President Donald Trump has taken aim at the CHIPS Act, the federal incentives program aimed at boosting semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. In a recent address, Trump called the act a “horrible, horrible thing,” but two Republican lawmakers from Texas, Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Michael McCaul, are speaking out in support of the act.
“And those Republicans are also pointing to the fact that it was actually Trump’s national security team that kind of planted the seeds for this whole thing back during Trump’s first term in office,” said Jasper Scherer, politics reporter for The Texas Tribune.
The CHIPS Act was signed into law during the Biden administration, and McCaul told the Tribune that Trump may have thought that the act was a Biden initiative, even though it had origins in the first Trump administration.
Several Texas chip manufacturing facilities have benefited from the grant.
“Both of them have pushed back a little bit on Trump’s call to get rid of the act, just pointing to kind of the national security considerations,” Scherer said. “It’s worth noting that there’s some local [relevance], just looking at the Samsung plant in the Austin area, and they have received money from the CHIPS Act.”
