This Is What President Biden's CHIPS Office Actually Did
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What is the CHIPS program and why was it created?
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Jill Weissenthal.
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
Tracy, I just wrote about this in our newsletter like five minutes ago, but it drives me nuts how in all of the talk about reindustrialization of America, everyone is just completely memory-hauled like 2022 and 2023.
Well, this is the amazing thing, right? We did have a big investment program actually announced under the Biden administration, like huge amounts of money, billions of dollars. And no one seems to be talking about it that much, or at least a very important segment seems to be ignoring it, and that is the Trump administration. Trump, I think he said before that he thought it was a horrible policy.
Yeah.
I suspect the reason he thinks it's horrible is because it was a Biden thing. But it is also amazing that like even this, even making more semiconductors in the US ended up being politicized and a sort of culture war issue.
It's just crazy to me. It's it's totally insane to me of all these like influencers and LARPers that's waiting to bring back physical manufacturing and national security, et cetera. As if this hasn't been a dominant thing in US discourse for years. As if there weren't literally battery and chip factories being announced almost every day throughout 2022 and 2023 all across the US. It was not just a program, it was like an actual Like breaking ground and new things were going up, and dollars spent by the private sector partially to get public subsidies, et cetera. You could certainly say that it was like badly designed or that it was wrong, or there were too many rules, whatever. Like all that, you know, that's all of this is fair play.
But the idea that suddenly this is just some like new impulse and not like something that's real existing reindustrialization. I find it infuriating and or at the very least very annoying. Shall we fix that, Joe? Let's fix it. Well we should talk about what actually happened, right? Because it does seem like d either literally or de facto or de jure or whatever The plug is being pulled on a lot of these different programs. And now there's talk about industrialization, but the hope is that tariffs themselves spur all of this a domestic investment in physical things for people to do assembly line jobs, et cetera. But we should learn a little bit more. We
should talk about what our jobs actually are as well, because you know, th yes, boost manufacturing in the US, create new jobs, spur some private investment, a sort of public private idea. But there are a lot of different like threads that you can pull here in terms of the actual goals.
Well, we should learn a little bit more about what the CHIPS program actually was. And I it does still exist, but I'm not really sure if it seems like it's more of a husk than it was. We are gonna be speaking with someone we know very well, someone we've known on the internet a long time, someone who even came on odd lots once several years ago, who actually worked in the CHIPS program office. We were speaking with Husan Khan. He was the director of economic security. at the CHIPS program office. I believe he's officially left the job. So um he could talk now about what he saw inside. Hussen, thank you so much for coming back on Odlots.
Joe, Tracy, it's always a pleasure. You know, your intro there, I ha feel very similarly. I really do feel like we forgot about what was accomplished in honestly less than two years. So excited to talk about it.
Why don't you tell us what did you do as the director of economic security at the CHIPS program office?
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the CHIPS program and why was it created?
0:00–6:02
2
How did the CHIPS office decide which projects to fund?
6:02–13:43
3
Why did the office focus on leading‑edge fabs versus legacy nodes?
13:43–21:57
4
What were the timelines and steps for a grant application?
21:57–31:49
5
How did community, labor, and environmental requirements affect funding?
31:49–40:30
6
What early results have we seen from TSMC, Intel and other U.S. fabs?
40:30–46:37
Speakers
7 identifiedMore from Odd Lots
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