Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowDonald Trump has continued his call for Congress to dismantle the CHIPS and Science Act, a 2022 law passed with a bipartisan vote that the Republican president recently described as a “horrible, horrible thing.”
We urge lawmakers to resist Trump’s request.
As we wrote shortly after last year’s election, the CHIPS Act should be viewed as a step toward achieving many of Trump’s America-first goals. The law allocated $53 billion in federal incentives for U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturing and research and development—the kind of science and production that will help the United States be less dependent on other nations.
Some of that money is, indeed, going to companies that are foreign-owned or based overseas. But those companies—including South Korean chip manufacturer SK Hynix Inc., which is planning a $3.87 billion semiconductor packaging facility in West Lafayette—have agreed to invest in the United States.
Trump, in his joint address to Congress, urged lawmakers to “get rid of the CHIP Act.” That part of the speech was a surprise to many lawmakers, including U.S. Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican who co-authored the law. He told reporters that Trump’s words “seemed in tension with the reassurances I had received privately and publicly from his now-Cabinet [members], reassurances which I sought in order to be supportive of certain nominees.”
The CHIPS Act focuses on microelectronics and battery technology, but the future of artificial intelligence could also be at stake.
That matters, Young told the audience at IBJ’s Technology Power Breakfast last week, because AI needs to be developed with American values at its core. “It’s essential for America to leave its imprint … the values that are embedded within the Declaration of Independence, the Enlightenment values on which this nation was founded,” Young said. “If we fail to do this, some other and likely hostile nation will shape AI according to its own principles.”
That’s why Congress should continue to fund the science portion of the CHIPS and Science Act, he said. “Our private sector and our capital markets are the best in the world, bar none, the broadest, the deepest, the most efficient, but they’re not optimized for the types of investments that are needed,” he said. The CHIPS Act helps to provide that investment.
But Young said encouraging the development of AI and the technologies of the future is about more than money. “On balance, government should not fail to recognize the opportunity cost of constructing unnecessary barriers that restrain our innovators,” he said. “Governments should not rush to create a giant new regulatory apparatus around the development of AI.”
But if U.S. developers lead AI’s advancements, American values will become imbued in the technology; other countries, including China, could be forced to play by those rules. That will give American companies a decisive advantage, Young said.
That’s one of many reasons to fund science, and we urge Congress to listen to Young and keep that in mind.•
__________
To comment, write to [email protected].
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.
Sen. Young hesitated to be an obedient MAGA CULT member blindly voting for TRUMP’s Clown car nominees so TRUMP retaliated by proposing to kill the CHIP Act ! Then CO-KING MUSK called Sen. Young out with a TOXIC wealth threat to primary him if he doesn’t comply with the MUSK-TRUMP Regime . IT is very clear why Sen. Young is now cowed into the MAGA CULT line.