Barbara Boyd highlighted a new manufacturing education initiative after Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned that decades of deindustrialization left the United States dangerously dependent on foreign nations for products essential to its economy and national security.

"Something called the founding of the Foundry School at the Institute for Peace at the State Department, and Rubio and J.D. Vance spoke there," Boyd said.

"You have a clip from Rubio starting to talk about what it's about."

Rubio used his remarks to trace America's manufacturing problems to decisions made around the end of the Cold War, when political and business leaders increasingly embraced the idea that products should simply be manufactured wherever production was cheapest and most efficient.

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"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 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," Rubio said.

Rubio said that approach promised greater corporate profits and lower consumer prices while resting on an expectation that countries around the world would increasingly embrace free enterprise and democratic government.

"It didn't matter any longer where things were made; they were to be made in the most efficient place at the lowest possible cost," Rubio said.

"That meant more profits for the company, lower costs for the consumers, and that was the way the world would work."

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According to Rubio, events eventually demonstrated the flaws in those assumptions.

"That ran into reality," Rubio said.

"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 to always act in their best interest."

Rubio argued that the resulting economic model weakened America's domestic industrial capacity, including its ability to produce both major machinery and basic components needed throughout a modern economy.

"But the result of it is that it deindustrialized America," Rubio said.

"We lost our ability and our capacity to make things, and not just big things, not just 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."

That dependence, Rubio said, eventually created problems extending beyond economics.

He argued that relying on foreign countries for essential products can create vulnerabilities involving national security and America's ability to remain prosperous.

"And we woke up to the reality just a few years ago that we are suddenly, as a nation, 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 a prosperous nation state," Rubio said.

Rubio said the administration is now attempting to reverse those trends through reindustrialization.

However, he cautioned that rebuilding manufacturing in the 21st century will not simply mean recreating the industrial economy of the previous century.

"And so now we are involved in this endeavor across the board to try to reverse those mistakes, and we have to understand that reindustrialization-that 21st-century industrial activity-is going to look different than it did in the 20th century," Rubio said.

Modern manufacturing will demand greater technical skills from American workers, Rubio argued, while technological changes could require workers to undergo additional training throughout their careers.

"It's going to involve far more skills," Rubio said.

"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 the modern world, they may have to be retrained multiple times in their career."

Boyd pointed to the Foundry School as the administration's effort to address that workforce challenge.

"What the administration is doing about that is really quite fantastic because what that ceremony was about was the announcement of what they're calling the Foundry School," Boyd said.

According to Boyd, the initiative will involve courses at approximately eight universities around the country.

She said the program was designed by Stanford in consultation with entrepreneurs from the United States and countries including Korea and India.

"How do you run an advanced manufacturing plant? What skills are necessary to do that?" Boyd said.

"We're going to give them to our workers, running these courses starting right now, and it's absolutely fantastic."

Boyd said the State Department's involvement reflects the international collaboration behind the initiative.

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The courses, as she described them, will focus on providing American workers with practical skills needed to operate advanced manufacturing facilities.

Rubio's remarks framed that workforce development as part of a larger effort to restore industrial capacity lost during the decades when American policymakers prioritized global production efficiency over maintaining the country's ability to manufacture critical goods domestically.

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