American Compass on CHIPS Act Passage: An Inflection Point in U.S. Policy

WASHINGTON, DC — The U.S. Senate today passed the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, a critical piece of legislation for revitalizing American industry and technological leadership. As the bill heads to the House of Representatives, American Compass executive director Oren Cass urged members to take seriously the need for promoting investment in domestic semiconductor manufacturing:

“The passage of the CHIPS Act marks an important inflection point for American public policy, abandoning our foolish faith in globalization and signaling that we may finally be ready to get serious about returning critical industries to our shores. Moving forward, much more needs to be done in confronting China, including restrictions on American firms doing business there, and that should be a central focus of the next Congress.”

Since our launch in 2020, American Compass has led the debate on American industrial policy, especially for semiconductor manufacturing. Our inaugural essay series on “Rebooting the American System” made the case for a robust national economic policy and featured a foreword by Senator Tom Cotton, in which he called for America to “begin the laborious process of pulling our supply chains out of China for medicine, semiconductors, and other essential goods and making them here at home, using all the tools available to policymakers.” Our first symposium, “Moving the Chains,” convened a wide range of experts to propose policies that would strengthen domestic manufacturing of critical technologies like chips.

We called for the Senate to proceed with a “clean” CHIPS Act earlier this month and, once it did so, our analysis has been highly influential, with Republican senators and congressmen circulating our work to push back against the Wall Street Journal editorial board’s misguided criticism.

For a more detailed analysis of the state of semiconductor manufacturing and the case for reshoring, read Oren Cass and Richard Oyeniran’s feature in National Review from last year, as well as our in-depth Atlas guide to the semiconductor industry.