As many of you may know, reliability engineering and PdM are a huge part of the manufacturing industry. Unfortunately the economy has hit manufacturing industry hard recently and jobs have started to decline. A new bill proposed by Senator Sherrod Brown (Ohio) is aimed at helping the manufacturing industry bounce back. The Industry Week article discusses the bill and the plans for implementation. Senator Brown believes that, “We can revive American manufacturing through investments in clean energy. This bill will help our manufacturers retool, put our auto suppliers back to work and produce clean energy technologies.” The bill would act as a revolving loan for auto suppliers and small to mid sized manufacturers. The Investments for Manufacturing Progress and Clean Technology (IMPACT) Act of 2009 would establish the $30 billion manufacturing revolving loan fund. With this fund, states would receive funds for the establishment of the revolving loan programs to assist in updating, expanding or establishing clean energy manufacturing operations and improving energy efficiency. More details of the proposed bill can be read at Industry Week.

If this bill is past, it may help revive the manufacturing industry. Considering that last month, nearly half of the nation’s job losses were tied to manufacturing, the industry could really use a boost. Let us hope that the manufacturing industry can get back on track and need to hire additional employees. And with more manufacturing taking place, more PdM jobs and reliability engineering jobs will be needed to help sustain the transition/expansion into clean energy or energy efficiency.