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FACT CHECK✒ EDITORIALABSURDITY:
Innovation in Action: Getting You Up to Speed on Manufacturing
Filed 48m ago · Via GAO · The Buffoon Desk
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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0
Photo: Delaram, Francis; printmaker; British artist, active 1615-16 · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons
The Government Accountability Office has published a 'Scroll-Driven Narrative' on Manufacturing USA, the federally funded network of institutes where the Departments of Commerce, Energy, and Defense have collectively sunk billions into 16 groups working on advanced manufacturing technology. The product is a companion piece to GAO's prior reports, including one recommending the government get better at measuring whether any of this is actually working.
GAO says it has previously made recommendations to improve performance measurement across the network and is now highlighting those findings alongside agency efforts, such as they are, to act on them. The headline achievement here is less about manufacturing output than about the existence of a slicker format for restating what GAO already told Congress.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.
✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
Three federal departments pooling billions of dollars into sixteen institutes sounds impressive until you remember the watchdog's main contribution so far is asking, politely and repeatedly, for someone to measure whether it's working. Dressing an old oversight report up in a scroll-animation doesn't make the underlying question go away: did the money build anything durable, or just a nice-looking warehouse tour. A fancier wrapper on the same report is still the same report.
