President Joe Biden’s White House is racing to secure its legacy ahead of November’s elections — in large part by doubling down on the future. In a reporting project published today, a team of POLITICO reporters broke down the massive, trillion-plus-dollar budget commitment made by the Biden administration and Congress to America’s infrastructure — a vast expenditure that could help his presidential campaign, if Americans actually get the money. That seems to be the hard part. Looking at the 2021 pandemic recovery and infrastructure bills, 2022’s CHIPS and Science Act and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the reporters found that less than 17 percent of the $1.1 trillion allocated in those laws has actually been spent. And despite the recent fanfare around a series of announced grants for advanced semiconductor manufacturing, the CHIPS and Science Act was one of the major laggards. Washington has sent out less than $700 million of the nearly $53 billion that Congress made available in the CHIPS and Science Act, the reporters found. That contrasts with the much larger sum — $29 billion — announced in tentative awards to semiconductor manufacturers in recent months. That money is still under negotiation. The law aims at adding American jobs and boosting competition with China, but building up the microchips industry is no small challenge — especially given its high skill demands and how many top jobs have moved offshore. Re-shoring expertise and manufacturing to America also means merging different countries’ workforces and customs, no simple feat as a recent report from Rest of World demonstrated. Sorting out spending for the “Science” part of the bill, which commits spending for research on emerging technologies like quantum, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, hasn’t been easy either. The Federation of American Scientists reported in October 2023 that appropriations for research funding fell $7.5 billion below their authorized levels. While the government might be lagging on assigning the lavish spending laid out by the CHIPS and Science Act, it’s had a noticeable indirect effect on the tech industry itself. A Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company chipmaking project in Arizona that was underway before the bill was signed was expanded and now includes more than 10,000 employees. And as POLITICO’s Jessie Blaeser and Kelsey Tamborinno point out in an explainer accompanying the package, private companies, some of which are angling for the government’s largesse, have announced $866 billion in planned domestic production during the Biden presidency. One possible effect of the spending gap between what’s authorized and what’s committed is that it might preclude voters from… actually knowing much about what their tax dollars are paying for. Polling conducted by POLITICO and Morning Consult shows not just that Americans largely doubt the Biden administration’s big spending is getting anything done, but that they barely know it’s happening — with the CHIPS and Science Act flying furthest under the radar. Of the four major bills the POLITICO reporting team examined, polling found the CHIPS and Science Act had the lowest profile with only nine percent of respondents saying they’d heard “a lot” about it and 23 percent said they’d heard “some.” Higher-income and higher-education voters were more likely to say they’d heard about the bill. As it happens, it’s not much easier for our dogged reporters to find out what’s going on with all this federal money either. The team notes that “The initiatives funded by the four laws are so varied and sprawling — from building bridges and tunnels, to making electric cars more affordable, to bankrolling battery factories and lithium mines, to stringing broadband lines and removing lead drinking water pipes, to removing carbon dioxide from the air — that grasping their full scope can be difficult.” For CHIPS and Science specifically, the government spending tracking site USA Spending offers little information. POLITICO reporters say they “requested award data via email and Freedom of Information Act requests to the federal agencies in charge of awarding funds,” but “Most have not yet provided comprehensive data.”
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