Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis and Dr. Jill Biden visit DG Medical on the Community College to Career Tour (CC2C). They will be stopping at locations in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina to highlight the importance of community colleges in fostering careers.22 February 2012

Dr. Jill Biden and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis today kicked off a three-day “Community College to Career” bus tour to highlight the unique role community colleges play in developing a flexible, highly-skilled 21^st-century workforce to meet emerging regional business needs.  Secretary Solis is writing updates on the trip from the road.

Dr. Biden and I just visited DG Medical in Centerville, Ohio, to hear about the incredible BioOhio Workforce development partnership that is helping community colleges like Sinclair Community College prepare Ohioans for jobs in the growing biomedical manufacturing industry.

Sinclair is working with former GM/Delphi employees and other dislocated workers to get retraining to perform jobs making medical devices and life-saving drugs. They are part of a BioOhio partnership that has brought together industry leaders and six Ohio community colleges to match workforce needs with course offerings.

The ambitious goal is to graduate 700 Ohioans and place them in biosciences jobs as clean technicians, shipping clerks, packaging experts, manufacturing technicians and test engineers.  More than half of existing program graduates already have found good-paying jobs in this field. Also, incumbent workers are being trained to move up the career ladder to become team leaders and front-line supervisors.

Watching this unique partnership at work illustrates why health care industry job growth continues to help drive our recovery forward.

Want to join the conversation by sharing how community colleges and industry partners are working together in your community?  Share your story at http://www.whitehouse.gov/communitycollege/tour and follow and engage with the tour on Twitter with the hashtag #CCtour.

You can see more of Secretary Solis' posts at Work in Progress, the Department of Labor's official blog.

First Lady Michelle Obama yesterday welcomed a group of young musicians to the White House yesterday for a conversation with some of the country's greatest blues musicians. The workshop, called “At the Crossroads: A History of the Blues in America,” gave the 120 middle and high school students from across the country a chance to learn about the genre’s evolution from African American spirituals and work songs to its influence on the chart-topping hits of today.

Ed note: This post originally appeared on The Commerce Blog, the U.S. Department of Commerce's official blog.

Today, in conjunction with the newly-launched BusinessUSA initiative, the Department of Commerce announced the launch of their business app challenge.  The $10,000 contest challenges app developers to find innovative ways to utilize Commerce and other publicly available data and information to support American businesses. The business app challenge calls on developers to utilize at least one Department of Commerce data set in creating an application that assists businesses and/or improves the service delivery of Business.USA.gov to the business community.  Developers may choose the platform that best suits them. Applicants may design for the web, personal computer, mobile handheld device, or any platform broadly accessible to the open Internet. A list of developer-friendly data sets can be found on the Business Data and Tools page of Data.gov.

President Barack Obama delivers remarks during the groundbreaking ceremony for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture site in Washington, D. C., Feb. 22, 2012. First Lady Michelle Obama attended the event with the President and other participants included: former First Lady Laura Bush; Washington, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray; Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.; Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas; Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts, pastor, Abyssian Baptist Church, New York; Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the museum; Richard Kurin, undersecretary for History, Art and Culture at the Smithsonian; Linda Johnson Rice and Richard Parsons, co-chairs of the museum’s advisory council; Dr. G. Wayne Clough, Secretary, The Smithsonian Institution; Lonnie Bunch, Founding Director, Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture; and Dr. France Córdova, Chair, Smithsonian Board of Regents.. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

This morning, President Obama was on hand for the ground breaking at the site of the future Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

He told those assembled on the National Mall:

Just like the Air and Space Museum challenges us to set our sights higher, or the Natural History Museum encourages us to look closer, or the Holocaust Museum calls us to fight persecution wherever we find it, this museum should inspire us as well.  It should stand as proof that the most important things in life rarely come quickly or easily.  It should remind us that although we have yet to reach the mountaintop, we cannot stop climbing.

As he considered what the museum will mean and the history that it will cover, the President talked about what he wants his daughters to experience: 

I want my daughters to see the shackles that bound slaves on their voyage across the ocean and the shards of glass that flew from the 16th Street Baptist church, and understand that injustice and evil exist in the world. But I also want them to hear Louis Armstrong’s horn and learn about the Negro League and read the poems of Phyllis Wheatley. And I want them to appreciate this museum not just as a record of tragedy, but as a celebration of life.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture was approved by the Smithsonian Board of Regents in 2006, and the new building is scheduled to open to the public in 2015. The museum will sit on a five acre site, between 14th and 15th Streets N.W. -- near the Washington Monument.

Learn more

• Go behind the scenes with Lonny Branch -- the founding director of the museum.

A new report from the Council of Economic Advisors found that by 2015, U.S. mobile data traffic will be 20 times higher than it was in 2010.

To provide for this projected traffic growth, much of it due to the increase in usage of smartphones, tablets, and other internet-enabled mobile devices, the Obama Administration has proposed making an additional 500 MHz of public airwaves, known as spectrum, available for wireless broadband access.

Making wireless broadband more widely available has the potential to transform many parts of the American economy, opening the door to everything from products that make businesses more productive and tools that help doctors and nurses provide better health care at lower costs to making it easier for people to interact with media-rich mobile apps and high-definition streaming video.

In addition, wireless broadband plays a vital role in enabling emergency personnel to communicate efficiently and to obtain necessary information quickly, including real-time videos, images, and other data, even when first responders are working across jurisdictional lines.

Today, Vice President Biden announced a new nationwide public safety broadband network that President Obama will soon sign into law as part of the payroll tax extension. The new legislation will create a nationwide inter-operable public safety broadband network that will, for the first time, allow law enforcement, firefighters and EMTs to have a dedicated communications network so they can talk with one another.

Read more about the benefits of a robust wireless broadband system in the CEA report.

President Barack Obama, with Vice President Joe Biden, discusses the importance of the agreement passed by Congress to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance while speaking in the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Feb. 21, 2012. The President urged Congress to build on the success of the agreement by taking additional steps to create jobs, grow the economy and help the middle class. The President and Vice President were joined by Americans who have shared their stories on WhiteHouse.gov and Twitter about what $40 a paycheck means to them. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

This morning, President Obama hosted an event at the White House to talk about the payroll tax cut -- which Congress voted to extend last week.

Flanked by a group of Americans who shared stories about what they would be forced to give up without the tax cut, he gave credit to all of those who added their voices to the debate:

This got done because of you; because you called, you emailed, you tweeted your representatives and you demanded action. You made it clear that you wanted to see some common sense in Washington. And because you did, no working American is going to see their taxes go up this year. That's good news. Because of what you did, millions of Americans who are out there still looking for work are going to continue to get help with unemployment insurance. That’s because of you.

On January 18, 2011, the President issued Executive Order 13563, in which he directed regulatory agencies to base regulations on an “open exchange of information and perspectives” and to promote public participation in Federal rulemaking.  The President identified Regulations.gov as the centralized portal for timely public access to regulatory content online. 

In response to the President’s direction, Regulations.gov has launched a major redesign, including innovative new search tools, social media connections, and better access to regulatory data.  The result is a significantly improved website that will help members of the public to engage with agencies and ultimately to improve the content of rules.

The redesign of Regulations.gov also fulfills the President’s commitment in The Open Government Partnership National Action Plan to “improve public services,” including to “expand public participation in the development of regulations.” This step is just one of many, consistent with the National Action Plan, designed to make our Federal Government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are technical interfaces/tools that allow people to pull regulatory content from Regulations.gov. For most of us, the addition of “APIs” on Regulations.gov doesn’t mean much, but for web managers and experts in the applications community, providing APIs will fundamentally change the way people will be able to interact with public federal regulatory data and content. 

On October 31, 2011 President Obama signed an Executive Order directing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to take action to help further prevent and reduce prescription drug shortages, protect consumers and prevent price gouging. Nearly four months later, it’s clear that the President’s Executive Order and the good work of the FDA are making a difference for the American people.

Since President Obama signed his Executive Order, FDA has prevented 114 drug shortages. In part, this resulted from the Administration’s call for voluntarily notification to the FDA of potential shortages. Notification of a potential shortage is crucial: with enough advance warning, FDA can take action to help stop a potential drug shortage. And since President Obama signed his Executive Order, voluntary notifications have increased six-fold.

Today, the FDA is announcing the steps it has taken to end the shortage of two important drugs that fight cancer:

• To avert an impending shortage of methotrexate, a drug used to treat children with leukemia, the FDA has worked with manufacturers to help ramp up production and has approved a new application to produce the version of the drug that is most needed , which will further bolster supply and ensure patients have access to this lifesaving medicine. 
• To end the shortage  of the cancer drug Doxil, the FDA will allow the temporary importation of a replacement drug. This action should address patient needs and end this drug shortage.

The FDA is also responding to President Obama’s Executive Order by releasing new draft guidance for the drug industry on requirements for both mandatory and voluntary notification to FDA of issues that could result in a drug shortage.

The agreement reached in Congress yesterday is an important step that will prevent a tax hike on 160 million hardworking Americans who are still recovering from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and continue essential support for millions of unemployed Americans struggling to find jobs. The agreement is also important because it prevents doctors who treat Medicare patients from taking a nearly 30 percent pay cut.  That kind of cut would harm physicians and jeopardize seniors’ access to the doctor they know and trust.

Some have argued that this legislation hurts the Affordable Care Act. This claim is false. Most of the policies in this bill that help prevent doctors from taking a pay cut are in the President’s budget.  Others were the product of a tough negotiation.  And none harm the implementation of health insurance premium tax credits as did the House Republican plan from December.

Let’s look more closely at what is actually in the agreement: