Authored by Seurat’s CEO, Co-Founder & Co-Inventor, James DeMuth
As 2026 begins, one reality is not possible to dismiss: manufacturing just isn’t an industrial legacy. It’s nationwide infrastructure, and the US continues to woefully neglect it.
2025 was stricken by acquainted issues. Strained provide chains, lengthy lead occasions, and intensified world competitors. Even within the face of tariffs, vital manufacturing capability remained concentrated offshore.
Sure, there have been some optimistic indicators:
- Policymakers are speaking extra critically about reshoring and functionality.
- Superior manufacturing instruments, particularly additive manufacturing, are more and more acknowledged as strategic.
- Private and non-private provide chain leaders are realizing they will’t make choices purely based mostly on short-term revenue. They should discover a stability between resilience and price.
However earnest dialog doesn’t rebuild factories or shorten lead occasions. 2026 have to be the yr the US strikes from recognizing the issue to constructing the answer.
Public + Non-public Partnerships Have All the time Fueled Vital Developments
America’s biggest industrial advances have been by no means purely personal sector achievements. From the interstate freeway system and aerospace to semiconductors, GPS, and nuclear power, the nation constructed its most transformative industries by means of deliberate public–personal partnerships.
US 101/I-405 interchange is among the nation’s busiest.
Rebuilding U.S. manufacturing isn’t any totally different. It must be a public mission with additive manufacturing at its epicenter. The Division of Conflict’s 2025 Acquisition Transformation Technique already pointed the way in which: increase home manufacturing, stabilize demand, speed up personal capital, and cut back supply-chain dependency.
The query is now not route – it’s urgency.
Even Low-Price Elements Can Break Fragile Provide Chains
Vcg/Visible China Group/Getty Pictures
2025 delivered one other warning shot.
The Nexperia semiconductor disruption, triggered by export pauses on ultra-low-cost automotive chips, pressured manufacturing cuts throughout main automakers. These weren’t superior parts. They have been fundamental inputs.
That’s the level.
Provide-chain threat just isn’t hiding in unique supplies or superior parts. It’s embedded in extraordinary components when manufacturing is distant, brittle, and concentrated.
When Manufacturing Is The Bottleneck, Pace And Resilience Are Benefits
Legacy provide chains have been by no means designed for geopolitical volatility, speedy iteration, or the rising complexity of contemporary merchandise. Future provide chains have to be constructed in another way:
- Digital manufacturing as an alternative of handbook backlogs.
- Automated, resilient manufacturing as an alternative of brittle, distant suppliers.
- Home throughput as an alternative of overseas choke factors.
What The USA Should Have in 2026: A Manufacturing Acceleration Technique
Rendering of Seurat’s Business Elements Manufacturing Manufacturing unit
If U.S. management in protection, aerospace, power, transportation, electronics, and medical expertise actually issues, home manufacturing capability can not stay elective. 2026 must be the yr we get up and deal with manufacturing as strategic nationwide infrastructure. Our efforts have to be intentional, coordinated, and scaled:
- Not scattered pilot tasks.
- Not one-off innovation grants.
- Not complicated tax credit.
What’s required
- Manufacturing unit-scale Additive Manufacturing deployments: Constructed by means of public–personal partnerships and anchored by federal procurement. Not simply prototypes, however large-scale manufacturing capability throughout all vital industries.
- Strengthen home provide of vital inputs: The Nexperia episode confirmed how even low-tech parts can create threat when provide is concentrated. Diversifying and reshoring vital manufacturing inputs is each economically and strategically pressing.
- A Twenty first-century manufacturing workforce: The subsequent-generation industrial workforce will mix innovation and operational abilities. We’d like automation, engineering, supplies science, and system operators. We should allow pathways that assist all of them.
- Regional manufacturing clusters: Industrial energy grows when OEMs, suppliers, expertise suppliers, and universities co-locate and collaborate to shorten provide chains and speed up adoption.
- Metrics that replicate actual industrial energy: Success needs to be measured by throughput, uptime, lead-time compression, resilience, and price competitiveness.
Manufacturing Is Extra Than Economics
Rendering of Seurat’s Business Elements Manufacturing Manufacturing unit
A sturdy home manufacturing base is greater than an financial engine; it’s the mechanism by which a nation maintains:
- Sovereignty: Proudly owning our vital industrial processes and industries.
- Resilience: Lowered dependency on concentrated overseas provide chains.
- Innovation: Sooner improvement of next-generation applied sciences and merchandise.
- Safety: Readiness and responsiveness in unsure environments.
- Management: The capability to set world industrial requirements and maintain our position as the worldwide engine of invention.
A Decision For The Yr Forward
James DeMuth at Seurat’s Pilot Elements Manufacturing Manufacturing unit
In 2026, my hope is that leaders — public, personal, and institutional — take concrete actions to deal with manufacturing not as a relic of the previous, however as the inspiration of tomorrow.
The USA has the whole lot required to guide the following industrial period:
- World-class analysis establishments
- Entrepreneurial power
- Deep heritage
- Rising applied sciences that lastly enable us to compete on pace, value, and scale
If we deal with superior manufacturing because the strategic infrastructure it actually is, then 2026 might be the yr the US strikes from discussing industrial renewal to really delivering it.
To have interaction with us on this mission, please attain out at data@Seurat.com.
James DeMuth, Co-Founder and CEO of Seurat, will likely be talking at Additive Manufacturing Methods (AMS), a three-day trade occasion happening February 24–26 in New York Metropolis. DeMuth will take part within the panel “Finest Practices for an Aligned Investor-Founder Relationship” on February 25. Registration for the occasion is open through the AMS web site.
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