This page publishes the one-page platform document Build It Here. Own It Together. The proposal is titled the Strategic Industries Act and focuses on restoring domestic capacity in defense, essential medicines, information technology, and semiconductors.
Download the original one-page platform PDF.
The document’s argument is that industrial weakness was not an unavoidable result of foreign competition. It describes a deliberate transfer of production and technical knowledge in pursuit of quarterly earnings, then frames the resulting dependence as a national-resilience problem. The platform’s proposed answer is public capital on public terms: when taxpayers finance the rebuilding of a critical industry, they should receive equity, repayment priority, and enforceable conditions on how the money is used.
The figures displayed in the document are presented here as claims made by the supplied platform, not as independently verified statistics. Its opening figures include $55 billion invested in China by one U.S. company per year by 2015, $53 billion for the entire CHIPS Act over four years, 28 million Chinese workers trained by that company since 2008, $43 billion in Boeing buybacks between 2013 and 2019, and 91 percent of rare-earth processing located inside China. The purpose of the figures in the document is to establish scale and contrast: the platform places long-term productive capacity beside corporate investment and capital-allocation decisions.
The problem the platform identifies
The document argues that American engineers trained a competitor’s workforce while corporate boards devoted more money to stock repurchases than to building productive capacity. It links that industrial dependence to minerals used in guided missiles and electric motors, as well as upstream inputs for medicines used by hospitals. Its central metaphor is a hand on the valve: dependence is not merely an unfavorable trade balance, but control over essential inputs.
That framing leads to a specific policy principle. Public support should not be structured as a blank check or a bailout without ownership. The proposed model pairs capital with conditions, gives the public a financial claim, and requires the rebuilt firms to maintain domestic productive capacity.
Four commitments
1. Rebuild the industries
The platform proposes federally chartered strategic firms in defense, essential medicines, IT, and semiconductors. Qualification would use general criteria rather than naming favored companies, and each charter would carry a binding purpose to maintain domestic production.
It also proposes guaranteeing demand, not only supplying capital. Price floors would cover the gap when foreign dumping pushed prices below cost, while long-term purchase commitments would give new facilities a dependable market. Public equity would sit alongside that support so taxpayers could share in the upside.
The proposal combines this demand guarantee with workforce training, funded apprenticeships, permitting reform for mineral processing and drug manufacturing, and stockpiles covering the period before new plants open.
2. Keep American work in America
The second commitment applies the labor rule broadly. Work performed for a federally supported strategic firm would take place in the United States, including software, engineering, clinical operations, and back-office services. The document allows no waivers or hardship clauses.
It also closes a contract-manufacturing loophole: placing company-owned equipment in a foreign plant would still count as work performed abroad. Tools and raw materials unavailable domestically could be purchased from allies on a published list, with exceptions expiring as domestic capacity comes online. Purchases from adversaries would not qualify.
3. Put taxpayers first
The proposed public stake would use senior preferred stock with a rate that increases over time. The platform describes this as an investment with a maturity date rather than nationalization: the public claim would be capped and disclosed, but expensive to leave outstanding and inexpensive to retire.
No dividends, buybacks, or executive bonuses would be allowed until the taxpayer claim was current. Repayments would flow into a dedicated fund with multi-year committed financing and annual independent audits. The document’s objective is to make a long industrial investment durable beyond a single annual appropriation.
4. Prevent looting during recapitalization
The final commitment targets compensation and financial extraction. Executive pay would be capped at eight times the average worker’s compensation, calculated across worldwide employees, contractors, and affiliates. Salary, bonuses, deferred pay, benefits, and severance would count toward one ceiling.
The platform rejects performance carve-outs and bans options, replacing them with long-vesting stock that is not tied to short-term share-price movement. Engineers and scientists would be exempt from the executive cap and paid at market rates. In exchange, firms would face hard floors on research, development, and capital spending, with pay clawbacks for missed commitments.
What the proposal is trying to change
Taken together, the four commitments describe a public-investment model with industrial, labor, and governance conditions attached. It is not simply a subsidy proposal. It treats public financing as leverage over production location, procurement, executive compensation, reinvestment, and the timing of repayment.
The supplied platform document does not provide draft statutory language, agency assignments, eligibility procedures, or a cost estimate for the full program. Those would be necessary to evaluate implementation. It also does not specify how allied-country purchasing lists would be maintained, how price floors would interact with existing trade rules, or how the preferred-stock terms would be priced. Those are important open questions rather than details to fill in by assumption.
For readers evaluating the proposal, the useful next step is to separate its goals from its mechanisms. Domestic capacity, labor location, repayment priority, and compensation limits are the stated goals. Charters, purchase commitments, stockpiles, preferred stock, audit rules, and pay caps are the proposed mechanisms. A legislative version would need to show how each mechanism is administered, measured, challenged, and ended when it no longer serves its stated purpose.
Its contribution at this stage is a concise statement of the governing principle: rebuild strategic capacity domestically, attach enforceable terms to public capital, and give taxpayers a first claim on the resulting value.