The $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act approved by Congress last month has many virtues. It passed with bipartisan majorities in both chambers. It aligns government funding with technological areas at the core of U.S. geopolitical competition with China. It includes efforts to geographically diversify the American innovation base.
Yet Washington needs to move quickly past self-congratulation. Global competitiveness is a “long game,” as one of President Biden’s national security advisors, Rush Doshi, has written. And the United States is, in some ways, playing catch up. As David Sanger observed in the New York Times, the technologies funded by CHIPS and Science “largely replicate the Chinese list”—from 2015. Further, “the money will just get flowing while Chinese and other competitors move on to their next set of goals.”
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