Trump launches new office to oversee CHIPS Act, boost semiconductor investments

US President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order this week creating the US Investment Accelerator office to oversee the CHIPS and Science Act, a Biden-era program to re-shore semiconductor production.

According to a White House statement, the new entity’s mission will be to speed up corporate investments domestically by reducing government regulations and coordinating with federal agencies.

Trump has criticized the bipartisan CHIPS Act, signed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2022, and said he wants to negotiate better deals. The office will also work to make it easier for companies to invest in US semiconductor manufacturing.

In a speech before Congress last month, Trump called the CHIPS Act “horrible” and said he wanted to defund it: “We don’t have to give them money; we just want to protect our businesses and our people, and they will come because they won’t have to pay tariffs if they build in America.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the status of CHIPS Act funding.

In February, reports emerged that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) planned to cut 497 jobs as part of Trump’s federal government downsizing. NIST, a non-regulatory agency within the US Department of Commerce (DoC), helps drive innovation and industrial competitiveness and oversees the CHIPS for America program. The personnel cuts were widely criticized as damaging to the rollout of the CHIPS Act.

In a letter today, nearly two-dozen lawmakers bemoaned the firings of 70 probationary employees at NIST and the ongoing reduction-in-force efforts by the Trump Administration that could target additional probationary scientists, postdoctoral researchers, and other staff authorized by the CHIPS Act.

The letter from 22 members of the US House of Representatives to US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said the potential changes come on the heels of the deferred resignation program, which already is affecting the capacity of the NIST to fulfill its statutory obligations. “Removing national and international leaders from the nonpartisan and professional civil service at NIST would hamper the development of critical standards, threaten industrial and consumer safety, and weaken American leadership around the world,” the letter said.

In 2021, the years-long decline in domestic chip production was exposed by a worldwide supply-chain crisis that led to calls for re-shoring manufacturing to the US. After more than a year of work from the Biden Administration to respond to acute semiconductor shortages, Congress in August 2022 passed the measure.

The Commerce Department, which is administering the CHIPS Act, spent months negotiating with semiconductor designers and fabricators to gain commitments from them and to achieve specific milestones in their projects before getting government payouts.

With the CHIPS Act spurring them on, semiconductor makers including  Intel, Samsung, Micron, TSMC, and Texas Instruments unveiled plans for a number of new plants on US soil. (Qualcomm, in partnership with GlobalFoundries, also said it would invest $4.2 billion to double chip production in its Malta, NY facility.)

The Department of Commerce has been divvying up $52 billion in the hopes of spurring on-shore chip manufacturing. While about $32 billion of CHIPS Act money has been allocated, the funds have not yet been dispersed. It was not immediately clear whether Trump’s action this week could delay disbursement of the monies.