Issue Area
Make Oklahoma the best place to do business.
Oklahoma is proving that economic growth doesn’t happen by accident — it happens when government gets out of the way. Senator Armstrong supports policies that encourage investment, create jobs, and attract the industries that will shape the next generation of American growth, from manufacturing and energy to aerospace and technology.
The Senator’s Position
Build the industries the country needs — in our state, the one actually positioned to host them, for the Oklahomans who already know how to do the work.
Oklahoma is proving that when government gets out of the way and creates the right environment for investment, businesses grow, jobs are created, and communities thrive.
For decades, Oklahoma has been powered by hardworking people, abundant energy resources, and an entrepreneurial spirit. Today, our state is building on that foundation to become a national leader in advanced manufacturing, energy production, aerospace, data infrastructure, and next-generation technology.
Senator Alan Armstrong believes Oklahoma’s success comes from a simple principle: when businesses are free to invest, build, and innovate, opportunity follows.
And the case for landing it in Oklahoma is not abstract. Each investment below means real paychecks for working Oklahoma families, real construction-trade work, and real career-track jobs for Oklahomans who already do this kind of work for a living — the kind of wages that put food on the table, keep a roof overhead, and let a family build a stable life over decades. When the country rebuilds its industrial base, the towns that host the work get those paychecks, the local tax base, and the multi-decade investment commitments that come with it. The Senator’s economic-development thesis is built around making sure as much of that work as possible lands in Oklahoma.
The drop-downs below cover the six specific Oklahoma economic-development investments the Senator is focused on. They are not abstractions. They are projects, clusters, and federal touchpoints that translate Oklahoma’s underlying advantages into actual investment landed in our state — and into the jobs, the paychecks, and the community gains that go with it.
“We have such abundant resources here in the US that we know how to responsibly produce. The thing that stands in between that literally is connecting those resources to the demand that desperately needs it.”
— Sen. Alan Armstrong · May 13, 2026 · ConservAmerica
The economic-development thesis and the Senator’s permitting reform work are inseparable. Both lines of work answer the same question: how does the United States rebuild the industrial capacity it spent the last thirty years exporting, and how does Oklahoma compete for its share of that rebuild?
Where We’re Focused
Six Oklahoma investments the Senator is focused on.
Each section below expands to the substance: why the investment exists, why our state is positioned to host it, and the federal levers that determine whether it lands here.
01Domestic Aluminum Smelting Capacity
The United States has lost most of its primary aluminum smelting over the past two decades. The country and our state both need it back. Oklahoma is one of the few states positioned to land a new smelter.
Domestic Aluminum Smelting Capacity
The United States has lost most of its primary aluminum smelting over the past two decades. The country and our state both need it back. Oklahoma is one of the few states positioned to land a new smelter.
Primary aluminum smelting is one of the clearest industrial-base gaps in the United States. The country once had dozens of operating smelters; today only a handful remain, and the rest of America’s aluminum demand is met by imports. Defense, aerospace, automotive, packaging, transmission, and clean-energy supply chains all depend on aluminum the United States no longer makes at the scale it consumes.
Oklahoma is one of the few states in serious contention for a new domestic primary smelter. The reasons are practical: reliable, abundant baseload power from our state’s gas and wind generation; rail and barge access through the McClellan–Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System and our state’s interstate rail network; a large industrial workforce already trained on heavy process operations; and a state-side permitting climate that has been an asset, not an obstacle. Landing a new primary smelter requires federal partnership in three specific places: Department of Energy loan programs, Department of Commerce industrial-base policy, and the relevant Senate committees that shape the federal financing environment for a project of that scale. Those are the federal touchpoints that determine whether a final investment decision lands in Oklahoma or in another state.
A modern primary smelter is also one of the largest single-facility job anchors a state can land. Hundreds of permanent process, maintenance, and engineering roles inside the plant; thousands of construction-trade Oklahomans drawing a steady paycheck over the multi-year build; and the kind of multi-decade industrial wages that put food on the table for thousands of families and support the schools, small businesses, and communities around them.
02Rapid Data-Center Deployment
The AI buildout has created unprecedented demand for power and land. The state with the best grid, the fastest permits, and the most reliable power wins these projects. Oklahoma is competitive on all three.
Rapid Data-Center Deployment
The AI buildout has created unprecedented demand for power and land. The state with the best grid, the fastest permits, and the most reliable power wins these projects. Oklahoma is competitive on all three.
Hyperscale data centers are the most power-hungry industrial buildout the United States has undertaken in a generation. The companies driving the build — the largest AI and cloud providers in the world — are land-and-power constrained. They are picking states based on three things: how quickly a project can interconnect to the grid, how reliable the underlying power supply is, and how much new generation can be brought online on a timeline that matches the technology curve.
Oklahoma is competitive on all three. Our state’s wind generation is among the largest in the country. Its gas-fired baseload is reliable. Its grid operator has demonstrated faster interconnection timelines than many of the larger regional transmission organizations. The federal action that decides where the next wave of data centers lands sits at FERC and the Department of Energy — specifically the transmission-interconnection and federal-permitting reforms that determine whether Oklahoma’s grid advantages translate into actual project siting. This investment connects directly to the office’s national permitting reform work — what’s good for the next data-center campus is good for the Senator’s headline national priority.
The local impact is concrete. A single hyperscale campus brings steady paychecks home to thousands of Oklahoma construction-trade workers over the multi-year build — electricians, pipefitters, ironworkers, mechanical and HVAC crews, and the general-contractor ecosystem that supports them. When the campus comes online, the permanent operations workforce is a smaller but high-wage population of technicians, electricians, security staff, and engineers whose jobs do not leave once the build is finished — the kind of steady, high-wage work that lets a family put down roots in the towns that host these campuses.
03The Duncan Refinery
The United States has lost refining capacity steadily for years. New or expanded refining in Duncan is a near-term Oklahoma opportunity the Senator is focused on.
The Duncan Refinery
The United States has lost refining capacity steadily for years. New or expanded refining in Duncan is a near-term Oklahoma opportunity the Senator is focused on.
The U.S. has steadily lost refining capacity for the better part of two decades. Refinery closures, retirements, and the absence of significant new construction have left American gasoline, diesel, and jet-fuel supply chains tighter and more vulnerable to single-facility disruptions. The country needs additional refining capacity, and the federal-state cooperation to permit and build it.
The Duncan refinery project is an Oklahoma-specific opportunity to put new refining capacity back on the map. Duncan and the surrounding Stephens County have a deep oil-and-gas operating history, a workforce already trained on process industries, and an existing logistics footprint that make the project credible. It is one of the near-term refining opportunities the Senator is focused on for both our state and the country’s broader refining footprint.
The local case is even more direct. A working refinery in Duncan brings back the kind of paychecks Stephens County built its economy around — process operators, mechanical and instrumentation technicians, engineers, and the contractor ecosystem that surrounds them. These are the kinds of jobs that put food on the table, make house payments, and put a kid through school. They are the family-supporting careers that have steadily left small Oklahoma cities over the past generation. Refining capacity going back into Duncan is energy security at the national level and a kitchen-table story at the local one. [Office to expand here with specific project details when ready to publish: developer, capacity, timeline, federal touchpoints.]
04The Tulsa Innovation Labs Cluster
Tulsa has built a serious technology cluster around cybersecurity, energy technology, and applied AI. The Senator is engaged on the federal partnerships that scale it.
The Tulsa Innovation Labs Cluster
Tulsa has built a serious technology cluster around cybersecurity, energy technology, and applied AI. The Senator is engaged on the federal partnerships that scale it.
Tulsa Innovation Labs, anchored by the George Kaiser Family Foundation in the city’s historic Greenwood district, is one of the most serious place-based technology clusters in the central United States. It is focused on the fields where Oklahoma already has comparative advantage and where federal investment is concentrated: cybersecurity (in partnership with the University of Tulsa, a longstanding NSA-designated cybersecurity research center), energy technology, applied artificial intelligence, and virtual health. The federal partnership opportunities are real and growing — through the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce, and the EDA’s Tech Hubs program.
The office is focused on the federal-side work that lets the Tulsa cluster compete for and absorb that investment. The FY27 appropriations request for the University of Tulsa’s cybersecurity research for human-AI teaming is one published example. The broader federal landscape involves the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy’s loan programs, and the federal tax provisions that affect where technology companies locate research and engineering operations. The opportunity is to make sure Oklahoma’s seat at the federal-research table is bigger than it has historically been.
The local payoff is high-wage technology employment landed in Tulsa rather than exported to coastal labor markets. Cybersecurity engineers, AI researchers, energy-technology staff, and the support workforce around them are jobs that build careers, raise families, and grow a tax base inside our state. The work of this office is to make Tulsa a place where an Oklahoma graduate can build a thirty-year career in technology without ever having to leave.
05Drone Development & Counter-UAS, in Partnership with Oklahoma Tribes
Tribal nations are leading some of Oklahoma’s most serious emerging-technology work in aviation, drones, and counter-UAS — with national-security implications.
Drone Development & Counter-UAS, in Partnership with Oklahoma Tribes
Tribal nations are leading some of Oklahoma’s most serious emerging-technology work in aviation, drones, and counter-UAS — with national-security implications.
Oklahoma’s tribal nations are quietly building some of the most consequential drone and counter-UAS research and development capacity in the country. The Choctaw Nation’s Tribal Range, a secure research environment for counter-unmanned-aircraft-systems technology in Bryan County, is one of the office’s FY27 appropriations requests. It represents a model that the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FAA all have direct interest in. Counter-UAS is one of the most active federal research and procurement portfolios of the next decade, and tribal sovereignty over the land base provides operating advantages other research environments do not have.
Two of the office’s channels for this work are publicly documented: the Senator’s Indian Affairs Committee seat and the FY27 appropriations request for the Choctaw Nation’s Tribal Range. The broader federal landscape includes DOD, DHS, and the FAA — each with active interest in counter-UAS work. The Senator views this as exactly the kind of partnership the federal government should be investing in — tribal sovereignty-respecting, nationally meaningful, and grounded in the actual capacity Oklahoma’s tribes have built over the past several years.
The economic upside is concentrated where it’s needed most: tribal employment, advanced-aviation and engineering jobs in rural Oklahoma, and the contractor ecosystem that grows up around a serious federal testing and procurement program. The communities around Bryan County are exactly the kind of small-town Oklahoma economies the federal government has spent decades flying past on its way somewhere else. The Choctaw Tribal Range is one way the next decade of federal national-security investment lands inside them instead.
06Critical Minerals & Rare-Earth Magnets — Stillwater
USA Rare Earth’s Stillwater facility is the first U.S. commercial-scale production of the rare-earth permanent magnets that defense, EV, and grid supply chains all depend on. The federal partnership is enormous, and the work is just starting.
Critical Minerals & Rare-Earth Magnets — Stillwater
USA Rare Earth’s Stillwater facility is the first U.S. commercial-scale production of the rare-earth permanent magnets that defense, EV, and grid supply chains all depend on. The federal partnership is enormous, and the work is just starting.
The United States spent the better part of two decades letting the rare-earth permanent-magnet supply chain consolidate overseas. Those magnets — sintered neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets in particular — are not optional inputs. They go into electric-vehicle motors, wind turbines, data-center cooling systems, MRI machines, consumer electronics, and a long list of defense systems. The F-35 alone uses roughly 920 pounds of rare-earth magnets per aircraft. The supply-chain risk is no longer theoretical.
USA Rare Earth’s 310,000-square-foot magnet manufacturing facility in Stillwater opened in March 2025, with the first sintered NdFeB magnets shipping to customers in the second quarter of 2026. In January of 2026, the Trump administration announced a $1.6 billion federal investment package: a $277 million Department of Commerce CHIPS Program award, a $1.3 billion CHIPS Act loan, and a government equity stake that could exceed 15%. The Department of Energy is funding a companion pilot-scale ion-exchange rare-earth production plant at the same site. The work is anchored alongside Oklahoma State University, ties directly to the OSU produced-water research for critical-mineral extraction the office’s appropriations request supports, and represents one of the clearest industrial-base wins on Oklahoma soil. The federal touchpoints that matter for the next phase — supply-chain expansion, workforce pipeline, and the regulatory environment that determines whether the buildout continues to land in Stillwater — sit at Commerce, DOE, and the relevant Senate committees. Keeping the work landing here is the kind of investment this office is focused on.
The Stillwater plant is already employing Oklahomans in advanced-manufacturing roles that did not exist in our state two years ago, with more coming online as the facility scales. That is the picture the country needs more of: high-wage, skilled industrial jobs landed in a university town in the middle of our state, anchored by federal investment and built around an Oklahoma workforce. It is what an industrial-base policy that actually shows up in Oklahoma paychecks looks like.
The Broader Environment
Specific projects matter. So does the environment they land in.
The six investments above are concrete projects, clusters, and federal touchpoints the Senator is focused on. But every one of them depends on something broader — the federal tax policy, the regulatory predictability, and the federal-state coordination that determine whether the next investment lands in Oklahoma or in a state with worse fundamentals but a faster federal permit. That underlying environment is the Senator’s permitting reform work in a different costume. And the stakes are local: every project that lands somewhere else is a paycheck that doesn’t reach a working Oklahoma family, a tax base that doesn’t show up in a county budget, and a career ladder that doesn’t open for the next generation of Oklahomans.
The federal toolkit that determines where industrial investment actually lands — tax policy that doesn’t penalize capital deployed in U.S. manufacturing, regulatory predictability that lets companies make the multi-decade investment commitments these projects require, federal-state coordination that gets federal dollars and federal approvals to Oklahoma stakeholders without losing months to administrative friction — is the broader environment this work depends on. The six investments above are how it shows up in specific places: on Oklahoma kitchen tables, in Oklahoma careers, and in the small cities that have been waiting for the industrial buildout to find them. The broader environment is what makes them possible.
For the Senator’s full position on the regulatory side of this, see the Nationwide Energy & Permitting Reform page. For the federal funding side, see the office’s published FY27 Appropriations Disclosures.
Connected Work
How this fits the rest of the Senator’s agenda.
Nationwide Energy & Permitting Reform
The Senator’s national priority. The regulatory predictability that determines whether any of the projects on this page can actually be built on a competitive timeline.
Tribal Nations
The government-to-government work that underpins the Choctaw Tribal Range and the Senator’s broader tribal-partnership posture.
Appropriations Disclosures
The published federal funding requests the office has submitted for FY27 — including OSU produced-water research, TU cybersecurity, and the Choctaw Tribal Range.
Follow the Work
Oklahoma economic-development updates, sent when there’s something to say.
Subscribe to updates from Senator Armstrong’s office for plain-language reads on the projects above — what’s moving, what’s stuck, what’s hiring, and how Oklahoma is competing for the industrial buildout the country needs. Sent on the office’s regular cadence, not on a schedule. No spam. No fundraising. Just the work.