The Defense Production Agency has a budget of $2 billion, not $727 billion. Part of that budget will fund Title III programs. I can’t find the Title III budget, but imagine it would be no greater than $500 million. The Title III funds will be split among different agencies: DoE, Department of Health, and DoD. DoE funds are intended to promote ‘green’ energy production capabilities, DoH funds things like vaccine production, and the DoD funds projects like integrated circuit manufacture as well as biomanufacturing.
The RFI that Thompson may or may not have responded to is competing with several other programs for funding. It may not get any funding at all:
From the RFI: “Note: There is no guarantee that this topic area will become a Title III project, and responders to this RFI will have no competitive advantage in receiving awards related to the submitted topic area.”
So the DoD may choose to spend their money building a vaccine producing factory instead of this thrust.
The DoD also indicated they have an existing problem under biomanufacturing: many American companies use facilities in Europe to manufacture materials needed by the DoD because these plants can be flexibly repurposed and can produce relatively small batches of a large number of biological products.
These funds are not restricted to American companies:
“Note: The DPA is concerned with only domestic sources. Foreign capabilities will not be considered. Title III cannot be used to create or expand a foreign source, regardless of the essentiality of the technology to U.S. defense requirements. The DPA defines domestic source to be a business concern that performs in the United States or Canada substantially all of the research and development, engineering, manufacturing, and production activities required of such business concern under a contract with the United States…”
The source must be domestic, not the company. Spiber will have no difficulty responding to this RFI.
Under the circumstances, we might imagine the DoD portion of the Title III funds might be $100 to $150 million. The proportion spent on the Distributed Manufacturing Enabled by Modular Bioindustrial & Reusable Assets program might be somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 to $50 million. Or it might be $0.
Given the existing needs for biomanufactured materials, spending $10 million on chimeric silk production with unknown applications just doesn’t make any sense. $500,000 to generate some samples that people can test out? Yeah, maybe.
The SLAM DUNK we keep hearing about may turn into a SLAM DUD. This entire thrust may receive ZERO funding in the five-year program. Might have to wait until 2028 to see if funds become available then.
Sorry to keep splashing cold reality on the fantasies people keep posting on this board. Of course, Thompson keeps splashing cold reality on our fantasies, so I’m just following his lead.
