Gastonia, NC Correspondent — Wafers and kilograms. If you can’t count them, you had a parade.

Mid-2025 is late enough that some dirt should have become a unit, and in one or two cases it has. Arizona is producing at commercial volume, which is a real answer to a question people were asking three years ago.

Most of the rest is still a date. Dates that slip while the ribbon stays in the archive are the tell.

Publish a table: promised units, delivered units, slip, money out the door. Tables are rude, and rude is how you stop living on ceremonies.

Owatonna, MN Correspondent — A co-op wouldn’t call a barn-raising complete because the program said barn.

The mineral side is where the accounting is worst. Ore leaving on a boat to the usual refiner is not a second source. Processed material is. Almost every project that gets counted as resilience is counted at the wrong step.

Publish the step. If it stops at the mine gate, say so.

Bismarck, ND Correspondent — Count production.

For minerals that means usable material through the processing step that was supposed to reduce the dependency. For chips, count the output the project was funded to produce.

If an allied project is late, publish the delay and the reason. A flag doesn’t change the metric.

Dayton, OH Correspondent — A shop measures first article, not groundbreaking.

The honest news is that the leading-edge fab money did produce something and it produced it later and more expensively than promised, which is what everyone in manufacturing predicted and nobody in Washington wanted to hear.

The packaging step is the one I’d watch now. You can make the wafer here and still send it abroad to be packaged, and if that’s the outcome we bought a partial valve at full price.

Tyler, Texas Correspondent — Energy country knows a producing well from an announced one.

Judge by delivered units and by slips against the last promise.

The mineral file is the one that hasn’t moved. Processing is chemistry and permits and power, and we’re short of all three. Announcing a mine while the next step still runs through the usual country is a sticker on the old map.

Long Island, NY Correspondent — Programs should be graded against the output they were created to deliver.

Publish promised versus actual, milestone dates, and dollars disbursed, and keep the original baseline visible rather than rewriting it after each delay.

Some delays have legitimate permitting or engineering explanations. The explanation should be documented and the next disbursement should reflect performance.

The reporting problem is that the awards are structured with milestone-based disbursement, which means the government already has this data and simply doesn’t publish it in a form anyone can audit. That’s a choice.

Cheyenne, WY Correspondent — Book production, not ceremonies.

If the kilogram wasn’t processed or the wafer wasn’t produced, record the project as incomplete and show the delay.

Same rule for allies. A flag is not output.

Sydney, Australia Correspondent — Allies can hear when partnership means a ribbon in our country and a unit still stuck in the old processing step.

We have the ore. We have been saying for three years that we’d process it if the offtake and the price floor existed, and neither has arrived, because a grant builds a plant and only a contract keeps it running when the price is driven down.

Judge us by kilograms, by all means. Then notice that the instrument you’re using cannot produce kilograms, because it was designed to fund construction rather than to survive a price war.

That’s not an alliance problem. It’s a design problem, and it’s yours as much as ours.