An executive order issued by the White House on March 31 is wrapping the Commerce Department’s CHIPS Program Office into a newly created United States Investment Accelerator that will have the mission of smoothing the way for foreign and domestic business investments exceeding $1 billion.
The CHIPS Program Office – which is part of the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) component – is a creation of the CHIPS and Science Act approved by Congress in 2022 that made $52 billion available to revitalize the U.S. semiconductor sector.
As part of that effort, the program office dedicated $39 billion for incentives to invest in semiconductor facilities and equipment in the U.S., while NIST’s CHIPS Research and Development Office was given $11 billion to invest in the development of a domestic chips research and development ecosystem.
President Donald Trump’s March 31 order creating the Investment Accelerator does not focus specifically on the semiconductor sector, even as it places the CHIPS Program Office into the newly created organization.
Rather, the White House order takes aim at the broader target of helping businesses advance big investments within the United States by reducing regulatory barriers and also by tapping into collaborations with the 17 national research and development laboratories operated by the Department of Energy.
“The Investment Accelerator shall facilitate and accelerate investments above $1 billion in the United States by assisting investors as they navigate United States Government regulatory processes efficiently, reduce regulatory burdens where consistent with applicable law, increase access to and use of our national resources where appropriate and consistent with applicable law, facilitate research collaborations with our national labs, and work with State governments in all 50 States to reduce regulatory barriers to, and increase, domestic and foreign investment in the United States,” the order says.
“The United States is the most powerful economy in the world, but slow, complex, and burdensome American regulatory processes at every stage of a company’s development and operation make significant domestic and foreign investment harder than necessary,” the order reads.
The order gives the Commerce secretary 30 days to establish the Investment Accelerator, with assistance from the Treasury Department and the assistant to the president for economic policy.
In giving over the CHIPS Program Office to the new entity, the order says the Investment Accelerator “shall focus on delivering the benefit of the bargain for taxpayers by negotiating much better deals than those of the previous administration.”
As of August 2024, the Commerce Department tallied more than $30 billion in proposed CHIPS private sector investments. By late December of last year, the agency had finalized about $29 billion of awards.
President Trump’s inclusion of the CHIPS Program Office into the new Investment Accelerator appears to mark a turn from his harsh criticism of the larger CHIPS and Science Act.
In his State of the Union address to Congress last month, President Trump called on Congress to undo the law.
“Your CHIPS Act is a horrible, horrible thing,” Trump said during the address. “We give hundreds of billions of dollars, and it doesn’t mean a thing. They take our money and they don’t spend it.”