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At the height of the US trade war with Japan in the 1980s, Congress established a nationwide network of organizations to advise small American manufacturers on how to survive and grow in what was then a particularly difficult environment. Decades later, there is now at least one Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) center in all 50 states, and they continue to provide taxpayer-subsidized consulting to thousands of businesses, including makers of ovens, printers, tortillas, and dog food.
But on Tuesday, shortly before the president announced sweeping tariffs on global imports, Trump administration officials informed members of Congress that it was withholding funding for some MEP centers because their work no longer aligns with government priorities.
The Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which administers the program to help manufacturers, emailed lawmakers to say that it would not be paying out nearly $12.9 million that had been due overall this week to MEP centers in 10 states, according to Democratic staff of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology who spoke on on the condition of anonymity.
“The department is reprioritizing its programmatic activities to ensure that the US secures its position as a leader in critical and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum,” according to the email seen by WIRED. “As such NIST has determined that these cooperative agreements are no longer aligned with the priorities of the department and NIST.”
The Democratic congressional aides and heads of MEP centers in multiple states believe that abandoning support for the program runs counter to Trump’s long-standing goals of boosting domestic manufacturing and winning the ongoing trade war with China. While the president has demonstrated a preference for punitive measures such as tariffs over subsidies to increase American manufacturing capacity, his defunding of the centers could leave US small businesses without the support they need to take advantage of such policies, advocates for the MEP program say.
“These efforts directly align with the president’s goals to strengthen domestic manufacturing and re-shore production,” says Jennifer Sinsabaugh, CEO of New Mexico MEP.
Project 2025, a proposed road map for the current Trump administration authored by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, had called for eliminating federal subsidies for the manufacturing program and letting the private sector “more properly” carry out its business advisory services. But as of Wednesday, the Department of Commerce and NIST had not announced a plan to privatize it or shared how the withheld funds would be repurposed.
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