General Catalyst, Palantir and 8VC are backing the New American Industrial Alliance, a lobby trade group being advised by former Trump administration officials.
By David Jeans, Forbes Staff
Onthe campaign trail, Donald Trump frequently promised to restore America’s industrial base with manufacturing jobs. “We're going to rebuild our manufacturing,” he said during one rally in Georgia. “It's going to happen fast and beautifully.”
Now, a coalition of Silicon Valley leaders is lining up to help carry out this vision. Launched Tuesday, the New American Industrial Alliance (NAIA) is positioning itself as the policy voice of tech companies that are building or investing in areas seen as crucial to America’s manufacturing resurgence: weapons, space and nuclear power.
Backed by the likes of General Catalyst, 8VC and Palantir, the trade group told Forbes it will begin making recommendations on policy and legislation in the first half of 2025, with an eye to gutting regulation it sees as a hindrance to innovation, and boosting government support for startup manufacturing businesses. Its interests span everything from research and development to supply chain management. “This is a different playbook,” said Paul Kwan, who leads General Catalyst’s global resilience fund. “If you want to transform physical industry, you gotta sit at the nexus of capital, innovation and policy.”
The group is optimistic that its priorities align with the incoming Trump administration’s goals, including tariffs and the type of cost cutting proposed by Elon Musk and his planned presidential advisory commission, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Multiple former Trump administration officials — some with close ties to the incoming one — are advising NAIA. Among them is Nadia Schadlow, a staffer on Trump’s former National Security Council, and Chris Buskirk, who cofounded the conservative donor group Rockbridge Network with vice president-elect J.D. Vance.
"We need to start innovating at a basic tech level and implement that into manufacturing," said Buskirk, who invests in companies with his firm 1789 Capital (which recently hired Donald Trump Jr. as a partner). "We won an election and I think the policies will come into place, as stated by Trump, and will be conducive to an American renaissance." Schadlow, currently a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, added that NAIA is hoping Trump’s regulatory reforms lead to “more factories producing more things, at higher levels and lower costs.”
NAIA’s CEO Austin Bishop insists the group is “naturally bipartisan, because there are people on both sides of the aisle who are coming to us very, very, very excited about the need to make stuff and have sovereign control over supply chains.” He declined to disclose any Biden administration advisors.
Bishop said the organization has so far raised a seven-figure sum from its backers, like Sam Altman-backed nuclear startup Oklo and air taxi company Joby Aviation, who are paying between $10,000 and $250,000 for membership (Musk’s SpaceX, Anduril and Andreessen Horowitz are notably absent from the roster). Incubator YCombinator, which launched its first weapons company this year, joined to advocate for procurement reforms and competition, said its policy head, Luther Lowe. “The time is ripe with the new administration,” Lowe said. “There’s been a lot of bipartisan support for this stuff.”
NAIA’s launch comes amid a flood of venture capital investment in companies working on military weapons, aerospace and nuclear energy that are capitalizing on ongoing concerns about conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East and rising competition with China. “America must reindustrialize to prevent escalating conflict and regain deterrence,” Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s CTO and an advisor to NAIA, said in an email. “New capital is flowing in this space in a meaningful way.”
NAIA, a 501(c)(6) non-profit trade group, will begin making policy recommendations in coming months targeting the Pentagon budget, and legislation covering semiconductors and nuclear energy, including the CHIPS Act and Advance Act, said Bishop. It also will call for tax breaks and reducing permitting, calling for an environment review exemption for manufacturing facilities.
The organization’s backers point to the consolidation of defense companies in the 1990s as an example of what needs to change. In a matter of years, dozens of manufacturers merged, leaving a handful of giant contractors — including Northrup Gruman, Lockheed Martin and Boeing — to dominate the sector. That dynamic hindered competition and innovation, said Palantir’s Sankar. “At the dawn of World War II, we were the best in the world at mass production,” he said. “That’s no longer the case.”
They also point to the role of globalization in hollowing out the U.S. manufacturing industry, and its role in China’s rise. Joshua Steinman, another NAIA advisor and a former National Security Council staffer who advised Trump on supply chain policy, said the trade group will take an "aggressive position” with “what I think [Trump] would call an ‘America First’ economic policy.” He added that during his tenure in the Trump administration, “I never came across an organization that I felt was directly and singularly motivated to advance and promote policies that would grow our industrial base.”
In addition to Bishop, currently an investor at Tamarack Global, NAIA is led by Julius Krein, the founder of a quarterly journal called American Affairs, and manufacturing startup CEOs Chris Power, of Hadrian, and Aaron Slodov, of Atomic Industries (the group is yet to announce a complete advisory board). The founders came up with the idea for NAIA ahead of a sold-out conference they helped organized called Reindustrialize, which was held in Detroit over the summer. There, leaders from Silicon Valley and industrial companies vowed to advocate for policies and build companies that could re-ignite America’s manufacturing sector.
The Reindustrialize conference will be a major part of pushing NAIA’s agenda, goals and membership engagement, Bishop said. The group is planning a second conference for 2025, he said; four cities are currently bidding to host the event. “We have probably a four year window of opportunity,” said Power, of Hadrian, “where people have realized American manufacturing is in a real crisis state, and to make these big moves to counter China and become a domestic superpower again.”
