Senate Republicans Want NIST to Remove 'Superfluous,' 'Partisan' Text From Chips Act NOFO
Commerce Committee ranking member Ted Cruz of Texas and 13 other Senate Republicans urged the Commerce Department Wednesday to "reverse" what they view as "superfluous and partisan provisions" in the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Feb. 28 notice of…
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funding opportunity for $39 billion in incentives for U.S. semiconductor manufacturers allocated from the 2022 Chips and Science Act (see 2207280060). The NOFO called for “applications for projects for the construction, expansion, or modernization of commercial facilities for the front- and back-end fabrication of leading-edge, current-generation, and mature-node semiconductors.” Many of the NOFO’s “grant criteria … will have the opposite effect of Congress’s intent” and “instead make domestic chip production more expensive, less competitive, and reliant on taxpayer subsidies over private investment,” said Cruz and the others in a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. The NOFO also includes “extraneous environmental-social-governance (ESG) requirements that seek to enact progressive policies that had been previously rejected by Congress. These policies include liberal wish list items, many of which were removed” from the Inflation Reduction Act budget reconciliation package enacted last year “because they did not have the votes to pass at even a simple majority in the Senate. To claim that these provisions are integral to the ‘national security mission’ of the CHIPS Act and will ‘[result] in lower costs’ defies reason.” The Republican senators sought the removal of provisions mandating on-site child care at covered facilities and encouraging grant recipients to use project labor agreements. They also faulted NOFO provisions they say embellish the definitions of what should satisfy some Chips and Science Act requirements aimed at hiring “economically disadvantaged individuals,” increasing community investment and prohibiting grantees from using award funding for dividend payments or stock buybacks. NIST didn’t comment.