By Andrea Shalal

WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden visited Pittsburgh, a former steel city, on Friday as part of his one-year-old anniversary promise to be more outspoken.

Biden’s approval rating has fallen amid high inflation and a rise in COVID-19, but the Commerce Department announced that the U.S. economic growth was the most rapid in almost four decades on Thursday.

Pittsburgh’s Democratic President will be touring Mill 19, an ex-steel mill that is being used as a research and developmental hub. He will then hail the U.S. economic recovery after the pandemic.

“The president will talk about the remarkable economic progress we’ve made over his first year in office – including the fastest single year of job growth in American history, the biggest unemployment drop on record, and as we learned on Thursday, the fastest economic growth in 2021 in almost four decades,” a White House official said.

Biden returns to the same location where he held his first campaign event. He will talk about the creation and passing of a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, which was a rare bipartisan triumph in a deeply divided Congress.

According to the official, the president will also talk about his efforts to restore American competitiveness to beat China in the race for dominance of the global economy. General Motors (NYSE 🙂 recently announced that it will invest $7B in Michigan for electric vehicle production, and Intel (NASDAQ 🙂 stated it would spend $100B to create a Ohio chip-maker.

The Commerce Department announced Thursday that the U.S. had experienced a 5.7% increase in its economy in 2021. This was the strongest growth since 1984, and it is the first time that U.S. GDP has outperformed that of the Chinese.

Mill 19 houses the Carnegie Mellon University’s Manufacturing Futures Institute. It also hosts a robotics lab and technology training site.