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Vance and Rubio Deliver Remarks at The Foundry School Launch, Sep. 3, 2026

September 3, 2026 · The White House · 0:19:36

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke at the launch of The Foundry School on September 3, 2026, at the Institute of Peace in Washington — an initiative, hosted by Jacob Hellberg, bringing industry, government, and educators together around American manufacturing skills. Rubio was introduced as the son of Cuban exiles who had warned for two decades that “we traded our industrial base for the illusion of cheap abundance,” and who had argued in Munich that de-industrialization was a choice and re-industrialization must now be America’s.

In his own remarks, Rubio called the post-Cold War assumption that manufacturing no longer mattered “a terrible mistake”: “The reality [is] that the nation state still does matter… But the result of it is that it de-industrialized America. We lost our ability and our capacity to make things.” He tied the reversal to critical minerals — “not just critical minerals as raw material, but also to the ability to process them” — and to making things again. Vance closed the event with the school’s signal: a generation was told that “if you were working with your hands that was less than,” he said, calling that “one of the dumbest things that America’s leaders ever told a generation of American kids.” The message, he said, is: “If you want to work with your hands, great. If you want to work with your mind, great. Why don’t you do both?”

Why it matters

Re-industrialization is the stated foundation of this administration’s economic statecraft, and this is its workforce chapter argued by the two principals who carry it abroad and at home — Rubio, who also serves as National Security Advisor, and Vance. The Foundry School is the kind of concrete institution the scoreboard can follow from launch announcement to operating reality.

Sources: The White House, “Vice President JD Vance Delivers Remarks at The Foundry School,” September 3, 2026 (official upload, embedded above; the upload’s description places the event in Washington, DC). Remarks as delivered at the event, including the introduction of Secretary Rubio.