Appendix C: Building and expanding industries
Machine tools, batteries, chips and the sequence of industrial investment.
Supports building and expanding industries.
The purpose of industrial investment is to expand what the country can make. Batteries, chips, transformers and the machinery used to produce them are part of the means of making a prosperous living. Automation can reduce the workers needed for a particular task without removing the need for its output. A country still needs productive capacity, skills and something to offer the economies from which it buys. Project 2029 begins rebuilding that capacity while organizing the people and investment needed for a larger Mission for America.
A factory is connected to customers, suppliers, power systems, construction firms and training institutions. The Ballroom follows those connections and helps the necessary investments proceed together. This appendix uses concrete industries to explain that method; the list does not limit the mobilization to those industries.
The machine tools that equipped a mobilization
To build an industry, start with the industries that equip it. A machine tool cuts, drills, grinds or shapes the parts that go into other machines. A lathe turns a shaft; a milling machine cuts a metal part to shape. An aircraft engine plant needs these machines before it can turn metal into engines. So does a plant making the machines for the engine plant. This was one of the central problems of the World War II mobilization: expanding the industry that would let the rest of industry expand.1
In May 1940, Roosevelt brought General Motors president William Knudsen into the National Defense Advisory Commission to organize production. Knudsen went to the machine-tool industry and pressed it to expand before the United States entered the war. By December, manufacturers were still quoting six to 12 months for delivery. He called for more factory space, additional shifts, and subcontracting to firms that could make parts or complete machines. The aircraft and tank orders would be useless without the equipment to fill them.2
The RFC's Defense Plant Corporation helped turn that prospective demand into orders a toolmaker could act on. It placed blanket orders for a pool of equipment before the final users were known. As private companies or government plants placed their own definite orders, the pool's order could be reduced. The government was giving the toolmaker a customer while the factories that would use the tools were still being organized. The expanding supply of tools then equipped aircraft, ordnance and shipbuilding plants.1
This was overlapping work. Existing factories kept producing while new buildings went up, toolmakers expanded, and workers learned new jobs. As more machines came into use, the demand for metal rose, and shortages of components such as bearings and valves could hold up the finished product. The mobilization had to keep following the next constraint. Expanding machine-tool production made the larger expansion possible; coordinating materials, equipment and factory readiness made it usable.3
The industries that must expand today have their own equivalents of the machine tool bottleneck; some are literally machine tools. The first two years organize this enabling capacity while production grows wherever firms are ready. Existing lending tools can support eligible investments without first chartering the full RFC, but expiring authorities still require the pre-election congressional action in Appendix B.
Building out the battery industry
One example of an industry America needs to build is batteries: for cars, trucks, trains, homes, appliances and utility-scale storage. The IEA’s 2026 report puts China at over 80 percent of global lithium-ion battery manufacturing capacity at the end of 2025, with the United States at about 6–7 percent. IEA, Global EV Outlook 2026.
The Ballroom should be able to follow a battery from its materials to the customer who will buy it. The United States already makes batteries. The task is to expand production and fill the missing parts of the domestic supply chain. Inside a cell factory, machines mix and coat electrode materials onto thin metal foil, dry and cut the coated sheets, and assemble them with a separator between the electrodes. The cells are filled, charged under controlled conditions, and tested before they can go into a finished battery. Each step needs its own equipment, materials and trained operators.4
Consider an automaker or a utility-storage supplier ready to buy more batteries. The RFC staff brings that buyer together with a cell manufacturer and asks what is preventing the next increment of production. The answer might be another coating line, a shortage of separator film, or too little equipment for charging and testing new cells. The staff then brings in the relevant machinery and materials suppliers, the utility, training institutions and lenders. The cell maker needs a reliable supply of film; the film maker needs a reliable customer before expanding its plant. Both need power, machines and people. The team's job is to help turn those interdependent decisions into contracts and investments that can proceed together.
The resulting work could include expanding a cell plant, adding a domestic materials supplier, and arranging recycling for production scrap. Each piece has its own buyer, financing and construction schedule. There is a concrete federal financing precedent: in November 2024, DOE closed a loan of up to $1.2 billion for ENTEK's battery-separator manufacturing project. The investment was in the material between the electrodes, a less visible part of the industry on which the cell factories depend.5
These are examples of the projects the Ballroom would assemble, not projects already chosen or financed for 2029. Private lenders and investors finance the commercially viable pieces; federal agencies assess the pieces eligible for their programs. The financing instruments explain their limits and the renewals needed to use some of them after inauguration.
Expanding chip production
A chip expansion starts with a particular product and follows every factory needed to deliver it. The next project might make the power electronics used in vehicles and industrial equipment, the control chips in appliances, or advanced processors. An existing producer may be able to add equipment or expand a line. A new fabrication plant, or fab, takes a longer construction and start-up effort. The Ballroom needs people who can distinguish those projects and identify what would let each produce more.
A fab needs manufacturing equipment, dependable power and water, specialized chemicals and gases, and people who can install and operate its systems. Its output also needs packaging and testing: connecting the chips, protecting them, and checking that they work as required. The RFC team follows those needs beyond the company whose name is on the fab. It brings the equipment and materials suppliers, utilities, contractors, packaging firms and training institutions into the discussion, and helps each expansion reach private investment or eligible federal support. Commerce's semiconductor supplier strategy already calls for this kind of work across suppliers, infrastructure and workforce; its 2024 Amkor award provides a specific precedent for investing in domestic packaging and testing.6
That could mean equipping unused space in an existing fab, expanding a nearby materials supplier, and financing a packaging plant that will serve several producers. A larger project might require a new fab whose output arrives after the first two years. TSMC's 2024 annual report makes the distinction concrete: its first Arizona fab had entered volume production, while the second fab's building was complete and its facility systems were still being installed. A finished building and a working chip factory are different milestones.7
The same work across the economy
Batteries and chips are examples of a method the Ballroom will apply across the economy. Take the transformers needed to connect new factories and power plants to the grid. Expanding their production can mean more electrical steel, winding equipment, trained workers and space for final assembly and testing. The team brings utilities' expected purchases together with manufacturers' expansion plans and follows the demand back to the suppliers that have to grow with them.8 The same questions apply to heat pumps, industrial motors, water-treatment equipment, medical supplies and the machinery that makes all of them: who needs the output, who can produce it, what is holding them back, and which investment would remove the constraint?
The national building program supplies part of that demand. As agencies and building owners assemble projects, the Ballroom can show manufacturers the equipment those projects are preparing to buy. A list of scheduled heating-system replacements helps identify the demand for heat pumps and controls. Manufacturers can plan against actual procurement and customer commitments as they are made. The Smart Tariff adds a proposed longer-term investment incentive; the work of assembling buyers and suppliers begins with the projects and authority already available.
Getting production up to speed
The first stage of a mobilization is getting the work ready to multiply. A line has to be installed, tested, adjusted and staffed before its advertised annual capacity becomes sustained output. The first projects also expose delays in lending, contracting and utility connections that the team has to solve and stop repeating. These preparations happen alongside expansion in factories that already operate. Some firms can add a shift or remove a production bottleneck while others are still constructing their plants.
The Ballroom should publish that progress in terms people can check: finance closed, equipment ordered and installed, workers trained, products meeting the customer's specifications, and shipments leaving the plant. A groundbreaking belongs on the record, but it is not the final result. The first two years must produce working examples as well as the larger investments that take longer to mature. That is how the opening effort prepares the country for a much greater expansion when Congress charters the full RFC.
Arrive with projects already in view
During the transition, the team can begin asking manufacturers, machine builders, engineers, lenders and unions what it would take to build in the United States and what prevented their last attempt. It can identify prospective customers and projects, investigate the obstacle facing each, and locate the agency that could act after inauguration. Those conversations do not commit federal money before the incoming administration holds office.
Existing federal procurement also supplies demand. Agency purchase plans and actual contract commitments help manufacturers decide whether to expand, just as the building mobilization gives producers a developing order book. Publishing planned purchases can make that demand visible, but a forecast is not a binding purchase contract. Each commitment still needs the purchasing agency’s authority and funds. The plan does not promise that government will buy everything every factory produces.
The same distinction governs the team’s public progress report. Capital committed, equipment ordered, equipment installed, workers trained, production qualified and shipments made are separate milestones. Reporting them lets people see a plant move toward output without calling an announcement a completed industry. The Smart Tariff provides another investment incentive, while the tools available now start the work.