program gets neither a new name nor any funding for the coming fiscal year.

Actually, the president had no choice but to rename the MEP the Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership. The last Congress mandated it, to honor former Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C. It remains to be seen whether a new and more Republican Congress will go along with the White House and give the program $47 million for the spending year beginning Oct. 1 or defy the White House and fund the program at a higher level.

In the current fiscal year, the program, which is designed to improve the competitiveness of U.S.-based small manufacturers, is funded at $117 million. The program is supposed to encourage small manufacturers in the 50 states and Puerto Rico to adopt advanced technologies and best business practices. Individual centers are a partnership among private industry, educational institutions and federal, state and local governments. The Bush administration proposes to "maintain a strong national network of centers while focusing funding on centers' performance and need."

The Advanced Technology Program gets no such semi-encouraging words. "Consistent with the administration's emphasis on shifting resources to reflect changing needs, the 2006 budget proposes to terminate the Advanced Technology Program," says the White House Office of Management and Budget. What's more, "no new" grants of assistance are expected to be awarded during this fiscal year.

The ATP was created to speed up the commercialization of high-risk advanced technologies. Its critics, however, have claimed that much of its grant money has gone to large firms that ought to be able to commercialize promising technologies on their own. The ATP is funded at $144 million in the current year, down from $186 million in fiscal year 2004.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

 John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.
      
      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).
      
      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.
      
      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”
      
      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.
      
      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
      

 

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