Last week, Elon Musk and SpaceX stunned the nation with the triumphant launch of Starship, the largest rocket ever built, and then gently guided the skyscraper-sized booster back to Earth, where it nestled in giant mechanical “chopstick” arms for future reuse. Starship itself traveled halfway around the Earth before successfully reentering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Indian Ocean. This sci-fi-style accomplishment came just weeks after SpaceX and Elon delivered high-speed internet to rural communities devastated in the wake of Hurricane Helene, and less than a month after SpaceX sent a rescue mission to the International Space Station to retrieve two American astronauts who had been marooned there.
The government must be cheering on these incredible feats of American ingenuity, right? Wrong. In a move emblematic of the hostility with which the current administration treats American industrial success, no fewer than seven federal agencies are pursuing Elon Musk and his businesses under labyrinthine federal regulations. A Wall Street Journal editorial notes that companies making up 40 percent of the S&P 500 market cap are currently under investigation by Biden-Harris administrative agencies.
America is the most innovative country in the world. But over-regulation and an unchecked and abusive administrative state threaten to strangle American industry and further diminish its ability to manufacture domestically, imperiling our national security and military superiority. Fortunately, two pro-innovation candidates—former president Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance—promise to roll back the administrative state, allowing for a revival of American manufacturing.
My friend and former colleague JD Vance has spoken eloquently about the risks posed by our shrinking manufacturing base and how to fix it.
In his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, JD movingly illustrates the economic and cultural devastation to the American family that resulted from the hollowing out of the American industrial base. As a United States senator, JD is just as focused on the devastating implications of this decline for national security. He has pointed out the danger posed by our decades-old policy of offshoring our industrial manufacturing capacity—a policy that has resulted in China’s shipbuilding capacity dwarfing ours by 230 times. But JD has also taken action against the prime domestic culprit for American industrial stagnation: overregulation.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
Earlier this year, JD introduced a Senate bill to eliminate the “raft of regulations” promulgated across five unelected federal agencies that weaken America’s ability to build. The success of measures like this one is critical if we are to grow our economy and protect our national interests. JD’s priorities echo those of President Trump, whose first term opened with a historic scaling back of federal regulations, which the president colorfully and aptly described as “a merciless avalanche of wasteful and expensive and intrusive federal regulations…a stealth tax on our people—slashing take-home pay, suppressing innovation, surging the cost of goods, and shipping millions of American jobs overseas.” Under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, those regulations are back.
Despite all this, patriotic tech founders from Southern California to the Midwest, Austin, and Miami are working 24/7 to revitalize the American industrial base. These entrepreneurs are building factories and churning out products to serve our national security, combat wildfires, improve supply chains, manufacture in space, improve front-line safety, rationalize freight logistics, produce clean energy, mitigate drought, and secure satellite communications. They are providing thousands of jobs to Americans and are working hard to make America’s industrial capacity the best in the world again. We need to let them.
When Ronald Reagan was seeking reelection in 1984, he celebrated the economic recovery of his first term as the United States healed from the Carter years. With his classic humility, he maintained that “no credit is due to us. We didn’t do anything but get government out of the way of the American people. It’s your recovery.”
American businesses are poised to usher in a manufacturing renaissance—tech companies innovating on the cutting edge of autonomy, robotics, control systems, and critical edge computing, as well as the thousands of small- and medium-sized businesses, factories, and machine shops across the country that have always been the backbone of American industry. Let’s ensure this renaissance is not stifled by overregulation and government overreach.
Presidents Reagan and Trump—and future vice president Vance—understand that when government “gets out of the way,” American ingenuity shines, businesses invest, and Americans secure the future.
Crystal McKellar is the Founder and Managing Partner of Aloft VC where she invests in companies applying the best of Silicon Valley to our Nation’s Health and Defense.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
