The Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is enlisting former Trump officials on Monday to convince Congress to pass legislation bolstering America’s semiconductor industry.
Officials believe the bill will make American manufacturing more competitive with China.
The bill has stalled because of differences between the House and the Senate on how much — and where — to spend billions of dollars to strengthen America’s supply lines… Both bills include some $52 billion to incentivize companies to build semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the U.S.
The Senate bill, which received 18 Republican votes, totaled $250 billion, and included money for other industries on the front lines of the U.S-China rivalry. In addition, it had funding to overhaul the National Science Foundation. The House version grew to $335 billion and includes money for workers whose jobs have been outsourced, in addition to environmental and trade provisions. Only one Republican supported it.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is hosting H.R. McMaster, President Trump’s former national security adviser; Matthew Pottinger, another Trump NSC official; Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google; and members of Congress, including Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), on Monday for a virtual conversation about semiconductor manufacturing.
“This is clearly a national security issue, so we’ll be bringing together experts from both sides of the aisle, including Trump supporters,” Raimondo told Axios. “Every day that we wait is a day that we fall behind.”
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote back in October 2020 when Apple lobbied the Trump administration for lower taxes to boost U.S. chip production, “Better to spread your eggs out than to entrust them to just a single basket.”
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