Input Stories

The first leg of the NAM’s 2025 Competing to Win Tour ended last Friday in Miami, capping off four days of visits, speeches and roundtables at manufacturing facilities, schools and legislative houses across Ohio, Alabama, Texas and Florida. 

Tour theme: The major theme of the four-states-in-four-days flurry: the need for a comprehensive, coordinated federal manufacturing strategy with strong, commonsense tax, regulation, energy and permitting, workforce and trade policies. 

Port stop: On Friday, the tour—which began Feb. 18 in Ohio with the NAM’s annual NAM’s annual State of Manufacturing Address, delivered by NAM President and CEO Jay Timmons—visited PortMiami, a critical U.S. trade hub. The NAM contingent was led by Johnson & Johnson Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Operations & Risk Officer and NAM Board Chair Kathy Wengel.   

• Almost half of PortMiami’s traffic is exports. The waterway connects manufacturers in the U.S. to more than 140 nations, and its top destinations for U.S. exports are Honduras, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Colombia and Panama. 

• The NAM team’s tour of the bustling port—which employs more than 29,000 people, supports more than 340,000 other jobs and in 2023 accounted for 3.9% of Florida’s gross domestic product—highlighted how access to global markets fuels U.S. job creation and economic growth.  

Talent and AI: The NAM also visited Miami Dade College in Miami on Friday, where it saw future workforce members studying the next manufacturing frontier: artificial intelligence.  

• Through its AI Center and Business Innovation & Technology Center, Miami Dade College is preparing the labor force for the future. 

• The school, which has more than 125,000 enrolled students representing 166 nations, is giving students the skills they need to lead in an AI-powered world.  

• Another plus: some 98% of the school’s students graduate with no debt.  

Skills to thrive: “A recent NAM AI report confirms that AI will change jobs more than it will replace them,” Timmons and Associated Industries of Florida President and CEO Brewster Bevis wrote in a Feb. 21 op-ed for Florida Politics.      

• “One-third of manufacturers expect to hire more workers because of AI, not fewer. … Miami Dade College is helping to lead the way with one of the nation’s pioneering AI education programs—training students for high-paying, high-tech manufacturing jobs of the future.”   

A comprehensive strategy: At every stop on the four-day leg of the tour, Timmons emphasized that the choices Congress makes now will affect the future of manufacturing throughout the U.S. The most critical of these choices concern the following:  

• Preserving tax reforms: The 2017 tax reforms were “rocket fuel” for the manufacturing sector and expiring and expired provisions must be preserved and made permanent. 

• Regulatory certainty: To invest and hire for the future, manufacturers need regulatory certainty, and that means removing duplicative, often contradictory rules and costly, needless compliance burdens. 

• Permitting reform and energy dominance: For the U.S. to reach its full potential, “federal agencies [must] make faster decisions and reduc[e] baseless litigation.” Furthermore, the U.S. permitting process for energy projects takes 80% longer than the same process takes in other developed nations. “We are seeing opportunities for energy dominance fade” thanks to those long wait times. 

• Workforce: The U.S. faces a shortfall of 1.9 million manufacturing workers by 2033. That’s an economic and national security issue, too. 

• Commonsense trade policy: If President Trump continues to use tariffs, manufacturers in the U.S. will “need a commonsense policy … that provides [them] with the certainty to invest [and] a clear runway to adjust.” 

Great for manufacturing: In four days, the NAM hammered home for legislators, students, local and state officials and businesses alike that policymakers can take concrete steps to make America great again for manufacturing.  

• The NAM will continue to bring stories of manufacturing triumph to Washington to push for such policies—because when manufacturing moves forward, there’s no stopping America.