The Untold Story of the CHIPS and Science Act
Daniel Goetzel is currently a Practitioner-in-Residence at Harvard Kennedy School’s Reimagining the Economy project. Prior to his work at Harvard, he was Program Director of the National Science Foundation’s Technology, Innovation and Partnerships Directorate. He also authored a Day One policy memo focused on fostering the next generation of small business leaders. The piece that follows is an oral history of the establishment of the NSF’s Regional Innovation Engines Program – a key part of the historic CHIPS and Science Act.
The CHIPS and Science Act was signed into law on August 9, 2022. It was the largest technology and industrial policy program in modern history, investing hundreds of billions of dollars into research, manufacturing, and American competitiveness.
When the government announces flagship programs like this, a bill signing or a ribbon cutting is often all the public sees. They rarely see the quiet, often messy work that goes into creating, passing, and implementing a major piece of legislation. This piece is an attempt to change that by digging into the CHIPS and Science Act and the NSF Regional Innovation Engines (NSF Engines) program.
While much of the media coverage and debate around the bill has focused on the multi-billion dollar incentives to large corporations like TSMC, Samsung, and Intel, the CHIPS and Science Act had a complementary focus and multi-billion dollar investment in R&D and economic development, spanning everything from chips and AIto battery storage and biotech. One investment vehicle that came out of the bill was the National Science Foundation’s Regional Innovation Engines, an up to $1.6B program aiming to create the industries of the future in communities that were historically ignored in past tech booms.
Contribute your own story about Regional Innovation Engines here.
“The first rule of government transformation is: there are a lot of rules. And there should be-ish. But we don’t need to wait for permission to rewrite them. Let’s go fix and build some things and show how it’s done.”
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
As the former U.S. Chief Data Scientist, I know first-hand how valuable and vulnerable our nation’s federal data assets are. Like many things in life, we’ve been taking our data for granted and will miss it terribly when it’s gone.
Direct File redefined what IRS service could look like, with real-time help and data-driven improvements. Let’s apply that bar elsewhere.