Every so often, history hands a nation a choice: to drift or to build. And every so often, it hands that nation a leader who inspires people to reject the drifters and build with boldness and confidence in the future. One of our guests this morning is the son of Cuban exiles, a man whose family fled a regime that confiscated everything, and who grew up understanding in his bones that freedom and prosperity are not inherited; they're defended and they're built. That heritage made him clear-eyed and it gave him something rare in Washington: the memory of what it costs when a country loses its future. For two decades in the United States Senate, he warned us. He warned us that we traded our industrial base for the illusion of cheap abundance. He warned us that supply chains had become weapons pointed at us. And this year in Munich, in a speech that will be studied for a generation, he said what no Secretary of State had dared to say: that deindustrialization was a choice and that reindustrialization must now be ours. He called on the free world not merely to defend Western civilization, but to build a new Western century. Under President Trump's leadership, he has turned that vision into policy, restoring American economic strength as the foundation of economic power, and reminding the world that the arsenal of democracy was never a metaphor; it was a factory floor. He's a statesman, a patriot, and the driving force behind the most consequential renewal of American economic statecraft since the Second World War. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming the 72nd Secretary of State of the United States, Secretary Marco Rubio.
Vice President JD Vance Delivers Remarks at The Foundry School
Thank you. Thank you, thank you all of you, first of all, for being here today. Thank you, Jacob Helberg, who's doing a phenomenal job. Everybody at our department is doing a great job, and I'm very proud of the work the State Department is putting in and to these and other initiatives. One of the things we really wanted to do in our time here, and the one of the reasons behind many of the reforms we undertook, is to allow us to have a State Department that can move at the speed of relevance, which is something we used to say all the time. Now it's become almost a cliché, but it really is important because world affairs are moving so quickly, economic developments are moving so quickly, and so much of that is internationalized and it involves what we do around the world as well. And so I'm very proud of everybody at the Department of State and all the work that they're doing to be a part of this initiative, along with our partners in the other agencies because this truly is an interagency challenge that we're facing. What—what is the challenge that we're here to talk about today? Let me put it to you this way. I think we made a terrible mistake in this country not—not many years ago, under people that were in charge at the time, especially at the end of the Cold War, and that was the idea that the ability to make things no longer mattered. It—no matter—didn't matter any longer where things were made. They were to be made in the most efficient place at the lowest possible cost. That meant more profits for the company, lower costs for the consumer, and that was the way the world would work. There was this fantasy, really, that the whole world would become free-enterprise democracies and that everyone would look like us. That ran into reality. The reality that that is not how human events have ever worked, that the nation-state still does matter, nationalism is still real, national borders still matter, and that countries are going always to act in their best interest. But the result of it is that it deindustrialized America. We lost our ability and our capacity to make things. And not just big things, not just the—the kinds of big machinery and things that we normally identify with industry, but even some of the most basic components that are necessary, that underpin economic life, especially in the 21st century. And we woke up to the reality just a few years ago that we are suddenly, as a nation, dangerously dependent—dangerously dependent on other nations for all sorts of things that we need, not simply for our economic vibrancy but in many cases for our national security and our very survival as—as a prosperous nation-state. And so now we are involved in this endeavor across the board to try to reverse those mistakes. And it will be the work of multiple administrations, but it starts here and it starts now with this one that is receiving attention at its—at the highest levels. One way is just the basic ingredients that go into all this, and it's why you've seen such a focus on access to not just critical minerals as raw material, but also to the ability to process them. But the other is—has to be the ability to actually make things once again. And we have to understand that reindustrialization, that 21st-century industrial activity, is going to look different than it did in the 20th century. It's going to involve far more skills. Uh, it's going to involve—not—not just are our workers going to have to be better educated in what they're doing, but in many cases, given the evolution and the rapidly changing dynamics of a modern world, they may have to be retrained multiple times in their career. One of the crown jewels that have empowered American innovation and ultimately powered American economic influence and power around the world has been our system of higher education. It has produced extraordinary research. It has produced extraordinary breakthroughs. But the sad part about it is the number of things we have innovated or created but then they're made somewhere else. And so I think in the 21st century, this partnership with higher education is—is important. And it's important for two reasons. First of all, why build it when you—why build a new wheel when we already have a wheel? We just need to repurpose that wheel to become the place where 21st-century American workers go to become empowered with the skills they need to succeed. But I also think it's important for higher education, and we've got some great partners here today that are already part of this initiative, and of course we want this partnership to grow to include other schools as well. But I think it's also important for higher education because increasingly, young Americans are asking: "Is the college degree worth it? Is the college route worth it?" Because we have to borrow money, or we have to spend money, or we have to do all these sorts of things, and in the end, I get a degree and all that degree does is either (a) qualify me to get another degree or (b) it may not even really lead to a job necessarily that's different from the one I could have gotten otherwise. And I think this speaks to that, because it also, in addition to being good for our country, is an opportunity to say to students: "If you come here and you go to school and you follow this curriculum, you will leave here not just with a paper credential, but with the skills that make you immediately employable in a high-paying job, in a good-paying job with long-term stability." And so this partnership is critical because what I hope it means, what I hope it symbolizes—and not just symbolizes, but what I hope it is evidence of—is how government, partnering with non-government entities like our higher education system and the private sector, the combination of those three pillars: the private sector that needs the workers and knows what they need from the workers, the higher education system that can equip young Americans with the skills they need to fill those jobs, and government that ensures not just that it's acting as a convening body, but ensures that our national policies reflect these priorities. These three pillars working together drive us towards this outcome that we want, and it's very important. So I think today's a great way to kick this off. We have great partners on board already. We hope to attract more. I want to thank all of you for being a part of it. And I want—the last thing I want to say about this is that we understand that for this to work, this is not a two-year project. This is not a two-and-a-half-year project. This is a project that will involve sustainment for the long term. Multiple American administrations are going to have to make this a priority, which is why it's so important that—that you see evidence that at the highest levels of our government now and for the future, you have that commitment. And it's why it's exciting for us to have the Vice President here today to speak about it, because I think it evidence—is evidence of not just the importance this administration gives it, but our acknowledgment that this is an issue that's going to require long-term and sustained attention. This has to be an—an endeavor that goes on beyond the next two years. It has to go on for a generation. And I think having the Vice President here today with us is evidence of that commitment. And so now I want to introduce and welcome to the stage here at the Institute of Peace—a beautiful building that the State Department's using a lot and we thank you all for coming—the Vice President of the United States of America, JD Vance.
Well, thank you all for being here and thanks, particularly, to Jacob Helberg for putting this amazing thing together, and to Marco Rubio for supporting it and making it possible. And thanks to all of you for being here to support it, to make it possible to get this thing off the ground. I mean, I—I think Marco said a lot of things that I want to echo, which is, one, that we need industry and government and educational institutions to cooperate to make something like this make sense. Now, when Jacob asked me to come and speak on this event, he and I talked about this for—for a very long time. I knew this was in the works for a very long time. But I said I'll only come and speak if you don't allow Michigan to be part of it and you do allow Ohio State to be part of it. So I'm very proud that we have Ohio State front and center along with Stanford, Penn State, and a few other great universities. Uh, with all due respect to our friends in Michigan, I think it's an amazing collection of people, of institutions, of businesses, of—of thought leaders and of entrepreneurs that we've gotten together in order to make this possible. And let me just sort of outline a few basic principles that I think are—are going to really inform the work that you're all doing, but most importantly, the work that we're doing in the Trump administration. So, principle number one is that industrial security is national security. We have learned over the past five, the past six, frankly, the past 20 or 30 years, that if America doesn't have enough self-sufficiency in industry and manufacturing, our enemies are able to exploit it and it makes our country much weaker. And sometimes it's not even because our enemies are exploiting it. Sometimes it's because a global pandemic breaks out, and I think all of us in this room have had the experience of somebody who, during the COVID era, needed an elective surgery, needed something done at a hospital—sometimes even a non-elective surgery—but it got canceled because we didn't make enough hospital gowns and hospital masks in the United States. So the supply disruptions that happened during the COVID era actually made it less possible for our citizens, our people to get the healthcare and the resources that they needed because we didn't make enough of that stuff at home. The only way to fix that, the only way to fix that is to reindustrialize the United States of America. And that brings me to principle number two. I have nothing against finance, I have nothing against the services industry; obviously, these are very, very critical parts of our economy. But there was a principle that was out there—I think fundamentally a lie that was out there—which is that the Western economies would transition from being manufacturing economies into being built around finance and services. And the reality is that you need all of these things. You need, of course, a healthy financial sector to get investments into the right industries, into the right companies, to support the amazing entrepreneurs, some of whom we have here today, but you cannot run an economy entirely on services and finance. You have to have a foundation, and that foundation is always going to be making stuff, and that's, of course, what manufacturing is. Uh, that principle has really underlined, I would say, all of the Trump administration's economic policies. We are in the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, and I think that the thing that Donald Trump will be remembered for, rightfully, is that he took America from a bipartisan consensus that existed in Washington but not in the heartland of our country, that we could have an economy without making enough of our own stuff. And he said: "We're going to change that. We're going to reinvest in American workers. We're going to reinvest in American industry. We're going to use both carrots and sticks." We just had a—a tax legislation about pass about a year and a half ago that we're very proud of that gives a lot of inducements to businesses to do capital investment, to buy capital equipment, to reinvest in their industries in a way that they maybe weren't three or four years ago. But we also are willing, as the President has shown, to use the carrot to say to other countries, and even to our own companies, that to the extent that you invest in the United States of America, to the extent that you build in the United States of America, you will be rewarded and you will find a partner in the American government. But to the extent that you're trying to ship American jobs overseas, to the extent that you are relying on brittle and, frankly, uh, adversarial countries for our supply chains, then you are not going to be rewarded by government policy and you're not going to find a friend in the President of the United States or anybody else. That—that, I think, is principle number two. Principle number three—principle number three, I should say, uh, very important in this, is it's not just about native American industry and it's not just about investing in America's industrial heartland; it's also about investing in American workers. And that is where I think the work of the Foundry is the most relevant and is going to be the most important in the years to come. Uh, there is a book that I'm—I'm fascinated by, in part because the—the hero of the story came from a similar part of the country that I came from, called "Rocket Boys." And "Rocket Boys" was later turned into a—an amazing movie called "October Sky." If you're—if you have kids, it's an incredible family movie because it's got something for the adults and it's got something for the little ones as well. But fundamentally, the story is that you take a kid in rural West Virginia, a kid who did not have a lot of obvious prospects—his name was Homer Hickam; he was a real NASA engineer—but because we had the resources and the investment in American communities, because we had teachers who actually believed in this kid when nobody else did, you had a kid who nobody thought would ever become a rocket scientist became a NASA engineer because we invested in him and we believed in him. And we believed in the possibility of American talent, even American talent that might have been a little bit of a diamond in the rough. We didn't assume that everybody who didn't have everything figured out by the age of 15, we could write that person off. We invested in our kids, and we invested in their tools, we invested in their talents, and we tried to find those diamonds in the rough, not knowing that some of them, maybe they—they weren't cut out to be NASA engineers, but some of them were. And I think that is what the Foundry is ultimately about. If you think of the—the thrust of college education over the last 20, 30 years, the message that I got when I was going to college at Ohio State and then—and then a Yale Law School, it was: "If you want to make a lot of money, if you want to have a really good career, go into law, go into finance, go into banking." That was it. Maybe, maybe go into tech. But I think what we're doing with the Foundry is we're telling America's next generation of entrepreneurs and engineers and just brilliant kids that there is a future—both a financial future but also a future in the dignity of what you're going to be doing every single day—by actually building things, by leading not just teams of bankers but teams of manufacturers and teams of electricians. We're sending a message to all of America's kids, both at the leadership level and those below them, that we believe in making things again. And we're going to give you the tools and the education and the networking in order to do it. The kids who are going to be involved in these courses, they're not just going to be listening to lectures from brilliant people, they're also going to be learning at an implicit level that this is a country, this is an institution—whether it's Ohio State or Stanford—that believes in the future of manufacturing in the United States of America. And they're also going to be networking with their academics, with their professors, with people in industry, with their colleagues in the classroom. And it's all going to send the message that—the message I got in 30 years ago, 20 years ago, was: "Go into finance. Go into tech. Go into law." The message these kids are going to get is there's a much broader set of horizons out there. If you want to be a lawyer, that's fine, but you can also go and build something. And there's a future for you in building something, and we're going to give you the tools in order to make that happen. And that—that brings me just to my final point. So much of what is amazing about the Foundry and this amazing logo behind us—I love this thing—is that it's going to do something specific and discrete. It's going to put really smart kids in the room with other really smart kids. And they're going to be entrepreneurs there, and they're going to be academics who are worried about the future of American manufacturing. They're going to learn interesting things in virtue of sitting in a classroom together. But I think the more important thing is the signal it sends. Not just to the kids who are going to sit—sit in the classroom, but to all of us. To the industry leaders here, to the people who hopefully pick something up from what Jacob and Marco and I have said, which is that we have to rebuild our country and we cannot do it without reinvesting in American workers. Uh, one of the interesting things, I've—I've become friends with Mike Rowe, the "Dirty Jobs" guy. And he has this amazing podcast, but he's also working a lot on this—this idea of why do we have so many people with hundreds of thousands of dollars of college debt but not the skills necessary to participate in what I think is—is the beginning of a manufacturing renaissance in the United States of America? And the answer is because we told a lot of kids, whether they were brilliant PhD-level kids or whether they were kids who just wanted to have a good job, we told them that if you were working with your hands, that was less than. Whereas if you were sitting at a computer, that was—that was the work of the future, that was the prestigious work, and that was the work that we were going to financially compensate you for better than if you were working for your hands. But I think what all of us need to do—and it starts with the Foundry, but I think it goes to every institution that you represent, to every kid that you interact with—is that working with your hands is very much the work of the future. And the idea that if you're working with your hands you're not using your mind is one of the dumbest things that America's leaders ever told a generation of American kids. So from the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, and all of these industry leaders, our message to America's children is: "If you are a tinkerer, great. If you want to work with your hands, great. If you want to work with your mind, great. Why don't you do both?" Because the future of American industry, the future of rebuilding this country, is going to be for people who use their heads, who use their hearts, who use their hands to build the next generation of American products with American workers doing it. You guys are at the vanguard, and we are happy and proud to support you every step of the way. God bless you and thank you for having me.