Competitiveness

Panelists discuss the increasing demand for technical talent in the current age of automation, how to foster a competitive workforce, and resources available to state and local governments through the CHIPS and Science Act. TRANSCRIPT FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations State and Local Officials Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. We’re delighted to have participants from forty-nine states and U.S. territories for today’s conversation, which is on the record. CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, publisher, and educational institution focusing on U.S. foreign and domestic policy. CFR is also the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. And as always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Through our State and Local Officials Initiative, CFR serves as a resource on international issues affecting the priorities and agendas of state and local governments by providing analysis on a wide range of policy topics. For today’s discussion, we are going to be talking about “Building a Competitive U.S. Workforce,” and we have an amazing panel of speakers today. Bo Machayo is the director of U.S. government and public affairs at Micron Technology. He has a decade of experience as a public policy and public engagement advisor the local, state, and federal levels of U.S. government, and has had a number of positions including in the office of Virginia Senator Mark Warner, Loudoun County’s Board of Supervisors, and in the Obama administration. David Shahoulian is the director of workforce policy and government affairs at Intel Corporation. Previously, he worked at the Department of Homeland Security on border and immigration policy. He’s also served on the House Judiciary Committee for over ten years. Dr. Rebecca Shearman is the program director for technology innovation and partnerships at the National Science Foundation. Previously, she was an assistant professor in the biology department at Framingham State University and holds a Ph.D. in evolution and developmental biology from the University of Chicago. We also will be joined by Abi Ilumoka, who currently serves as a program director for engineering education in the Division of Undergraduate Education at NSF. And prior to that, she was a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. And finally, I’m happy to introduce Sherry Van Sloun, who is the national intelligence fellow at CFR. Previously, she served as a deputy assistant director of national intelligence for human capital at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for nine years. And she’s also held various positions with the National Security Agency and served in the U.S. Army as a signals analyst for eight years. Sherry is going to be moderating this conversation. She brought this great panel together, and can talk a little bit about her research, and basically the provisions for state and local governments and the CHIPS and Science Act. We will then open it up for questions and turn to all of you. Again, this is a forum where we can share best practices. So we do want to hear from you. You can either write your question or raise your hand when we get there. So, Sherry, over to you to take it away. VAN SLOUN: Thanks so much, Irina. And thanks to you and your staff for putting this webinar together. I really feel lucky to be here today. I want to say thanks to Becky, Bo, David, and Abi for being here as well. I know your schedules are busy, so we really appreciate you taking the time out of your day. And then I want to thank all of you who joined today. I think it’s great to have all of us here to talk about this important topic. So a little context. My last few assignments in the intelligence community revolved around building talent pipelines to meet the emerging demands of intelligence work. So my time here at CFR, I’ve spent some time looking into the implementation of the CHIPS and Science Act, specifically the human capital aspect of the act. My focus has really been around the need to build semiconductor manufacturing talent but, to be clear, the CHIPS and Science Act covers many other STEM workforce advancements and future technologies, from AI, to biotechnology, to quantum computing. So today, we have Becky and Abi here from NSF to share about the broader reach the CHIPS and Science Act gave the NSF regarding cultivating workforce, and then Bo and David to dive into some of the semiconductor manufacturing perspective around talent. So looking forward to this. And I think we’re going to kick it off with going to Becky and Abi at the NSF. Let me start here, and say the NSF has been involved in promoting science for many decades. It’s been active in supporting workforce development through your directorate of STEM education. And what the CHIPS Act legislation did was create the director of technology, innovation, and partnerships. And one of those new programs under that new directorate is the Experiential Learning for Emerging and Novel Technologies, which is the ExLENT program. Which I think, Becky, you helped to create that program. So we’re glad you’re here. So can one of you share how the ExLENT program works, the timelines you’ve laid out, and the impact you’re hoping to see over time? And then specifically maybe you could focus a little bit for a minute on the semiconductor workforce specifically, and how the ExLENT program will help to build this much-needed body of talent for the U.S. SHEARMAN: Sure, Sherry, happy to jump in. You’re correct, I was involved in the development of the ExLENT program. And we are super excited about it. So TIP is—which is the acronym of our new directorate—just celebrated its first birthday very end of the spring. And we’re really in just our first funding cycle of ExLENT. So you read out the full acronym, right? So this is really centered around experiential learning. And we’re named emerging and novel technologies. So emerging technologies really are those technologies that we—you know, we point to the CHIPS and Science Act and say that’s, you know, what we’re interested in funding. But we did keep it kind of open. So, novel technologies, right? We are kind of allowing the community to tell us, look, this may not fall precisely in the line of these emerging technologies, but we need to be building a workforce that can do X, Y, and Z. And we specifically developed this program with a few things in mind. We need to build a workforce that is nimble in its ability to get training as expertise evolves, as our technologies evolve. And we’ve got to engage all Americans in the STEM enterprise, if they’re interested in being in the STEM enterprise. For us to be really competitive, everyone needs to have access to a good STEM education. And then we also built it around the fact that we felt like we really need to be bringing organizations across different sectors together to do this correctly, right? We need to have those experts in education, but we also need to have those industry partners who understand the needs of the industry and the needs of a specific company. So the program is really designed to address those things. It’s very broad. So we allow the applicant—who can be from academia, they can be from the private sector, they can be nonprofits, we’re really trying to reach everybody here. They can say: This is the population we’re trying to reach. So maybe it’s, you know, middle school/high school students. Maybe it’s adult learners at any point in their educational career, and trying to get them hands-on experience that’s going to give them some credential, expose them to something so that they, if they choose, can kind of be on that educational path towards a good-paying job in an emerging tech field. And of course, the semiconductor industry is central to that, right? We don’t have a specific call-out to semiconductors, but we highlight it as one of the emerging technologies. VAN SLOUN: And Becky, thank you. So can you share a little bit more with the audience about, like, how they would go about engaging with you on a proposal? What is the process that folks do there? I know you have calls, but can you explain that a little bit about how a call goes out and then what that looks like once it closes? SHEARMAN: Absolutely. So we have a solicitation out. And if I’m allowed to drop something into the chat, I’m happy to share the link and you can go right to it. And there’s—we have deadlines. In fact, our next deadline is September 14. So if anyone’s really interested and has nothing to do in the next month, you can take a look at the solicitation and consider applying for the program. It outlines—the solicitation will outline everything you need to do but, basically, you’re writing up a proposal, submitting it through our standard process at NSF through a site called research.gov. And then your proposal goes through a merit review process, where we bring in experts from the community that will include people with the expertise in education, expertise in industry. You know, we try to have a very broad cross-sector expertise represented on that panel. And they review all the proposals and give us recommendations and feedback around where we should make our funding decisions. The best thing to do if you go to that solicitation, there are links on that first page to an inbox and to program officers that you can reach out to. A good place to start is just reaching out to them and trying to connect, and have an initial conversation. VAN SLOUN: Thank you. And if I recall, your first grant announcement will be announced soon, right? SHEARMAN: Very soon. VAN SLOUN: And then the call in September will be announced later this year or early next year. Super. OK. Thank you very much, Becky. Bo, let’s move to you and, you know, really kind of diving into semiconductors specifically. You know, your role allows you to see kind of across Micron and how it’s working with partners to build the talent pipeline that you all need for your existing locations and where you’re also expanding at new locations across the country. Can you share a little bit about how Micron has responded to the passing of the CHIPS Act legislation, specifically here in New York? And how you’re tracking that talent pipeline gaps at all levels of the manufacturing lifecycle? MACHAYO: Yeah. Thanks, Sherry, for that question. And it’s great to be a part of this discussion. Per, you know, your conversation, we’re happy at Micron. Thanks to the CHIPS and Science Act and also thanks to the incentives from the, you know, states and localities, we were able to make investments of, you know, in New York, of $100 billion over the course of the next couple of decades. And a big part of that is around how we can address the talent pipeline needs. You know, we’ll have 9,000 direct jobs and over 40,000 indirect jobs due to economic activity that will happen in the central New York region. But we know that all those—you know, that talent won’t be able to come directly from central New York. It will have to be a whole of New York approach, but also a regional approach across the northeast. And so specifically in New York, we’ve, you know, been able to, you know, establish partnerships from what we’re calling the K through gray level, really making sure that from K-12 we’re doing interactive activities and sponsoring what we call chip camps, that are unique to Micron and we’re able to make sure that we are, you know, engaging young K through eight, you know, students to be able to really understand the jobs that are available in semiconductor industry. Another thing that we’re doing specifically in New York is really working on kind of both curriculum development and how we can partner with schools. As a part of our announcement, we made a commitment to doing $10 million into the steam school, which is a local initiative that will focus on both career—or, both technical kind of education, but also kind of an engineering pathway to assure that, you know, we can get students interested in the semiconductor industry early on. We’re also—you know, have half of those jobs are going to be technician jobs, and the other half will be engineering jobs. So how we’re partnering with, you know, local building trades unions through our PLA to make sure that we’re educating folks, establishing certificate programs so that we can make sure that folks who are looking to transition to the semiconductor industry, thanks to the investment that we’re making there, how can folks be part of the Micron experience? And then also, how are we doing that with community colleges and also higher ed institutions, as well? And so we partnered with the SUNY system in New York, and also the CUNY system in New York to make sure that we’re building the pipeline from a community college there. Particularly investing in creating clean rooms at Onondaga Community College and then utilizing the existing clean rooms across the state. We also established a couple of regional networks for New York, especially the Northeast University Semiconductor Network, to really make sure that we’re taking, you know, what individual community colleges and higher ed institutions have to be able to make sure that we’re addressing those gaps. You know, that is—these are kind of examples of ways. And as a matter of fact, earlier this week when I was in central New York we also are able to partner with the local museum, a science and technology museum in central New York, to create a semiconductor exhibit so that kids from K-12 can actually be able to understand what a semiconductor is, what a memory chip is, and multiple different ways and avenues to be able to attract talent to be able to come and to meet the gaps that we have throughout the semiconductor industry. And so those are just a couple of ways in which we’re looking to build partners and to address some of the needs that we’ll have in New York. VAN SLOUN: Thanks, Bo. That’s fantastic. David, I’m going to turn to you now. I just got back from Portland, Oregon last week, where I was able to get a tour of Intel’s fab and their innovation center. And it was really incredible to see firsthand the different kinds of talent needed to make this industry possible. Can you share a little bit about the makeup of Intel’s workforce? I think many people will be surprised that the bulk of it really isn’t Ph.Ds., but how you’re building efforts for a talent pipeline needed for your major investment in Ohio, specifically. I know it was a huge one for you guys. I know, the Ohio State University is kind of the hub of that consortium there, but—which makes me very proud. I’m a Buckeye. But can you talk a little bit about that and what’s happening there? SHAHOULIAN: Sure. Happy to do that. So, first of all, thank you for having me. It is a pleasure to be here. Second, like Bo mentioned, you know, we’re excited about the opportunity the CHIPS and Science Act provides. And, you know, because of that, and the incentives that we’re getting from the federal government and the state governments, you know, we are right now building—expanding all of our sites, and building a new greenfield site in Ohio. So yes—on your first question, yes. People are generally surprised to hear about the makeup of our manufacturing workforce. Let me just—to just give it—summarize it really quickly, right, each of our fabs is generally around 1,500 positions that we create for that fab. About 60 to 70 percent of those jobs are for semiconductor technicians. These are individuals that can have an associate’s degree, but in some cases we don’t even require that. A certificate would do. And in some cases, you know, we hire people with even less than that to be technicians. These are people that oversee and troubleshoot the manufacturing process and then all of the support systems, like the electrical, water, gas, and air filtration systems that, you know, support manufacturing operations. So that’s, like—that’s the bulk of the jobs that we will be creating with our new factories. The other—the remainder is about 20 to 25 percent, you know, individuals with bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering, computer science. And then it’s about, you know, somewhere between 5 and 10 percent individuals with advanced degrees. I will just want to say—just add a little caveat for Oregon, right? Because Oregon is a location where we do manufacture, but we also develop our manufacturing technology, there we do—you know, there is a higher ratio of Ph.Ds. So there, you know, there are more advanced degree folks. Second, with respect to Ohio, we’re very excited about the work that we’re doing there. One of the reasons we chose Ohio as a site was because of the great educational system that already existed there and their history with advanced manufacturing. When we announced that we were going to be building there, we immediately committed $50 million into, sort of, you know, expanding that education ecosystem that already exists. And that’s, you know, modernizing the curricula, creating modules that are semiconductor specific, providing semiconductor manufacturing equipment, helping build clean rooms. These are all the things that are necessary to train individuals and give them, you know, hands-on training in our industry. We’ve already awarded 17.7 million dollars of that. That has gone to eight collaborations involving almost 80 schools across the entire state of Ohio. We’re really proud of that effort. One of them—just to give you two examples—one of them is being led by Columbus State Community College. They’re working with every other community college system in the state of Ohio to create semiconductor technician curricula with shared credits, right, that can be shared across all of the different institutions. There’s another one that’s being led by the Ohio State University, I should have said, The Ohio State University. Forgive me for that. Right, they’re partnering with nine other universities to create an education and research center for the semiconductor industry to lead on innovation and education. So, you know, these are the—of course, the things that are necessary, you know, to create the education ecosystem that will help not only us but our suppliers, and then other semiconductor companies across the country. VAN SLOUN: So do you—thanks, David. Do you think that what you’re doing in Ohio, you’ve got quite the consortium, like you’ve just talked about. Is that going to be enough to be able to source the talent pipeline for that fab and the outlying things that are going to happen around that fab in Ohio? Or is there a way that other—that you’re going to reach into other areas, like Bo mentioned a regional approach, to that space in Ohio? SHAHOULIAN: Yeah, so that is—you know, that is a regional approach, in the sense that we’ve reached out to all of Ohio. We are also—we also have interest from other universities in the rest—you know, the remainder of the region. Purdue, Michigan, you know, other universities in the Midwest. You know, what we’ve asked is for them to help partner with the Ohio universities, and, you know, working on trying to build those partnerships and those collaborations. You know, we’ve also, you know, collaborated with NSF, right? So, you know, when NSF got $200 million to build out the education ecosystem, you know, we know Micron partnered and put some money on the table. We did as well. You know, we matched 50 million dollars in funding to create $100 million partnership with NSF to sort of also bring those opportunities nationwide to any school, not just ones where we’re operating. So NSF has already rolled out two programs with that funding. And, you know, we anticipate they will be rolling out more this year. And, you know, schools anywhere in the country will be able to apply for that funding. VAN SLOUN: That’s fantastic. Thank you very much, David. That’s very helpful, I think, for the audience today. Becky, if we could come back to your or Abi, it seems to me that the U.S. wants to be a leader in this industry, for semiconductors specifically. It’s going to take a village, right? I mean, how do we best prepare the partnerships between private sector, academia, and community organizations to really find ways to bring exposure to this kind of work? I know Micron and Intel are doing their great work, but is there anything that NSF is doing kind of to get this message out and get excitement built around this industry? SHEARMAN: So I’ll start, but then I really do want to invite Abi to join me and add anything she may have. She sits in a different place than I do at NSF. I can at least speak from the from TIPs directorate. I know we’ve been doing a lot. So TIP stands for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships. And we are very much interested in really trying to move emerging tech innovations into practice kind of at speed, at scale. And a big part of that includes making sure we’re thinking about the workforce needed to do that successfully, right? And so everything that’s coming out of TIP is really emphasizing these partnerships. So even when it comes to workforce development, we feel like we’re not going to be able to do this well unless we’re really engaging all the people who bring some sort of expertise to it. And I think when you listen to David and Bo talk about what they’re doing, right, they’re talking about doing this in partnership, in collaboration. And you know, the ExLENT program in particular is—so, I guess, let me start by saying I just—with TIP being a new directorate and all the attention that has brought, we’re trying to bring these different sectors who maybe aren’t used to talking with each other into the same room. And all of our programs that are coming out are doing that, and ExLENT is no exception there. And we are trying to get the community thinking beyond—although, you know, Intel and Micron are absolutely central to the success—but we’re trying to get the—as is, you know, The Ohio State. But we also recognize that if we want to educate the domestic workforce, there’s a lot of other organizations that could bring real value. So we are being very intentional about reaching out to community organizations, to nonprofits that are thinking a lot about reaching specific communities to get folks who would never consider themselves someone who would be in this space, have a job, you know, in a in a semiconductor manufacturing plant, working for Intel, right? It just—it wouldn’t occur to them that that’s something that they would do. We’re trying to create those pathways to reach out and give them some initial exposure and bring them into the fold so the opportunities are there for them, if they want them. And we’re also including those industry partners and the large universities, but we think that the more different perspectives we can get together in a room the better we’re going to be able to diversify the pathways and reduce the barriers to those jobs. And that’s what ExLENT is really trying to do. And, like I said, I’d love to—I’d love to give Abi an opportunity to share anything from her perspective at NSF, if she wants. ILUMOKA: Thank you, Rebecca. I agree. I agree with everything Rebecca has said. What I would like to add is that in addition to ensuring that the content is being provided, and experiential learning is being provided to students across the spectrum of academic levels, we in the education directorate are focused on ensuring that evidence-based teaching and learning practices are brought into the classrooms. We want to ensure that the right environments are available to students, the right kinds of support for learning, right kinds of assessment. And so we have partnered with TIP on some innovative opportunities, known as DCLs, dear colleague letters. These are opportunities that bring together programs in the education directorate and programs in the TIP directorate to fund investigators that are focused on not just teaching, in the case of semiconductors, how to design chips, but also how to teach the design of chips. I taught the design of chips for twenty years before I joined NSF, so I know exactly how challenging that is. You know, designing structures that you can’t see, essentially, and you’re having to refine and redesign to ensure that they work—to test and ensure that they work. And so in the education directorate, we have held a number of events to get the public excited about chip design, and chip design education. In May, we had a workshop to which we invited folks in academia, all the way from universities to kindergarten. And we had a wonderful attendance. Over three hundred people showed up for the workshop. It was a two-day workshop. And folks were invited to brainstorm on how to teach microelectronics at all levels. So a lot of interesting information came out of that. We had participants from industry, Intel, Micron, and so forth. We had participants from government and from academia. So that was a very successful event. We have a second webinar on the eighth of August along the same lines. So we have currently two DCLs. And I’ll put the links in the chat, dear colleague letters. One is called Advancing Microelectronics Education, which looks at ways in which you can actually teach this stuff to folks who don’t have the extensive math, and physics, and chemistry background. The second thing we’re doing is making sure that we integrate these opportunities with existing programs in the education directorate. For example, the IUSE program is Improving Undergraduate STEM Education. It is a well-established program in the directorate, and it looks at innovations for teaching and learning in STEM in general. Now, by bringing this program into play with the ExLENT program, then we attract investigators that have an interest not just in the content, the chip design, but also in how to teach the chip design. Now, that confluence brings up very exciting, very interesting proposals on ways in which you can present this material to folks who are not experts at all, or are not in the domain. So I hope that answers your question on how to get folks excited. We have a couple of workshops and webinars scheduled going forward that will draw in participants from all over the country. And we generally keep pretty good notes on what goes on at those workshops, the kinds of questions, the kinds of ideas that are shared, and move forward on those to help the community grow. VAN SLOUN: Abi, that’s fantastic. Thank you very much. It’s really helpful. If you could put those things in—the links in the chat, that would be fantastic for the folks listening in today. Irina, it’s 3:30. Do you want me to turn this over to you for Q&A? FASKIANOS: Yes, I think that would be great. Let’s go to all of you now for questions. You can either write your question in the Q&A box. If you do that, please include your affiliation. Or you can raise your hand, and I’ll recognize you, and then you can ask your question. And don’t be shy. We really want to hear from you. Right now, we have no questions, which I think people are just collecting their thoughts. So Sherry, if you have one—another question while people are thinking about what they want to ask. VAN SLOUN: I’m actually—oh, ahead. FASKIANOS: We do have one question. Raised hand from Usha Reddi. And if you could identify yourself and unmute yourself. And you’re still muted. There you go. Q: Thank you. So my name is—I’m from Kansas. I’m Senator Usha Reddi, but I’m also a public school teacher, elementary school. And I also am part of several nonprofits which advocate for STEM learning, especially for young women and girls. So I wanted to know, can anybody apply for these NSF grants? And do you have to be a doctorate or affiliated with a university? Can it be a teacher? Can it be a nonprofit organization? Who is eligible for these types of grants? SHEARMAN: Sure. Can I just jump in? VAN SLOUN: Yeah, please do Becky. SHEARMAN: OK. So that is a great question. I’m so glad that you asked that. So I guess in reality it depends. NSF historically, you know, makes grants to academic institutions. We are trying to change that quite a bit. So for a lot of our—for a lot of our funding opportunities you can be something other than an academic institution to submit. But you would have to look at the eligibility, right? So some are some types of organizations are not eligible. For example, the federal government can’t apply for an NSF grant, right? But nonprofits, some local government offices, if they’re related to education, can apply for these for these funding opportunities. So those opportunities definitely exist. And if there’s a program that you’re specifically interested in, I would encourage you to reach out to a program officer associated with that program. And if you can sort of Google the program if you happen to know it—if you’re familiar with the program, it’ll direct you to a contact. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Let’s go next to the raised hand from Mayor Melissa Blaustein. Q: Hi, everyone. Thanks for a great session. I really appreciate it. And actually, Sherry, I was so happy to see—(inaudible)—intelligence. I’m coming to you from the Naval Postgraduate School. I’m a student at CHDS right now, the master’s program for local governments on homeland security. And in that vein, I’m wondering—I’m from a smaller municipality. Sausalito is quite small, but very well known. And we don’t often think about the issues of how we can attract hiring for these types of industries, but I’d love to hear maybe from Bo and David a little bit about what you’re seeing smaller communities or policies do to attract these type of people, or perhaps if remote working is being qualified or considered for folks who want to pursue a career in chips and semiconductors. And any advice any of you have as well for smaller local governments to attract a conversation around this type of topic. Thanks again for your time. Really appreciate it. VAN SLOUN: Bo, do you want to take that first? And then, David, if you want to chime in, that’d be great. MACHAYO: Yeah, no, I think—so we are investing in, you know, Boise and in—Boise and in in central New York, and in Onondaga County, but in a small town called Clay. But one of the things that we have been—we had found successful, and I’ll focus on the New York model, was working with the state and the locality to come up with something called a Community Investment Framework. So it was a partnership between Micron, the state, and the locality to really look at how are we investing in things that the community needs. Everything from housing, to workforce, to childcare, and really kind of focusing on what those barriers to entry were, to ensure that folks could be able to work in the semiconductor network. And then also using that as a model to say, what around—like, what will we be able to do similar to that model in Boise? And how do we make sure it’s a whole-of-state approach and also kind of a regional approach to invest in these barriers to entry to the semiconductor network? And how can Micron do—Micron play their role in that? And so in the—(inaudible)—in particular, we decided to invest $250 million of that $500 million over the—and then committed to raising the other 150 (million dollars). And the state put in 100 (million dollars), and the locality also put in some of those dollars to ensure that we meet those needs and those barriers. And to be able to make sure that over the course of the next couple of decades, as we implement our project, that we are providing and addressing—whether that’s a skills gap, or a barriers to workforce gap, or providing or investing in childcare or whatnot—to make sure that we’re able to attract talent from across the area. And then also making sure to kind of work with our localities and other localities that are surrounding to make sure that we’re also partnering with them to do the exact same thing, and to replicate that model. And that’s something that we’ve found successful, is that just intentional partnership to make sure that we are kind of building up that next generation of workforce to have those skills that are necessary. But I’ll turn it over to David to talk a little bit about what Intel is doing. SHAHOULIAN: Yeah, thanks, Bo. You know, I don’t want to speak for Micron. I assume this is also true. We sort of take a both-and approach to building up the education ecosystem in across the country, right? I mean, we have national partnerships. You know, like Micron, Intel partnered with NSF. We put in money, along with government money, to create, you know, grant opportunities for schools across the country to apply for if they, you know, wanted to get into the semiconductor space, or they wanted to, you know, up their game in that space. And then both companies, right, we also have regional partnerships, right? Particularly in the communities in which we, you know, build facilities, we dedicate a lot of our effort. Partly because, you know, the reality is with technicians, you know, community colleges are only going to build technician programs for their communities if there are facilities nearby where their community members can work. You know, you don’t see community colleges far from semiconductor spaces actually bringing on semiconductor programs, you know, if there isn’t a job anywhere in in that area for the community members who go to that school. So that is—so that is why we worked really closely with the local community colleges in Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, now in Ohio, to build programs near the facilities. That said, you know, we are happy to share their certificate programs, the curricula, the—you know, the associate degree program curricula with any community college that that wants to build that. You know, I’ll say we’re also partners with the American Semiconductor Academy, right? Which is, you know, along with the SEMI Foundation is working to try to build curricula that is shared across, you know, all universities so that, you know, again universities, and community colleges, and other educational institutions can basically start or upgrade their semiconductor-related curricula much more easily. So I just want to say that, you know, there are—there are both opportunities near where we are, and national opportunities as well. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. So we have a written question from Shawn Neidorf. What is the career path for a person who comes in as a semiconductor processing technician? What does a career in semiconductors look like for a person with an associate’s or less education? And then a related comment/question from Alison Hicks, who is the mayor of Mountain View, a Silicon Valley city and home of Google headquarters. The big thing I hear from constituents regarding barriers to jobs is getting a first job after getting an engineering degree. People tell me there are 100 more applicants for many, if not most, jobs, and they can barely even get interviews. They feel their resumes are being auto-screened out if they don’t have a degree from Stanford, Berkeley, et cetera. So they rarely make it even the first step of the hiring process, let alone getting a job. Can your programming do anything about that? I know engineers who give up and don’t even work in the field. They’re not just applying in the Bay Area. They’re applying throughout the United States. So if you could speak to both of those, that would be great. SHAHOULIAN: Bo, do you want me to go first, or do you want to do it? MACHAYO: You can take it first. SHAHOULIAN: You know, I’ll just go very quickly. So, first of all, you know, at least the engineers in the semiconductor space, particularly electrical engineers, I mean, that the unemployment rate for electrical engineers right now is, I think, at 1 percent. I mean, it is full employment. So we are desperate for talent. (Laughs.) So I’m happy to have a conversation offline. I don’t know whether the engineers you’re speaking to have semiconductor skills or not. But, you know, we have strategic partnerships with many universities across the country. And that goes from the MITs and Berkeleys of the world to, you know, the Arizona States and Oregon States, or, you know, an Ohio State now, where we have two—we have partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities and other MSIs to help build their engineering and computer science programs. And we hire directly from those, and we sponsor undergraduate research and things like that to really kind of build the talent pipeline. I would just say, for technicians, I—you know, the technicians I’ve met love the job, right? It’s a different lifestyle than I think many other jobs, right? It’s like, basically, they do these rotating weeks where they do three days on four days off, or four days on three days off, so you got like three or four days in a row off, and then, you know, they work either 36 or, like, 40-some hours a week in those jobs. They are jobs that, you know, we have—you know, we’re not paying six-figure starting salaries, but we have lots of technicians who do earn, with an associate’s degree or even less, more than six—I mean, you know, over 100,000 (dollars) a year. And that’s just base salary. You know, with us you’re getting stock options, you’re getting annual and quarterly bonuses. So it is, again, a really good life. And we have people with, you know, high school diplomas who are earning over six figures—you know, who are earning six figures. MACHAYO: Yeah so, you know, I’ll add to what David was saying. For us, in terms of what does a career look like, you have your technician pathways, you’ve got your engineering pathways. But, you know, holistically for us for to attract this next generation of talent and to also be able to get folks who are looking to transition from an industry and come to Micron, you know, we want to make sure that, you know, the jobs that are available at Micron, are skill-based. And so not necessarily looking at the levels of degrees of what folks have, but to be able to make sure that the skills can easily translate to work at Micron. So for example, you know, we’ve been really successful in this with the veterans community, where we have about a two times higher national average in terms of hiring veterans than kind of other tech companies as well. And so being able to attract those folks, not only because they align with, you know, the skill set that we have, but also the values that Micron has and, you know, the values that are aligned throughout the entire semiconductor industry as well. We also are able to utilize our existing footprint to be able to have folks have the opportunities at different fab locations across the U.S. A great thing that we’ll be able to do is having our, you know, fab in Manassas—in Manassas, Virginia, our R&D site and our new manufacturing fab in Idaho, and then also our four fabs that would be in New York. Having the ability for folks to go from site to site, and to be able to learn the different aspects, both from the kind of legacy fabs to the—to the leading edge as well, on both the R&D. And then also our international footprint as well. And so, we have that—you know, we are looking at this as an opportunity to be able to ensure that we, you know, allow more folks to be a part of the semiconductor industry, but also, you know, making sure that we’re—you know, as we create, you know, the 50,000 jobs in New York, the, you know, 17,000 jobs in in Idaho, looking at it from a regional approach. You know, Intel will be making—has made announcements across the country as well. So have other folks in the semiconductor industry. And so we know it’s going to need to be an all-hands approach that we’ll be able—that, you know, we need to make—think about things as regional, both northwest and northeast, and, you know, making sure that we’re incorporating, you know, everyone to be able to be a part of this industry. And that’s going to be, you know, us working with localities like the ones you’re part of, and the institutions as well, to be able to make sure that we are attracting talent early on, and then also making sure that, you know, we’re addressing, and having, and equipping the skill sets necessary to come and work into the industry. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. The next written question is from Gail Patterson-Gladney, Van Buren County commissioner in Michigan. Where the materials come from for the semiconductors? Are they recycled after use? I do not know much about the semiconductor, but am willing to learn more. Where do I educate myself and community members about programs? VAN SLOUN: Can we go to David for that? And we’ll start with David. SHAHOULIAN: If I had the answers to those questions, I’d be happy to answer them. (Laughs.) I am the workforce policy lead. And so I don’t know about our materials, and I just—yeah. I’m happy to let Bo try to take it. MACHAYO: (Laughs.) Yeah, so from a supplier standpoint, you know, there’s going to be materials suppliers, there’s going to be, you know, chemical suppliers that will be needed for the semiconductor industry to be successful. A huge part of that will be, you know, how successful are we going to be—the Microns, the Intels, the Samsungs, the TSMCs of the world, of making sure that we’re investing in building up these fabs that are needed to manufacture folks. And then ultimately the suppliers will need to be able to kind of co-locate around us, and also make sure that we’re equipping those talent—those folks that are going to be at, you know, all of our fabs. And we’ll need all of those suppliers, both chemical and material suppliers, to be effective. And so, you know, those folks are constantly—I’ll speak for Micron, but I think this is probably true for Intel as well—will be at our fabs throughout the duration of our construction phases, and as we get chips out the doors. And are important to kind of continue to make sure that we have the leading-edge chips that are coming out of their facilities. So, you know, happy to—there’s a supplier page on Micron’s site that you’re more than—you’re more than welcome to visit to kind of learn about the suppliers. We’ve been doing webinars both kind of regionally and throughout the state as well, to be able to, you know, talk to folks about what’s going to be needed as we kind of implement our two projects, our two investments in the U.S. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take a question from Eno Mondesir, who is executive health officer in the health department in Brockton, Mass. If you can unmute yourself. Q: Good afternoon. I am posing this question perhaps to Bo or to David, or anyone. I wonder if—how do you see AI affecting hiring human subjects? Maybe not now, but maybe two to five years down the road? SHAHOULIAN: Is your question—sorry, you don’t mind, you know, is your question about AI in the hiring process when it comes to screening applicants, for example? Or do you mean AI, you know, potentially replacing— Q: I mean replacing human labor force. SHAHOULIAN: Yeah. Well, let me just say, I mean, I think all of the semiconductor companies see AI as a value-add, right? You know, these are very complex—you know, designing and manufacturing semiconductors is the most difficult human endeavor on the planet, or among them, right? I mean, it is the most complicated process there is. So to the—to the degree that AI can help us perfect chip designs, perfect software and coding that goes with those, you know, discover flaws, those things, you know, those are absolutely beneficial to the industry. You know, at this point in time, we don’t foresee that, you know, really supplanting, you know—(laughs)—our employees, right? I mean, you need workers, again. You know, fabs, right—again, every factory, I just pointed out, creates at least 1,500 to 2,000 jobs. A lot of the work that’s done in the fab is already automated, right? You have robots that move the chips around. The lithography tools, you know, themselves—the etching tools, the chemical layering, you know, all of that happens basically automatically. The work is for, you know, people, right, that is all about maintaining that process, you know, troubleshooting, discovering flaws, tuning the machines. I mean, that work will continue, right? We’re not at a point where that work gets supplanted anytime soon. I don’t know if, Bo, you want to add anything. VAN SLOUN: Bo, do you want to add anything to that? MACHAYHO: Yeah, you know, I agree. I think the job—the economic impact and the jobs that we’ve relayed on the figures for our investments in both Boise and New York, we anticipate, you know, remain the same. And to make sure—and we know that, you know, AI is an important thing kind of moving forward in the semiconductor industry, and for Micron particularly. You know, memory chips are going to be important for AI, and in that conversation. But really believe and have seen, you know, throughout the globe the economic impact that’s been made from the investment of the semiconductor industry in terms of jobs, both direct and indirect jobs, and believe that would continue. FASKIANOS: Great. So we have a written question—or, comment from David Di Gregorio, who’s an administrator at Tenafly High School, and also as a councilman in Englewood Cliffs. And he wants to work with you all. He’s responsible for engineering and design. So I will share his contact information with you all after this. We have a written—or, sorry, a raised hand from Michael Semenza in the office of Representative Puppolo. If you want to go next, and unmute yourself. There you go. Q: Hello. Good afternoon. Are you able to hear me? FASKIANOS: We can hear you. Yes, we can. Go ahead. Q: OK, great. I apologize. Would you be able to repeat the question real quick? FASKIANOS: Oh, I thought you were asking a question. You had raised your hand? Q: Oh, I don’t know how that happened. I’m sorry. FASKIANOS: Oh, OK. No problem. That’s, you know, technology, it’s sometimes—we’ll go next to Senator Javier Loera Cervantes. Q: Hello? FASKIANOS: Yes, we can hear you. Q: Hi, my name’s Anelli (ph). I’m actually the digital director representing Senator Javier Loera Cervantes from the state of Illinois. First, I’d just like to say thank you to everyone who did come out today, because I know this is a sort of the first step, and taking initiatives to our curriculums, to our districts. We did discuss a lot education. And I just had a quick question. Especially for New York and sort of your approaches to discussing with principals how to bring these initiatives to the schools, when you essentially decide which districts to sort of work with, what does that—what does that approach look like? Do you sort of target low-income communities? Ones that just kind of tend to work more vigilantly with your company? Or just sort of sort of what’s the approach that you take when you want to bring these initiatives and change of curriculums to the districts in New York? MACHAYO: Yeah, so it’s been a kind of an all-hands approach. Obviously, we want to make sure that we are investing in the community in which we are going to be at, but know that especially in New York it’ll be a kind of an all-hands and all-state effort, both kind of central New York, where we’re located, downstate in the city, and then also in Albany, and Buffalo, and Rochester, and really an all-encompassing approach. And so, you know, we both work with the New York State Department of Education and local—our local K-12 superintendents and school systems to be able to make sure that we’re identifying and sharing exactly what is needed in terms of curriculum development, but also how are we spurring the interest of—to make sure that we’re getting a diverse set of employers and workforce, not only to be interested in the semiconductor industry and working directly for Micron, but also for the suppliers and the other indirect jobs that will be associated with Micron that are going to be important for Micron to thrive and succeed there. And so it is working with kind of everyone, and identifying, in New York, you know, a handful of places right now that we can have a prototype. And knowing—and then expanding, and knowing, and understanding that this project is going to, you know, take a couple of decades to make sure that we’re—to make sure that we are implementing our project correctly, both kind of in in New York and then also in Boise. And so knowing that it’ll expand, and the partnerships will expand as well throughout the entire state. VAN SLOUN: Irina, are there any more questions? FASKIANOS: Yes. We have a question from Ernest Abrogar, who is the—let’s see, I have lost it—the research specialist at Oklahoma Department of Commerce. How can suppliers to semiconductor manufacturers participate to provide educational or practicum opportunities to those areas that don’t have a major fab facility nearby? VAN SLOUN: David, do you want to—do you want to take a first shot at that? SHAHOULIAN: Sure. Look, I mean, we have suppliers in every state in the union, and the territories as well. So, you know, we partner with our suppliers in many different ways. You know, we work with suppliers, you know, to grow their businesses, to improve their practices, to, you know, ensure compliance, right? And we work with them also on workforce, you know, development strategies as well. You know, we do that. A lot of our suppliers are co-located or near located to our facilities, but a lot of them are not, I guess most are not. And so we are happy to partner them on these efforts. Again, there are—you know, we’re happy to share, you know, the curriculum, the modules, the things that we have designed in partnership with the schools that have been our partners, right? We’re happy to share that with other educational institutions. So if there’s, you know, a curricula or something that you, you know, want to—you know, want to take or modify, you know, or expand on in Oklahoma, you know, we’re happy to assist with that. VAN SLOUN: Great. Bo, you have anything to add? MACHAYHO: Yeah, no, I’d share that too. I mean, I think anything that you—anything that you’re doing in Oklahoma, or any state in the country, if you’re focusing on, you know, education and investing in semiconductor education, if you are focusing on, you know, incentives for suppliers in certain states, and are looking to attract that part of the industry, I think, you know, we’d be happy to talk to you and figure out how we can kind of partner together in states—in states that we are currently investing in for the manufacturing side. But understand that, you know, we’ll need to also work with other states to make sure that we have the suppliers and their downstream suppliers that will be helpful for us to be successful. FASKIANOS: So, we have one other question that just came in from council member Anita Barton. Do either of your companies plan to get together with any universities in Penna? SHAHOULIAN: Not sure. I understand that. Universities—say the last part? FASKIANOS: Companies plan to get together with any universities in Penna. Maybe Pennsylvania? I’m not— VAN SLOUN: I’m thinking that’s what it is, yeah. FASKIANOS: Yeah, I’m thinking it’s probably Pennsylvania. MACHAYO: So I can take that. I mean, we—so we launched our—along with the NSF director, and Senator Schumer, and our CEO, Sanjay, and, you know, some of our other leadership team, we were able to launch the Northeast University Semiconductor Network. And there are universities that are a part of that network that are based in Pennsylvania. And we are kind of—again, understand that it’s going to be a regional approach to be able to attract the semiconductor folks—or, the next generation of semiconductor workforce to work at Micron. And so happy to partner in that way as well. And we also just recently launched a northwest one as well to kind of do the same thing, look at states within our footprint region to be able to make sure that we’re attracting the workforce that’s needed. FASKIANOS: Great. VAN SLOUN: David—(inaudible)—on Pennsylvania, or? SHAHOULIAN: You know, I know that we have been in some conversations with Pennsylvanian institutions. I cannot tell you right now which ones they are, because I have not been part of those conversations. But, you know, given our proximity—the proximity to Ohio, I know that in the western part of the state, there has been some interest. I would just say, again, we are participating with NSF in, you know, ensuring that there is funding available to, you know, schools nationwide. VAN SLOUN: Thanks, David. So I think we only have a few minutes left. And I’m going to turn to Irina to close this out. But I just wanted to say thank you to, you know, Becky, David, Bo. You guys have been fantastic in sharing information that’s going to help, I think, across the entire United States thinking about semiconductors, and the need to build this pipeline and get excitement around this. And I’m really excited to hear about some of the programs you all have going on. So thank you so much. Irinia, I’m going to turn to you to close us out here. But thank you for joining us. FASKIANOS: Yes. And thank you all. This is a great hour discussion. We appreciate you taking the time, and for all the great comments and questions. We will be sending out links to the resources that were mentioned. And we will go back to Becky, David and Bo, and Sherry for anything else that they want to include, along with a link to the—this webinar and the transcript. And as always, we encourage you to visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for more expertise and analysis. And you can also email [email protected] to let us know how CFR can support the important work that you are doing in your communities. So thank you again for joining us today. We appreciate it. VAN SLOUN: Thanks, everyone.

Panelists discuss the cost of China’s zero-COVID policy, the country’s dwindling economic growth, and the consequences of China’s economic slowdown at home and on its international economic relations.

Mitchell Landrieu—senior advisor and infrastructure coordinator at the White House, former lieutenant governor of Louisiana, and former mayor of New Orleans— discuss the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) with CFR Adjunct Senior Fellow Heidi Crebo-Rediker and share best practices for coordinating efforts among various state and federal agencies, implementing resilient and sustainable technologies, and applying for the state and local grant programs. TRANSCRIPT FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations State and Local Officials Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. We are delighted to have all of you, participants from fifty states and five U.S. territories, with us for today’s conversation, which is on the record. CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, publisher, and educational institution focusing on U.S. foreign policy. CFR is also the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Through our State and Local Officials Initiative, CFR serves as a resource on international issues affecting the priorities and agendas of state and local governments by providing analysis on a wide range of policy topics. We’re delighted to have with us today Ms. Crebo-Rediker and Coordinator Landrieu to talk about infrastructure in the conversation coming. We have shared their bios with you, so I will just give you a few highlights. Ms. Crebo-Rediker is an adjunct senior fellow at CFR and a partner at international capital strategies. Prior to coming to CFR, she served at the U.S. Department of State as its first chief economist. And she was also the chief of international finance and economics for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Coordinator Mitch Landrieu is currently serving as senior advisor to the president and responsible for overseeing the coordination and implementation of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed into law last year. Prior to joining the Biden administration, Coordinator Landrieu served two years as mayor of New Orleans, where he was instrumental in helping the city recover from Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. He also spent sixteen years as a representative in Louisiana statehouse and was elected lieutenant governor of Louisiana from 2004 to 2010. So thank you for being with us today. I’m going to turn it over now to you, Heidi, for the conversation. CREBO-REDIKER: So thanks, Irina. And thank you to everybody who joined today. It’s quite a—it’s quite a crowd. And thank you very much to Mitch Landrieu. He’s a very busy man. He has been in charge of the federal rollout of a very large, historic investment in American infrastructure, the 1.2 trillion dollars. So it’s part formula funding. That’s a system that we’re used to. But part of this has been standing up and coordinating new programs that add multiple and address multiple sometimes new policy objectives that we’ve talked about on some of these calls before, like equity, and resilience, whether it’s climate or cyber, and paying attention to underserved communities. And also to get money out the door fast, because we really need to rebuild our infrastructure. So it’s complicated. You’ve tried to make it easy and transparent. We’ve talked about the build.gov website and the guidebook that you’ve put together on how to use these funds, what to apply for, whom to contact, how to navigate all the myriad of federal agencies that are involved in the deployment. And we hope people have used it. But there are a lot of people who have questions on this call today. I’m just going to kick it off with a question of where we are. We’re almost one year in. What are—you know, what have you seen? What are the lessons learned that can be helpful to the people on this call? And I’ll hand it over to you. Thank you so much. LANDRIEU: Heidi, thanks so much. And thanks, everybody, for joining us. And of course, thank you to the Council on Foreign Relations for hosting this event. I’m a big fan of CFR, followed the organization for many years. The director Richard Haass is a great thinker. He wrote a book that I completely agree with, which is that you cannot be strong abroad if you’re not strong at home. And it argues for making sure that in order for us to really protect our national security that foreign policy is a two-headed coin. One of them is domestic policy—or, I should say—our national security is a two-headed coin. One of them is our foreign policy; one is our domestic policy. But they both depend on each other so that America can be strong, and America can actually, what we like to say, win the 21st century. So it’s critically important. If you talk to any of our major leaders that are identified as national security folks, they will tell you that our infrastructure at home is a necessary component part—our physical infrastructure, our human infrastructure—to America being able to meet its obligations on the world stage. So with that framework in mind, it’s also critically important, if America is going to continue to lead the world economically, to make sure that America itself has the tools it needs. So President Biden has come in and, unlike any other president that has served at least in the last sixty to seventy years, passed what we call a once-in-a-generation opportunity to actually catch back what we have not been doing well for the past couple of years, and prepare ourselves for the future, by investing in rebuilding our roads, and our bridges, and our airports, and our ports, all of our waterways, some of our great lakes. Making sure that American citizens, each and every one of them, has access to high-speed internet to make sure that people have equal access to knowledge and can engage in economic development, generational growth, precision agriculture, telemedicine—things that we all know are such a necessity now. As if you didn’t know before COVID, we certainly know it now. Making sure that we prepare ourselves for a clean energy economy. I think everybody knows by now and, you know, our thoughts and prayers as we—as we record this conversation are with the people of Puerto Rico who are being battered once again by another terrible storm as if they haven't had enough already. We continue to deal with the issues of climate change in a real and an impactful way that's going to have a compelling impact on nation’s security, as well as the livelihood of people in American and people outside of America. And then finally, just preparing ourselves for clean energy economy that we know we're going to need. All of those things are part of this bill. Now, we’re ten months into this. We’ve hit the ground running. My team is basically on doing three things. We're building a team to be able to deliver things to the ground. We’re getting the money out of the door. And then we’re trying to tell the story. In the last ten months, we’ve pushed over $110 billion out of the door. And as you said when you when introduced me, there are basically two ways that this money is getting to the ground. Number one, 90 percent of this is going to be deployed by the governors in the mayors to the ground. So we have to get it to them. They’re going to get two ways. One is through formula funding, which should be very familiar to anybody that has worked with the federal government since at least Ronald Reagan has been in office, where the states were really the portals through which federal money came down through pipelines. We basically put money in those pipelines and sent them directly to the governors, whether it's roads, or bridges, or airport, or ports. That's about half of the money. And so for those folks on the local level that are looking for this, you have to engage with your state representatives and your state senators, your congressional delegation, and your governors the same way you would historically engage with them on advocating for money to be spent in your communities. But there’s another half of the bill. And that is money that is going to be directly sent to small communities, medium-sized communities, large communities, tribal communities based on competitive programs that exist in every pocket of this bill. Now, this bill has 375 programs, 125 of them are brand-new, and they span the entire spectrum of what I just talked about earlier. I won’t go through it again, but it basically touches every portion of the bill that you’ll be able to compete for. You can find most of the information about all of these programs in build, B-U-I-L-D, dot gov. It’s got a page for each one of the programs, and it describes what it is, how to get it, who’s got it, what the deadlines are for the applications. And it gives you a pretty good feel for what’s going to happen. There’s also a (book ?) for folks in rural America on rural.gov. And then for folks that want to sign up for high-speed internet, you can go to internet.gov, because our team is trying to come to where people are, and find you where you are, and not wait for you to say how the heck do I get to this money. So that’s a fifty-thousand-foot, very quick view of the most historic piece of legislation that’s been passed in the last fifty years. And I’ll turn it back over to you for further questions. CREBO-REDIKER: So the—so the build.gov website is actually—it’s got a huge amount of information, and all the different programs, and deadlines, and the federal agencies that are involved. But can you talk a little bit about the technical resources that are also available to state and local governments? Because a lot of people don’t know where to start, especially for these funds that you have to compete for. Their offices are overwhelmed. They don’t have the resources to actually fill out the applications. And many of the underserved communities that you’re actually targeting are the ones with the most limited personnel and expertise. And the formulas in the past haven’t necessarily served these communities so well. So just if you could talk a little bit about what resources are out there for state and local governments. LANDRIEU: Well, thank you for that question. You know, when this bill passed—when you say it’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity, it also means that it hasn’t happened in a long time. And so I would have to just give you my opinion that we in the country—I mean, the federal, state, local governments, the not-for-profit sector, the faith-based communities and, you know, other folks—don’t have good muscle memory in how to get money to the ground to do big things, or to do consequential things. And we’re relearning all of these things. So one of my challenges, as the senior advisor and coordinator, is to make sure that the federal government itself, all of these Cabinet secretaries, are using all of their power, all their intellectual capital to coordinate, so that when people want to access us we’re actually user friendly. Which is why we’ve had over fourteen Cabinet meetings, we’re having our fifteenth actually this Thursday coming up, to make sure that we’re communicating. Secondly, I also knew that the federal government has to coordinate very overtly and aggressively and offensively with the states. So on behalf of the president, I’ve spoken to each one of the governors in the country. They have at my request, at the president’s urging, appointed an infrastructure coordinator. And then we began to talk to the mayors and to those organizations that actually are responsive to the question you asked. So the National League of Cities, the National Association of Counties, the United States Conference of Mayors, all of those organizations have been read into and actually have, quote/unquote, “gone to infrastructure school” to understand how technically to get this stuff to the ground. On top of that, we have reached out to the philanthropic organizations across the country—the Ford Foundation, Kresge—led by Bloomberg and the Emerson Collective and a whole host of other ones, who I did not mean to leave out but it would be too long for me to mention every one of them, who are really working through how philanthropy can organize themselves around getting technical assistance to these small communities to actually help them figure out how to do it. I would also encourage everybody on this call to think about two things: How to access the universities in your area that can help you facilitate communications between and amongst all the organizations that I just told you about, and then finally to think about workforce development. One of the things that’s immediately—two things immediately obvious. There’s some people who need technical assistance finding all this stuff, which is what we just spoke to. But the other is just asking yourself the basic question, how do I connect the guy down the street that’s not working to a job that I understand is coming because of this bill? So if you think about just a clean energy side for this, and moving into half the country buying an electric vehicle by a certain date, whatever that might be, you have to start thinking to yourself: Well, if I’m going to buy an electric vehicle, where am I going to plug it in? Where is that going to be? Who’s going to put these EV charging stations in the ground? Who’s actually going to build them? How are we going to train people to build these things? Or you might think to yourself, well, wow, if we’re going to have these electric vehicles, who’s going to manufacture these batteries? Where are these batteries actually going to get manufactured? Well, in the last couple of months, because of the president’s bill, billions of dollars have been noticed by big, big companies that are going to build these manufacturing facilities and these batteries. So people are going to have to put them together. Who are those people? How are they going to be trained? What’s the curriculum to train them? Those kinds of things. And then finally, if you really back it up and ask yourself, well, if we’re going to have electric vehicles and we need electrical vehicle charging stations, and we need batteries, where are we going to get the source material to actually make these things, these critical minerals? Somebody has to mine them. So all of those things have to get done. If you think about high-speed internet and say to yourself, well, who’s going to lay the high-speed internet, and ask yourself, how many people do we need? We have about an 800,000-person gap over the next ten years about how much we have to lay and who’s going to lay them. All of these things portend that we have to redesign our workforce development strategies in our respective communities. And I will end on this point: I just told you that we have a national concern. But the answers are local. So in each one of the neighborhoods of the people who are on this call listening, you have to ask yourself: What’s going to happen in my city? What’s going to happen in my town? What’s going to happen in my county? What are the jobs that are coming our way? What is the governor and the mayor doing to help coordinating? Who are the universities and the workforce training centers? Who are the community and technical colleges that are available? What is the core curriculum that we have to design in order to pair the people that we know with the jobs that we think are coming our way? That has to be put together. And everybody that’s listening on this call is going to have a responsibility for actually designing what that looks like as this money gets down to the ground. That’s not something that the federal government is going to design. We’re providing the money. We’re providing the programs. We’re providing the guidance. But the work has to get done on the ground, where everybody on this call lives. CREBO-REDIKER: So before we start taking questions, and I hope you will all use the raise hand function, we’ll go through the list. And I think what we’ve learned on previous calls, that we actually—we have a lot of know-how and experience on the call, and that we learn a lot from people from all over the country on the ground, and they learn from each other in this forum, because innovation is often more local than federal, no offense. And the— LANDRIEU: No offense taken. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly—that’s exactly—one thing I’ll—not only no offense taken, that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be. And if we set this system up right and we create this virtuous cycle of innovation, those ideas on the ground will kind of percolate back up and then out again. So it’s a great thing. CREBO-REDIKER: So that was my question, how do you—how do these people deliver feedback to you? Because a lot—especially with the new programs you have new regulations, you have new coordination functions and agencies. Is there some way for state and local governments to get feedback to you on how the programs are working, so that it can sort of be an evolving process? LANDRIEU: Well, first of all, constantly. Right now there’s always—whenever these programs get put in place, there’s always a comment period that all of the agencies on the federal level have to receive from the private sector, the public sector, what they think the rules and regulations ought to be. And there are constant feedback loops that we’re working into the design of the programs. As I mentioned to you earlier, I’m in contact with all the governors and all their infrastructure coordinators. And I’m in contact with all of the mayors in America and the county executives. And of course, their respective department heads. Let’s just say, in a city, the head of the Department of Public Works in, you know, Austin, Texas, or the head of the state transportation office in Colorado. We’re constantly getting feedback from them about what works and doesn’t work. So the folks that are on the ground, you ought to be pushing that up and pushing that out through those organizations. On top of that, all of the websites for all of the different departments have feedback loops where you guys can chime in and tell us what’s working and what’s not working. This is going to—we’re iterating every day. And as I said, it’s my personal opinion that the country’s gotten out of the habit of doing big things well together. And there’s a lot of coordination that has to take place before we actually get it right. And so I would encourage people to give constructive counsel and advice about how to move forward. CREBO-REDIKER: Well, that’s it for my questions. The first—the first hand up was Sandra Tooley, who’s a city council member from Valdosta, Georgia. Do you want to—Sandra, do you want to unmute yourself, tell us—you know, I just said where you’re from and what your affiliation is—but what your question is? And thanks for raising your hand. Q: Well, my name—I am Councilwoman Sandra Tooley, city of Valdosta, Georgia. And I was listening to a lot of the comments and information that you were giving us about how we can help some of these smaller businesses or smaller areas who don’t have access to—I guess, get the information about how to, you know, ask for these funds, and everything like that. They are getting left so much behind that we don’t have the education out there for them. I know they say it’s—some people say it’s out there, but how do we get it out to the people in the smaller businesses or the smaller cities that this is what you can do to get there? I don’t know either about how to get information to them. And that’s one of the problems we are finding here. That they don’t know how to fill out some of the forms because they’ve not done it before. They haven’t had that exposure, and I just don’t know. That’s what, I guess, I’m trying to figure out. What is your recommendation for trying to help the companies or business or schools or universities who can teach them that or give them that information that they need? LANDRIEU: No, that’s a good point. And as I said, the organizations that we’ve been partnering with—Bloomberg Philanthropies, for example, has a—has a whole group of people they have pulled together to be available and to provide technical assistance to small communities and towns around the country. You also have each one of the different departments that have technical assistance components, whether it’s the USDA, the Department of Agriculture, or the Department of Transportation that are helping do that. And then, of course, council members themselves can go on build.gov and these other tools that we have, getinternet.gov or rural.gov. And a lot of this stuff is self-explanatory. Sandra, the other day I was in Lowndes County, which is not far, you know, from where you live, talking about making sure that folks have access to indoor plumbing. There are a lot of people in America that don’t know there’s millions of people in this country that don’t even have access to outdoor plumbing. There are billions of dollars in this bill that are designed to help those small communities understand that. Now, Sandra, I want to point out to you, just to just repeat what I said when I started, half of this money’s going to your governors. So in states like Alabama and in Georgia, you know, you got to—you got to go hustle your governor and your legislatures. Now, you get into kind of challenges because not all governors get along with all mayors. But this particular bill, the way it’s designed, doesn’t eliminate the need to handle whatever political conversations people would normally have on the ground. The other half of the bill, though, are projects that you can apply for directly that don’t have to go through your governor. So you can identify those as well. And so if you look at those technical tools that we gave you, and look through also the organizations that I’m sure one of your towns or communities is involved in—whether it’s the National Association of Counties, or the National League of Cities, or the U.S. Conference of Mayors. All of these organizations are running down, hopefully to the ground, as well as the technical assistance that’s part of each of the departments in the federal government that’s responsible for the parts of the bill that you’d be interested in, whether it’s EPA, Department of Agriculture, Department of Transportation, the Department of Energy, or the Department of Commerce, which is where the primary components of the particular bipartisan infrastructure law. CREBO-REDIKER: Thank you so much for that question, Sandra. Can we go to Ann Johnson Stewart? She is a state senator in Minnesota. Q: Good morning. Thank you. Yes, I’m Senator Ann Johnson Stewart. And I appreciate the time today. I just want to echo the concerns of the previous questioner. In addition to being a senator, I’m also a licensed civil engineer and own my own consulting firm. By the way, Mr. Landrieu, I’d love to come work for you so watch for an email from me soon. But I just want to emphasize the challenge here. I’ve been working on this as—I also have an appointment at the university as the local technical assistance program engineer. For a small agency to submit a proposal, it costs roughly $30,000 in staff time. Now, this is documented over and over again. And what we’re seeing, at least in Minnesota, is that many of the cities that have been successful in getting your grants, which we’re very grateful for it, but they have had to hire consultants to do that work for them. Some of the grant applications require a twenty-five to thirty-page project summary, which really—I mean, many people are competent and qualified, but it does require some civil engineering time. And, Mr. Landrieu, I just want to emphasize that this is a bridge that we have to figure out how to connect, the small cities, the tribes, townships. I’ve been teaching culvert repair for years. They could use money to repair culverts. They want it, but they do not have the expertise to write the grants. So please, again, I’d love to follow up with anybody on your staff about this issue, but it is the really small cities and townships who just don’t have the resources. And making that money available—in a state like Minnesota, we can’t do it because we’re not in session right now. We don’t have the means by which we can fund this initiative. And so I don’t want to take up all the time, but I do want to tell you that that is well documented, that it’s costing about $30,000 a grant application. Thank you very much. LANDRIEU: Well, Ann, thank you very much. I appreciate that. My father-in-law is a civil engineer, so there is a great need for universities to—so if you’re—in small towns and counties, you know, all the city council members and even the mayors are all part-time jobs. And everybody’s got another job someplace else. And the school system, primary, secondary, many, many universities, council member like you have as well. And I would really encourage people to think about how to solve these problems on the local level as much as possible. We’re completely aware of the challenge. This is, like, oh, what’s the best way to describe this? When we had the financial crisis back in 2008 and the system got stressed, when we had COVID, writ large, and the system got stressed, I mean, like, right away you see where the holes are, where the dysfunction is, right? Things that we haven’t thought about for a long period of time. The same thing is happening with the infrastructure bill. When you begin to push a whole bunch of money into a number of different streams that had currently existed and you’re creating new ones, you begin to see gaps. And Ann has lifted up one of the real challenges that we have. We know about it. We’re working on it from Washington. It needs to be worked on ground up, and we have to meet it. So we’re talking to the governors, we’re talking to the mayors about this. I will just, you know, communicate to all the folks that are on the ground where you live that you don’t have to wait on us to start putting technical assistance programs together. You can do the same thing. Everybody’s got a little bit of extra juice around, a little bit of extra intellectual capital, a little bit of expertise. You’ve got to tie together the government and the business community and the faith-based community and the not-for-profit sector so that they all are running towards this fire. Now, there’s some big things that are going on that are going to cut across your jurisdictions. Let me run through a couple of them. Making sure that high-speed internet, that the fiber actually gets laid in the right places. Every governor is challenged with coming up with mapping that as we speak. So you should be communicating with your governors’ office that’s in charge of this about that particular thing. The same thing is true about mapping out where electric vehicle charging stations are going to go. There are billions of dollars in this bill to lay down five thousand electric vehicle charging stations on highways and in other places where the private sector is not likely to do it. So that’s another thing that you should be aware of. The third thing is on fortifying the electric grid. All of these things cut across small town jurisdictions, big city jurisdictions, and in some states state jurisdictions. And so the governors are the ones that are being charged with sending these maps to us. The same thing is true, by the way, about getting lead out of—the lead pipes that are moving in and out of people’s homes. Governors and the states are supposed to be coming up with mapping to actually get that stuff done. That’s going to require input from the small towns and small communities that will then be put into a plan and then sent up to us in Washington, D.C., which we can approve or not approve. So all of those things today are happening that you can be working on, while we’re working on the technical assistance from the top all the way down to the bottom. CREBO-REDIKER: So one other thing just to add, because we’ve talked about this on other calls, people at universities or colleges or community colleagues are very good at writing grant proposals. LANDRIEU: Correct. CREBO-REDIKER: So, you know, if you get the mayor to reach out to the head of the community college or the local—you know, your local higher education institution and just say, hey, team effort, we need you—you know, we need your grant writing expertise. And hopefully, it’ll come for free. We have a lot of questions that are very, very similar, along the line of the—of the last two questions, on getting technical assistance. And specifically— LANDRIEU: I neglected—I neglected to say this, that to the extent that your feedback can highlight for us what might be superfluous or duplicative in these applications. We’re all about making it faster and easier for people to apply. Having said that, it is important that we build these things with intention, that we do think about equity, and we do think about high-paying jobs, and we do think about building things with climate and resilience in mind, and we do think about building stuff with products that are made in America. So some of these competitive grants will have requirements in that to show us that that’s exactly how you’re spending the money because we just—the president’s thought was not to just go build a bridge the way it was built before. That you want to build it higher, and bigger, and stronger. You want to build it with cybersecurity in mind. Those kinds of things tend to make applications a little bit, you know, more than they were before. So it just can’t be one page. But that doesn’t mean they have to be thirty and written in a way that people can’t understand. So, again, we’re trying to do two things at once. And we’re completely open to getting better as we go along so that we can get this money out fast and build stuff better. CREBO-REDIKER: So we have a couple of questions that are similar in vein. Alan Propp from D.C.: What are the key considerations you look at when considering grant applications? How do we move from shovel-ready projects towards shovel-worthy projects, while still be realistic about what projects we can accomplish? And we have an additional follow-up from Salt Lake City, Ben Luedtke, who said basically the same question, should we submit the project designs and then second submit a later application to fund the construction? Which needs to come first, and in what order, and how do you—how do you suggest they approach this? LANDRIEU: Thank you. Well, first of all, my office doesn’t make any selections for any projects in any one of the areas. I’m coordinating the activity of basically fourteen Cabinet agencies. Most, if not all, of the selections, at least on the competitive side of this, will be made by the Cabinet secretaries after a vetting process that staff from those different agencies go through. However, when those, what they call I hate federal acronyms—NOFOs, notices of funding opportunities, that’s a notice that the federal government sends out that says: Hey, we’re going to give out a billion dollars to fix bridges, or we’re going to give out a million bucks to lay high-speed internet, or we’re going to give our $500,000 to invest in ports and airports, et cetera. They will have in that the kinds of criteria that you have to be responsive to. Now, again, we want to build things fast, shovel-ready. But we also want to build them right. And so build them right is really a value judgment. And President Biden believes that equity is really important, that we use this money to build generational wealth, that we use this money to get into tribal communities, into small communities, and not just the strongest survive kind of communities that have the kind of money to show up fast and first. So there is a little bit of a tension between speed, getting it done, and then getting it done right. And so there are some—there are some value judgments that are written into these applications. And equity is one of them. Again, climate is one of them. We want to make sure that, as has been demonstrated time and time again—I’m from New Orleans. You know my city got beat to death by Katrina, Rita, Ike, Gustav, the national recession, the BP oil spill. It doesn’t make any sense to go build something back the way it was if it’s not able to withstand the kinds of things that are coming our way right now. So you want to build bridges back with the good material. You want to build them stronger. You want to think about cybersecurity. It's also important that we build with products that are made in America. Now folks are going to say, well, we can’t find all the products that are made in America. But we want to incentivize manufacturing here in America. Since the president’s been in office, he’s created 678,000 manufacturing jobs, the largest number that has been created in many, many, many years. And that’s because of the incentives of this bill. We want people manufacturing things in America. And so, as a consequence of this bill, I think that there’s been—I don’t want to call the number, I’m going to get it wrong—but a large number of billions of dollars of investments that have been announced by manufacturers who are starting to respond to this, because this is going to build generational wealth. The president believes that unions built the middle class, and the middle class built America. He wants folks getting high-paid, you know, well-paid jobs with well-paid benefits in order to stand this up. So if you build it that way, that’s going to last longer. It’s going to be stronger. It’s going to be built better, and it’s going to build a better America. So that kind of gives you a reason why some of these requests for proposals or notices of funding opportunities have that kind of language in it. And it expresses the kind of tension about going fast but doing it right at the same time. And we’re trying to do both. We think that we can. But again, we haven’t done this for a very long period of time. And we have to get really good at it. And it’s going to take us a minute in order for that to happen. CREBO-REDIKER: Thank you. Aldona Valicenti from Lexington, Kentucky, you have your hand up. Q: Yes, I did. Thank you very much. It’s a real opportunity to express my thanks for having this program in place. But what I did want to do is offer you an opportunity, and the people who are listening, an opportunity in how to approach this. The city of Lexington has already had the good fortune to implement high-speed internet. So in other words, we have several providers. We’re a gig city. But that has not necessarily been the same for the surrounding counties. So we have taken the regional approach. Since we have had already the opportunity to oversee a build, we know quite a bit about building fiber now. And we have organized the six surrounding communities, including our combined city-county government, into an opportunity to look at how we might be able to do that with the surrounding counties. We’ve issued an RFP. And we’ve done that because we felt that we could now educate each other. And that has been a real, real opportunity. We’ve listened to the vendors who can do it, and now are beginning to work with our state government. So I just wanted to offer this as another alternative, because I do believe that, you know, it’s the regional opportunities that are going to drive economic development, very much as you’ve all indicated. And that’s the approach that we’ve taken. And if anybody wants to call me in Lexington, I’ll be happy to talk to them. LANDRIEU: Aldona, thank you so much for that. I think is—used to be the mayor of Lexington and is now the governor’s infrastructure coordinator and running that initiative. I’ve spent some time in Kentucky. I’ve been there a bucketload of times. I’ve been to Louisville. Greg Fischer’s a good friend of mine, who’s the mayor of Louisville. I’ve actually been to Dog Patch. So you live in a beautiful state. But she makes an excellent point that I’d like to—I’d like to, you know, click on a bit. When you have a hub like a Lexington or a Louisville, you’re going to benefit from helping the small towns and communities in the region. And the reason is, is because the more—the more competitions they win, the more federal dollars come into the area, it lifts everybody up. So taking a regional approach to all of these things is really very, very wise, no matter where you live. And hopefully every major city in America, whether they be large cities or medium-sized cities, or small cities that are wealthy, will take the exact same approach. Primarily because the universities that live in those areas actually are serving regional populations anyway. And so that’s what I’m hoping to do. I hope people don’t just wait on the federal government to go do everything because, A, we can’t and, B, we can’t see everything on the ground. So from my perspective, what I’m trying to help do is build what I call horizontal-vertical integration, where the federal government, which is fifty thousand feet up, is really talking very well and all the way down to the ground with people that live in very small communities, and then connecting the state and the cities in between. So that there’s, like, one delivery table in America. Now, when you do that, you also have to think regionally. And if you can create concentric circles that are moving all across the country one thing will start to feed off of the next, because all of these networks that we’re building are all codependent, especially the electric grid. So it’s critically important to kind of, you know, fist-bump what Aldona said, especially about regional cooperation. But you also have to have cooperation between the state government, the federal government, and then the regional directors of all the federal agencies as well. CREBO-REDIKER: So, just before we finish with the last few questions, Senator—State Senator Ann Johnson, you have someone on the line who is volunteering as a semi-retired civil engineer who wants to help you. So you should connect with Robert Israel. Just passing—messenger. So, a question coming from David Rutz. It’s in the—it’s in the chat. We have a project that’s new and wasn’t submitted with the original list of infrastructure projects. Problem with river erosion at one of the state hatcheries. It’s a new project prior to the original submission—it wasn’t submitted. Will there be another—will there be a second bite at the apple? Is there a chance of funding and a second round that he can go to the state infrastructure coordinator and ask for funds for his project? LANDRIEU: Which—well, it’s a little bit unclear from the question about which project he was asking about and what department, but the answer is still the same. This is a—this is a multi-year effort. This is not a one-year thing. So much of this money was put in—that was in the infrastructure bill is a five-year to a seven-year spend. And so when we’re announcing notices of funding opportunities, we’ll send out money for 2022. There’ll be another application for 2023, 2024, and 2025, until the money is spent. So, yes, there are always numerous bites at the apple. And, by the way, there are a lot of different ways to get funded through various different programs. It’s not a one-size-fits-all. I’ll give you an example. In the Department of Transportation and Development, in DOT, they actually pushed three funding opportunities together. So you had one—to go to the question that was asked before—one application for three programs. So that you didn’t have to do it three times. And so we have a number of those happening. So it sounds like what the questioner was asking about was a water project, which is probably coming out of EPA. Now again I want to remind everybody, I’ve said it twice now so I actually intend to be repetitive, half of this money is coming from the federal government to your state. State water revolving funds from the EPA that deal with lead and clean air and clean water and things like abandoned mine lands. Some of it you have to apply directly to the federal department. You have to kind of know—and you can look at that book at build.gov that will tell you exactly what the program is and whether it’s a funnel program to the governor or whether it’s a competitive program that you can apply for directly. CREBO-REDIKER: We have one question—I’ll try and get one more question in—from John Bouvier. He has his hand raised. Go ahead. LANDRIEU: Great name. Q: Thank you. This has been very informative. I appreciate everything you’re talking about. But I think we—I’m hearing, I feel the same way, that we’re kind of stuck when it comes to the money that goes to the states, particularly on the energy side. In Southampton, we have numerous energy initiatives, and we get held up a little bit at the level of the power authority. We have an unusual power authority. It’s a public-private power authority. And they have—when we urge them to apply for these kinds of grants, they’re a little reticent unless it’s cost-effective. That’s a loosely used word. I’m not quite sure what they mean by that. But we’re held up by it and it becomes a checkpoint, a chokepoint for us. And when we make the investments ourselves in particular—we’re able to do that, we do hire consultants and we have good relationships. Unfortunately, we’re still at the mercy of the power authority. And even though it’s just a difficult relationship. And there’s these certain obstruction points when it comes to our willingness to do the right thing, to do CVP, and CCA, and all those things gets held up by either the public service commission or gets held up by our local power authority. And we approached to try to change that by acting regionally and trying to—so we spent an inordinate amount of time petitioning our power authority, and working with them, and trying to get that done. But it just seems very obstructive and contrary to the goals that you have, and the federal government has to move these things quickly. I just wanted to get your thoughts on that. LANDRIEU: First of all, John, I love your last name. It sounds very like you’re from Louisiana. But you said—where are you from? You said Southampton? CREBO-REDIKER: New York. LANDRIEU: Yeah. So— Q: That’s the eastern end of Long Island. LANDRIEU: You raise a point that is a system design issue that is political in nature. And the best I can describe to you is this: Historically the federal government, for many, many, many years, has decided that they were going to push money down through the states. That is, they’ll send the money to the governors, and then the governors have to use whatever process that every state uses to get money to the ground. And every one of them is different. Some legislatures are more powerful than others. Some lieutenant governors have more power than governors, particularly, like, I think, in Texas. But that’s kind of the way it’s always been done. When they were putting this bill together, I wasn’t there when the bill got passed, but there was a serious argument that reflected what your concerns were just now. Which is, how do you get money directly to small governing authorities? And that is why Congress designed 40 percent of this bill to go directly to, for example, Southampton as opposed to the governor of New York. Now, it is also true that your public service commission on some of the clean energy stuff can apply for this stuff as well. And if they’re the ones who get it, and then they distribute it down to the ground, there’s nothing this bill does to alleviate the requirement that local politics take the course that local politics takes, which is to argue, you know, and to hold people accountable for the decisions that they make. If people are really wise about this and we get this right, I think it’ll come into pretty—into some really good clarity that working together, building regional solutions, being aggressive about trying to get these federal funds and get into the ground as quick as possible on fortifying the energy grid, cleaning up the Great Lakes, doing the kind of things that I talked about, is going to be of most benefit to most people in the country. It’s one of the—this bill is designed to get people to find common ground. And, you know, people have to behave well, and they have to make big decisions. And, you know, we can’t force that from fifty thousand feet up. That’s going to have to be, you know, done by local leaders on the ground, like you. So I commend you for thinking about it. As we design future pieces of legislation, hopefully, you know, Washington, as they always should be, will be open to hearing back from the leaders that actually make America work. I happen to think they’re local leaders. I think money can come from Washington and we can have some good ideas, but actually the rubber meets the road where the people on this call live, on the corners, and in the playgrounds and, you know, in places where folks shop. And, you know, local elected officials are the ones that are in the store every day, in the carpool lines, at the ballparks or churches. You know, and you’re getting smacked on the head by your constituents because you’re living in real-time. And there’s no distance between your decisions and when those decisions hit the ground. That’s not necessarily true about Washington. So I appreciate the urgency with which all of you act and the clarity of purpose that pushes all of you forward. And I just really appreciate the work that you’ve done, because I’m a local elected guy. And that’s kind of what I learned and that’s what I’m trying to bring to Washington on behalf of the president. CREBO-REDIKER: So we’ve gone over. You’ve been unbelievably generous with your time. And you said forty-five minutes. We’ve gone over a couple of minutes. So I want to thank you. I’m going to hand it back to Irina to wrap up. You are so welcome to come back here, though, because there are a lot of questions that a lot of people want to have questions asked and answered. So we hope you’ll—this will not be your last time joining our group here at CFR. LANDRIEU: Well, Heidi, I thank you. And if I can’t, there are people who are a lot smarter than me who work on my team who have been great about designing this and implementing. They’re always available to you guys as well. So thank you so much for having me. And again, to all the local elected officials, God bless you. Thank you for all the work that you do. I’ve been there—sixteen years as a legislator, eight as a mayor. I know what it’s like. But it was wonderful. And I’m going to try to bring, you know, some of that ethos to the federal government and get his money out to the ground as fast as possible, on behalf of the president. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. I just want to remind everybody that we will send out a link to this webinar recording and transcript so you can share it with your colleagues and your constituents. Until then, you can follow Coordinator Mitch Landrieu on Twitter at @mitchlandrieu46 and Ms. Heidi Crebo-Rediker at @heidirediker. And as always, please email us with ideas and suggestions for future webinars. You can email [email protected]. And also follow us. Go to cfr.org, foreignaffairs.com, and thinkglobalhealth.org for more expertise. So thank you all for the work you’re doing. Thank you, Coordinator Landrieu, for your service, we appreciate it, and for this time. Have a good day. LANDRIEU: Thank you so much. Good being with you. (END)