In summary: leisure travel has already recovered to pre-pandemic levels but business travel and foreign tourism to the U.S. Thursday afternoon the governors heard city, regional, and national tourism marketing officials discuss the sector's progress in recovering from the pandemic. to decide if meaningful portions (of future manufacturing) will be on American soil or not." "Call your senators - we need this done before the August recess," Gelsinger said. Gelsinger, who has been lobbying for action on the long-stalled bill for months, implied chipmakers would invest in overseas manufacturing instead if Congress didn't act before the August recess. The CEO of computer chip giant Intel, Pat Gelsinger, repeatedly urged the assembled governors to press their states' congressional delegation to pass the core provisions of the CHIPS Act: $52 billion in incentives for firms like Intel to shift semiconductor manufacturing back to the United States. "And I want every other governor to say: no, I want to be the first one to claim that victory." Mills, you're a tiny state, and I bet you don't have 100 high schools, and if you put a line in your budget that said we're going to have a FIRST team in every high school," Kamen told the Press Herald. Students who become passionate about STEM, he reasons, will transform their own prospects and that of the country. He wants the governors' help - including Mills - to further expand the model and increase its profile in an effort to give the sport soccer-like visibility. Backed by donations from tech giants, the nonprofit has dozens of employees and $70 million in assets. The result was FIRST, a robotics competition for K-12 students that's grown from 23 teams in 1989 to some 50,000 teams fielding more than 700,000 student competitors in 113 countries. Let's create a sport around science and engineering," he recalled to the governors. Kamen's observation, back in the late 1980s, was that the emerging shortage of science, technology and engineering experts was a cultural problem: schools and their students didn't celebrate STEM, they celebrated sports. New Hampshire-based inventor Dean Kamen, whose engineering powerhouse DEKA is pioneering the rapid production of human organs grown from a patient's own cells, urged governors to boost the supply of young people interested in science and technical fields by contributing to his ongoing effort to make robotics competitions into a sport as popular as scholastic football, basketball or baseball. "Governors must lead on this - there is no alternative," Hutchinson told his colleagues at the opening plenary session in the Holiday Inn by the Bay ballroom, asserting that more than 650,000 computer science jobs remained unfilled across the country. The pledge, endorsed by Mills, commits the governors to implement at least one of thirteen policy initiatives meant to increase the number and demographic diversity of students studying computer science. Outgoing NGA Chair Asa Hutchinson, Republican governor of Arkansas, announced that fifty of the 55 states, territorial and commonwealth governors had signed a compact he has been promoting committing to expand computer science education in public schools. "Some of the national issues affect us differently, but all of us have similar challenges even if we have different dynamics in terms of our legislatures and local politics.
"We're a group that has the shared experience in terms of leading and there are opportunities for bipartisan cooperation," the Republican said. Doug Burgum said the bipartisan forum was valuable. Speaking to reporters after the first plenary, North Dakota Gov. May we find that common ground this week in Portland, Maine." "That's what governors have to do every day to improve the lives of our citizens. "I continue to strongly believe that while we will disagree on many issues, we have more in common than what sets us apart that there are opportunities for us to find common ground and consensus despite our disagreements," Mills, a Democrat, added.