The GOP’s CHIPS Tradeoff

The debate over Congress’s massive, $280 billion China-focused package is over. With the passage of the Chips and Science Act by both houses this week, it now awaits the president’s signature.

In the end, Republican lawmakers could have blocked it, but they declined to do so. The legislation received 17 GOP votes in the Senate and 24 votes in the House, delivering the bill for the White House.

On the one hand, there’s a reasonable case to be made that boosting semiconductor production on U.S. soil is such an imperative that the bill’s deficiencies can be overlooked. Those deficiencies, among other things, include its creation of a “chief diversity officer” for the National Science Foundation, a loophole allowing universities with Confucius Institutes to receive funding, and the removal of previously included provisions to support Taiwan and counter Chinese propaganda.

Proponents of the bill say that it included adequate-enough guardrails to prevent U.S. funding from going to projects in China, and to prevent the theft of intellectual property developed using new government grants.

But the last-minute negotiations surrounding the bill yielded less-than-reassuring results, due to lobbying by the higher-education industry poised to benefit from tens of billions of dollars in research funding and progressive Asian-American activist groups that warned about the potential for certain amendments to inspire xenophobia.

First, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer stripped from the legislation a provision offered by Rob Portman restricting the ability of subsidy recipients to do business in China, per a Washington Free Beacon report:

At issue are provisions written by Sen. Rob Portman (R., Ohio) that bar U.S. companies from manufacturing products in China, such as semiconductors, that were developed using federally funded research. Myriad government and private investigations conclude that the Chinese government routinely steals trade secrets from U.S. companies, government agencies, and universities…

Exactly why Portman’s measure was removed is a matter of ongoing debate on Capitol Hill. One office blamed Rep. Frank Lucas (R., Okla.), the ranking member on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Two Republican offices pointed the finger at Senate Republican staff tasked with whipping support for the CHIPS Act for failing to communicate that the provision was removed ahead of a procedural vote earlier this month. Another office said the decision to remove the guardrail provision was entirely Schumer’s and couldn’t be stopped by Republicans.

Progressive activists simultaneously targeted a different Portman provision that would have effectively barred the entry of individuals involved in technology-transfer schemes counter to U.S. national security. Politico reported on the effort:

Nearly three dozen AAPI, immigration and civil rights advocacy groups, led by the Asian Law Caucus, urged Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a letter to reject an amendment from Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) that would boost screening requirements on recipients of federal research funding.

The provision was included in the version of the broader economic competitiveness package passed by the Senate last year, but House lawmakers dropped it from their iteration of the bill after lobbying by universities. Portman’s language was left out of the drastically scaled back legislation the Senate began debate on last week, though the senator later said he and other Republicans were under the assumption his research security provision had made the cut and suggested he could pull his support without the language added back in.

Portman’s original language would allow the State Department to find an immigrant inadmissible if the department finds that the individual is seeking to enter the U.S. to acquire sensitive or emerging technologies to undermine U.S. national security interests. In their appeal to Schumer and Pelosi, the groups argue that it “that would deny admission or revoke visas of Chinese nationals and others based on innuendo, bad information, and racial targeting.”

Of course, revoking the visas of “Chinese nationals” involved in efforts to export sensitive U.S.-developed tech is the point. But here, as has been the case elsewhere, progressive outfits hold an ideological predisposition for opposing efforts to counter malign Chinese Communist Party behavior.

In the end, these groups succeeded in blocking Portman’s proposal, after Senator Maria Cantwell intervened, though there are other avenues for its eventual inclusion:

The tradeoff for the pro-CHIPS Republicans all along has been that their support of an overall, subpar, even damaging bill was necessary to secure what they viewed as critically important semiconductor subsidies. So important, in fact, that waiting until the next Congress, in which the GOP would likely have more sway to craft a more solid proposal, was not seen by these members as a tenable solution.

Whatever the merits of their support of the CHIPS bill this week, they now have a particular responsibility to fix its most damaging aspects going forward.