13th District Congressman Rodney Davis is joining a group of bipartisan legislators to help address the country’s supply chain issues.
The Critical Infrastructure Manufacturing Feasibility Act has been introduced to the House with the goal of identifying how supply chain issues can be mitigated and how more goods, along with jobs, can be created in the US. Davis says the U.S. needs to identify where in the country’s manufacturing portfolio are critical points in the supply chain not manufactured.
“Our goal is to identify what we are not doing in this country, what we are not producing here. Things like masks, at the beginning of the pandemic there was a shortage of face masks because America did not produce them. Now we have a shortage of computer chips that will go into vehicles or go into electronics because America has not been producing those. Our goal is to identify where those shortages are and bring that production back to the United States. Long term we have to begin processing our rare minerals into computer chips that will make our electronics work well into the 21st century.”
Davis says the best way that the country can insulate from supply chain issues is to manufacture more goods in the United States and not be at the whims of trade with foreign nations. Davis says he hopes over the long term that the act will put manufacturing back in rural communities, especially.
“My goal long term is to come up with some kind of a program working with an agency, let’s say like the Small Business Administration, so that if a company decides to locate to an area around Morgan County for example that has some industrial park space. An industrial park space that may have been paid for in partnership by the Federal Government through the USDA or EDA. If a company decides to locate to that area then what we would envision is, once that company met a threshold of a certain amount of employees and begin producing those products that have been identified as shortages in our supply chain, then they might have their initial business loan somewhat forgiven. I think that would also encourage much more production within the United States because we are going to show the rest of the world that the United States is not going to give up the future of manufacturing into the 21st century.”
The legislation directs the Secretary of Commerce to conduct a study on the feasibility of manufacturing more goods in the United States, in particular, products that are key to critical infrastructure sectors. The key sectors in the bill range from Agriculture, Chemicals to Transportation and Water Treatment.
The bill is currently awaiting a committee assignment.