Pentagon grants Mike Rowe foundation $10 million for skilled trades program

The Pentagon last week presented a check for $10 million to TV presenter Mike Rowe as part of an initiative to foster the uptake of skilled trades in American workers

Rowe is the CEO of a foundation aimed at re-energizing interest in trades such as welding, plumbing, and electrical work

The funding comes through the Pentagon's Build Freedom Initiative, a workforce development program created to improve the U.S. defense industrial base

and was granted to Roe at a ceremony on July 2nd. We're launching Build Freedom, which has already scaled to 70-plus programs

hundreds of millions of dollars of additional spend, and incredible visibility across the country

These projects that we're uniting and that we're supporting with Build Freedom do their heavy lifting from Honolulu Community College to Danville, Virginia

from the Gulf Coast of Michigan and everywhere in between, with more things happening every single week

The team's got an amazing set of ideas. So we going to go ahead and take this forward here We not just building careers for today As Mike laid out in the video we talking about building careers for the future AI six jobs the ability to work across the country and to really meet a demand for the future that is at

the heart of everything we're trying to do with re-industrializing the country and scaling the

industrial base for the future. Throughout our history, the industrial strength of the

of the United States has proven to be decisive in our ability to maintain military advantage

Whether it's the Ford Motor Company that was producing a bomber, a B-24 bomber every 63 minutes

off a mile-long assembly line to the precision weapons of today, American industry and the workforce and the personnel that go in every day

and take their share of defending the nation is critical to the defense of our freedoms

I went to Congress 15 years ago and testified before some committee

It was Rockefeller I believe was chairing it And I said look fellas I not an expert and I don have a crystal ball but I pretty sure if we don close this skills gap if we don get in front of this now and make a more persuasive case for all these open jobs

if we don't do something to counteract the narrative that the best path for the most people is a four-year degree

and anybody who doesn't take that path is somehow going to get a vocational consolation prize

If we don't challenge all of that in a meaningful way, the gap is going to continue to widen

Student debt is going to continue to grow. And we are going to wind up with a workforce that's dangerously out of balance

And they all agreed, too, and people on both sides of the aisle called. Mary said, we ought to do something

We said, we're standing by, and you know how it goes. Fifteen years later, you called

And that's why we blew you off the first time. I didn't know

It is a matter of national security. I can't overstate it. Not a day goes by where Mary doesn get a call from some leader of some consequential industry in our country who is freaking out They done the math They know that for every five trades people that

retire to come in, it's been that way for nearly 12 years. The math is not on our side. The stigmas

stereotypes, myths, and misperceptions that we deal with every day, those can be confronted. Those

can be changed. This campaign is an attempt to do that. Every penny of this check goes to work

ethics scholarships for men and women in the dip. But since the cameras are pointed at us

I should also say that if we're smart, we'll use this as a catalyst. And we will spread the word

And we're going to disseminate this exact photo that's being taken right now. And I'm going to

ask the leaders of every consequential company in our country, maybe not to quite match it

but you get the idea. If we can get a significant amount of money standing by

guaranteed to trade men and women in a trade, then the rest, I believe, will fall into place