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Nevada’s Thacker Pass lithium mine has received final approval on a $2.26 billion loan from the Department of Energy (Reuters, subscription).

What’s going on: On Monday, Lithium Americas—which is building the Thacker Pass lithium mine project in Nevada with a nearly $1 billion investment from General Motors Co.—closed on a loan from the DOE Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan program. The loan, which has a 24-year term, was approved provisionally in March.

• Thacker Pass, which broke ground in March 2023 just south of the Nevada–Oregon border, was approved at the end of the previous administration and is expected to open later this decade.

The big picture: “The funds are a key part of U.S. President Joe Biden’s efforts to reduce dependence on lithium supplies from China, the world’s largest processor of the electric vehicle battery metal,” according to Reuters.

• Last week, the Biden administration approved another lithium project, by developer Ioneer.

What to expect: “With the loan now closed, Vancouver-based Lithium Americas plans to start major construction, a process that could take three years or longer. The mine’s first phase is expected to produce 40,000 metric tons of battery-quality lithium carbonate per year, enough for up to 800,000 EVs.”

• The project is anticipated to create about 1,800 jobs during construction and 360 full-time jobs once it is up and running.

The Annual Meeting of the Members of the National Association of Manufacturers will be held Wednesday, September 25, 2024. The only agenda item to be considered during the annual meeting of the members will be the election of the NAM Board of Directors slate for the 2025–2026 term.

The meeting will begin at 9:00 a.m. ET and will conclude by 9:05 a.m. ET during the NAM Fall Board of Directors meeting. It will be a hybrid meeting taking place via Zoom and in-person for those attending the Fall Board meeting at the Salamander Washington DC.

Members who wish to vote on the Board slate must participate in the meeting, but you may designate a proxy who is able to participate. Proxies must be duly authorized by completing and returning this proxy form. No individual may serve as proxy for more than one person and no NAM employee may serve as your proxy.

To register, please contact Anne Marie Alaska, Director, Board Initiatives at [email protected].

Texas Instruments and HP are the latest recipients of CHIPS and Science Act funds meant to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing (Bloomberg and Reuters, subscription).

What’s going on: Texas Instruments will receive $1.6 billion in grants and $3 billion in loans under the 2022 legislation (Bloomberg), while HP will get $50 million in grants (Reuters), the Biden administration announced last month.

• All the awards are pending finalization, and amounts could still change following due diligence by the Commerce Department.

Where it will go: The money will go to different undertakings at each company.

• At Texas Instruments, it “will help pay for one factory in Utah and two in Texas—projects that will cost about $18 billion through 2029—the Commerce Department said in a statement. The effort is expected to generate around 2,000 manufacturing jobs and thousands more in construction,” according to Bloomberg.
• The funding proposed for HP will go toward “projects that build on HP’s expertise in microfluidics and microelectromechanical systems with funding set to support manufacturing of silicon devices critical in life sciences lab equipment used in drug discovery, single-cell research and cell line development,” Reuters reports.
• The HP work is expected to create nearly 150 construction jobs and more than 100 manufacturing positions (MarketWatch).

Why it’s important: Most of the funds from the CHIPS and Science Act “is slated to support production of cutting-edge chips by companies such as Intel Corp. … But the law set aside a minimum of $2 billion for less advanced semiconductors—sometimes called legacy chips—like those produced by Texas Instruments. … Legacy chips are essential to the global economy, powering everything from smartphones to refrigerators to weapons systems. And it’s an area where China is increasing its ambitions,” according to Bloomberg.

• The majority of the measure’s funding has now been announced through more than a dozen proposed awards. Announcements are set to be wrapped up by the end of 2024.

Manufacturers are deluged by data. As companies adopt more advanced technologies, they are increasingly overwhelmed by the quantities of raw data that must be collected, analyzed and put to use.

Indeed, a new survey from the Manufacturing Leadership Council—the NAM’s digital transformation arm—reveals that 70% of manufacturers still collect data manually. Here are some highlights from the survey, which reveals where manufacturers need to improve, and how they’re planning to do it.

Exponential data growth: While the survey’s respondents report an explosion of new data, they also expect to keep on top of it over the next few years.

• Forty-four percent of manufacturing leaders have seen at least a doubling of the amount of data they collect in their organization today compared to two years ago.
• While many manufacturers still lack standardized data due to operating a mix of older equipment and systems along with newer technologies, more than half expect that their data will be in a standardized format by 2030.

Analytical improvements: How are manufacturers planning to use all this new data?

• Nearly 60% of respondents say they are focused on understanding their operations with an eye toward optimizing them in the future.
• While 30% of manufacturers say they are using manufacturing data to predict operational performance, another 60% say that predictivity will be a primary objective by 2030.

Better decisions: Manufacturers use data to make better, more proactive decisions, according to the survey. Today, these decisions are made at a relatively high level.

• Seventy-seven percent of respondents said that the responsibility to employ data in decision-making falls to plant leaders and managers.
• Only 33% said that factory floor employees held that responsibility—a percentage that might grow as manufacturers seek to empower frontline employees with greater decision-making ability.

Looking ahead: As artificial intelligence and other emerging digital technologies become more established, they will likely reshape many if not all aspects of manufacturing operations.

• Thanks to advanced sensors and robust data networks connecting equipment and machinery, manufacturers will collect copious data in real time and act on it almost as swiftly.

Read more: To get a deeper look at the current state of data mastery in manufacturing, download the full survey, Data Mastery: A Key to Industrial Competitiveness.

The Senate on Thursday rejected a bipartisan tax package that would have reinstated three expired, manufacturing-critical tax policies (The New York Times, subscription). The NAM will continue its efforts to revive the provisions.

What’s going on: The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act failed 48–44 in a procedural vote, 12 votes shy of the 60 required for the bill to advance in the Senate.

• The measure would have restored immediate expensing for research and development costs, enhanced interest deductibility and 100% accelerated depreciation for capital equipment purchases.

Not giving up: The NAM is already at work on its 2025 tax campaign, Manufacturing Wins, through which manufacturers will continue the fight to restore these expired provisions.

• These policies began phasing down in 2022 and 2023, but even more devastating tax increases are scheduled for the end of 2025.
• Manufacturers have already been meeting with legislators to explain the importance of preserving the 2017 tax reform in its entirety—including vital provisions such as the corporate tax rate, the pass-through deduction and more.

What’s next: “Manufacturers look forward to working with Congress to restore these vital bipartisan provisions and prevent further tax increases on manufacturers as we enter the critical tax conversations of 2025,” the NAM said following the Senate vote.

Manufacturers have long been partners of the Consumer Product Safety Commission—working with the agency to keep the public informed and protected—but a lack of transparency at the CPSC in the past few years has stymied businesses’ attempts “to understand how [they] will be regulated,” the NAM told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Innovation, Data and Commerce ahead of a hearing Tuesday.

What’s going on: The NAM has regularly called for congressional oversight of the CPSC in recent years. Ahead of the “Fiscal Year 2025 Consumer Product Safety Commission Budget” subcommittee hearing, the NAM highlighted several areas of concern for legislators to address:

• Section 6(b) of the Consumer Product Safety Act: “Manufacturers strongly support maintaining the crucial, balanced and effective information disclosure procedures currently mandated in the Consumer Product Safety Act,” said NAM Vice President of Domestic Policy Charles Crain. “Unfortunately, in recent years, the CPSC has attempted to circumvent these standards, releasing statements that lack any scientific data or research or by taking actions without official agency rulemaking.”
• Effective communication of rulemaking and research with regulated businesses: Despite a CPSA requirement that the agency defer to voluntary standards in certain safety-measure compliance cases, “there are recent examples of the agency commencing a proposed rulemaking in an apparent rush to regulate.” The agency has also begun unnecessarily withholding from manufacturers the test reports and analysis they need to create voluntary standards, while giving manufacturers “reduced time … to implement proposed and final rules.”
• Public engagement by CPSC commissioners and staff: “One of the benefits of a small federal agency with multiple commissioners is the availability of commissioners and senior staff to meet with interested parties on relevant topics,” Crain continued. “Unfortunately, in recent years, the CPSC has been less willing to engage in productive conversations with regulated entities.”

The last word: “It is critical that the CPSC effectively communicate and work with manufacturers to ensure that our shared goal of consumer safety is maintained,” said Crain. “The NAM will continue engaging with both the CPSC and Congress to see that the agency is effectively engaging with the manufacturing community.”

Through the NAM’s recently launched 2025 tax campaign, Manufacturing Wins, manufacturers are calling on Congress to prevent several devastating tax increases from taking effect at the end of next year.

One of those scheduled increases is the expiration of the Section 199A pass-through deduction—a critical incentive, created by tax reform in 2017, designed to help thousands of small and medium-sized manufacturers invest in their businesses.

The NAM recently released a tax explainer on the pass-through deduction, breaking down what it is, what it does and why its preservation is vital to manufacturing in the U.S.  Here are the highlights.

Pass-through defined: The defining characteristic of a pass-through entity is that its business profits get “passed through” to the company owners, who then pay taxes on the business’s income on their personal tax returns.

• The vast majority of businesses in America—96%—are organized as pass-throughs, including S-corporations, partnerships, LLCs and sole proprietorships.
• In manufacturing, pass-throughs are typically small, family-owned firms.

What it’s done for manufacturers: The Section 199A pass-through deduction allows pass-through manufacturers to deduct up to 20% of their qualified business income, decreasing their effective tax rate.

• Combined with a lower individual income tax rate included in the 2017 reform (which reduced the top individual rate from 39.6% to 37%), the pass-through deduction has freed up significant capital for smaller manufacturers to reinvest in their businesses.
• For example, 2018 was the best year for manufacturing job creation in 21 years and the best year for wage growth in 15 years.

What’s in jeopardy: Both the pass-through deduction and the lower individual income tax rates are set to expire at the end of 2025—and they’re certain to hit small and medium-sized manufacturers hard.

•  In a recent NAM survey, 93% of pass-through manufacturers said their ability to grow, create jobs and invest in their companies will be stymied if the expirations are allowed to happen.

What should be done: Congress must make the pass-through deduction permanent and keep individual tax rates as low as possible.

The last word: “Small and medium-sized pass-throughs are the backbone of the manufacturing supply chain,” said NAM Vice President of Domestic Policy Charles Crain. “Congress must act before the end of 2025 to preserve the pass-through deduction and prevent devastating tax increases on small businesses throughout the manufacturing sector.”

Freshman Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) is Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, Trump announced Monday at the first day of the Republican National Convention (The Wall Street Journal, subscription).

The backdrop: “The pick comes amid widespread calls for unity following the assassination attempt at Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, when a gunman opened fire on the crowd. Trump said he suffered a gunshot wound to his ear. One rallygoer was killed and two others were critically wounded. The gunman was fatally shot by a Secret Service sniper.”

• NAM President and CEO Jay Timmons called for a renunciation of violence following the shooting. “Violence should never be the answer and must be clearly condemned, along with those who would foment it,” he said. “In America, we resolve our differences through our votes, not violence. … [A]ll Americans should commit ourselves to the peaceful expression of our ideas and our politics and to the protection of our democracy.”

Why it’s important: Vance—a former Marine and Yale Law School graduate who gained national fame with his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy”—is expected to “be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American [w]orkers and [f]armers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota and far beyond,” Trump wrote in a social post on Monday, according to the Journal.

On the record: Timmons, who shares Ohio roots with Vance, said on Monday the vice presidential pick “understands the transformative power of manufacturing to improve the quality of life for everyone.” Vance previously shared what Timmons called his “powerful personal story” with the NAM Board of Directors.

• Vance “recognizes the role manufacturing plays in building strong communities and an exceptional nation, and he is committed to supporting the growth of our industry,” Timmons said. “The NAM is committed to working with all candidates to shape the manufacturing strategy in the next administration and advance the NAM’s ‘Competing to Win’ policy agenda for growing manufacturing in the U.S.”

U.S. consumer prices declined unexpectedly in June, the second straight month of “tame” readings (Reuters, subscription).

What’s going on: “The consumer price index dipped 0.1% last month after being unchanged in May, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Thursday.”

• In the 12 months through June, the CPI rose 3.0% following a 3.3% increase in May.
• Reuters-polled economists had forecast a 0.1% rise for the month and a 3.1% year-on-year gain.

The big picture: “The annual increase in consumer prices has slowed from a peak of 9.1% in June 2022. The CPI is running far ahead of the measures tracked by the Fed for its 2% inflation target. The Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price indexes both increased 2.6% in May.”

However … The report follows news last week that the unemployment rate rose to a two-and-a-half year high.

• And economic growth has slowed in response to the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes in 2022 and 2023.
• Fed Chair Jerome Powell told Congress this week that more data is still needed to declare “inflation beaten.”

What it means: Still, the CPI report is “reinforcing views that the disinflation trend was back on track and drawing the Federal Reserve another step closer to cutting interest rates.”

When Emerson’s first-ever Chief Sustainability Officer Mike Train talks about his company, his enthusiasm shines through.

• “What we do to enable our customers is huge,” said Train. “We have an important role to play—and I get a lot of energy out of that.”

An aggressive push: The technology and engineering company, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, has been making big moves in sustainability over the past few years—beginning with a goal in 2018 to reduce some of its greenhouse gas intensity by 20% over 10 years.

• At the time, the goal was ambitious, and the company wasn’t quite sure how it would achieve it. But employees banded together and pulled it off.
• “We actually achieved the goal in 2022—six years early,” said Train. “But the act of putting out a goal and not knowing exactly how we’d solve for it … has been driving the culture of our company. Our employees are proud we put it out there, proud to have participated, and it’s activated thousands of people to get excited about what we’re doing.”

An inclusive approach: Since then, the company has applied a range of tactics. From “energy treasure hunts,” in which teams search for energy waste in facilities, to renewable energy procurement and collaborations with supply chain partners, Emerson is finding interesting and inclusive ways to make an impact.

• The company has gone from getting 3% of its power from renewables to getting to 49% from those sources. And it now has a commitment to use 100% renewable energy by 2030.
• Emerson is setting other big goals, too, from net-zero operations by 2030 to a zero-waste-to-landfill pledge, along with other water and biodiversity actions.

An effective framework: The company has a three-part approach to its sustainability practices.

• Greening Of Emerson involves the actions Emerson is taking to reduce its own footprint by minimizing waste and engaging its supply chain.
• Greening By Emerson involves the company’s activities to help a wide range of manufacturing customers improve their own sustainability, often through Emerson’s automation portfolio and expertise. This, according to Train, is where Emerson has its biggest opportunity for impact.
• Greening With Emerson refers to the company’s work with government and research organizations on policy and innovation, offering technical expertise and manufacturing perspective to help drive action.

A group effort: Train has seen the company coalesce around these goals—from the sustainability team he works with every day (“they bring a lot of energy and passion to what we’re doing”) to the rest of the company’s 74,000-person workforce.

• “The fun part of sustainability is everyone is learning it together,” Train continued. “You’re allowed and encouraged to borrow ideas from each other, so the collaborative part of sustainability is an awful lot of fun.”