President Donald Trump’s administration is restoring funding to Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) programs that it cancelled at the beginning of the month, reversing a decision that drew widespread condemnation from the manufacturing community.
At the end of March, funding for 10 state MEP initiatives expired, and the government’s controlling agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, chose not to renew them, a move that took those state agencies and national groups by surprise. Other MEP leaders said they believed the March funding cuts were only the first and that all MEP programs would lose funding as their contracts expired.
On Friday, a spokesman said, “After further review and consideration, NIST has determined it will renew the funding for these 10 centers through the end of the fiscal year as NIST and the Department continue to evaluate plans for the program.”
The states that lost and have now regained funding were:
While some people in the manufacturing community have criticized MEP initiatives for wasting public money in recent years, the abrupt funding loss to the 10 centers drew a sharp response from the business community with regional MEP programs urging their members to reach out to lawmakers and defend the program.
Ethan Karp, a regular IndustryWeek contributor and president and CEO of Cleveland-area MEP Magnet, criticized the funding cuts as counter to the Trump administration’s push to reshore manufacturing to the United States through aggressive tariffs.
“Cutting MEP now is like building a runway and then grounding the planes,” Karp wrote earlier this month.
