Congresswoman Escobar presents $1.03M federal grant to boost El Paso defense manufacturing
EL PASO, Texas (KFOX14/CBS4) — El Paso Congresswoman Veronica Escobar presented over a million dollars of funding to support defense manufacturers in the Borderland.
In a presentation held on Tuesday at TNT Tooling, Inc., a machine shop in West El Paso, Rep. Escobar presented El Paso Makes, a subsidiary of the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM), a check for $1,031,000 from a federal Community Project grant.
According to a news release, the money will go toward an initiative that will help small and medium-sized manufacturers in El Paso beef up their defense manufacturing.
"The work funded through this project will focus on fabricating critical drone components, specifically flight controllers," said David Espalin, Ph.D., Director of El Paso Makes. "It builds on the success of our initial phase, where we connected a local Tier 1 Department of Defense supplier with small and medium-sized manufacturers to create a digital cloud infrastructure for producing mis…