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Former President Donald Trump has been particularly critical of the CHIPS and Science Act in recent days.
In an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast late last month, the former president blasted the Biden-Harris administration's landmark semiconductor manufacturing funding law, saying “that chip deal is so bad.”
“We put up billions of dollars for rich companies to come in and borrow the money and build chip companies here, and they’re not going to give us the good companies anyway,” Trump said on the podcast.
Trump claimed the country should have instead used tariffs to push companies to build chip factories in the U.S., rather than federal subsidies and tax credits.
“When I see us paying a lot of money to have people build chips, that’s not the way,” Trump said. “You didn’t have to put up 10 cents, you could have done it with a series of tariffs. In other words, you tariff it so high that they will come and build their chip companies for nothing.”
The comments have prompted the question of whether Trump, if reelected, would try to defund some of the legislation’s funding for domestic semiconductor factories.
The CHIPS Act allocates a bucket of $39 billion for semiconductor manufacturing. Thus far, the Biden administration has awarded more than $33 billion across 32 projects.
However, only one project’s funds, $123 million for Polar Semiconductors, have been disbursed. The rest of the awards remain in the “due diligence” phase, meaning the Commerce Department is working with the applicant to “confirm and further refine their workforce commitments and standards,” according to the National Institute of Standards & Technology.
The Biden-Harris administration plans to announce all awards by the end of the year, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in an April CNBC interview. However, a DOC spokesperson declined to comment on whether the administration intends to disburse all funds before President Joe Biden leaves office.
So, what might a Trump presidency mean for the CHIPS Act?
“He could certainly throw a wrench into the existing CHIPS Act,” said Alan Sykes, a law professor at Stanford University. “There's a possibility of fairly dramatic effects if he were to win the White House and try to curtail the subsidies.”