Mississippi Republican US Sens. Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith are near-lockstep on their votes – skewing conservative on fiscal and social issues and reflecting the views of their conservative Mississippi constituencies.
But on the issue of CHIPS and the Science Act, Wicker and Hyde-Smith find themselves on opposite sides of the legislation. Wicker voted to support it. Hyde-Smith voted against it.
The split vote of Mississippi’s US Senate delegation becomes more interesting when we consider that a year earlier, Wicker and Hyde-Smith joined as signatories of a bipartisan letter calling on President Joe Biden to increase US semiconductor production in response to global computer chips. shortages following the COVID pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and weak global semiconductor supply chains.
The original legislation under consideration by the US Senate was a measure that would provide $52 billion in subsidies/incentives to encourage chipmakers to open US semiconductor factories/fabrication plants. The bill that passed the Senate, the House of Representatives and went to Biden’s desk is a larger, more expansive law that analysts put in the range of $280 billion to supercharge research and development for the American domestic semiconductor industry and lead to direct competition with China in this economy. sector.
Fleishmann Hilliard senior vice president Matthew Caldecutt – in guiding communication professionals to be able to discuss the complex, 1,000 pages plus legislation, wrote on August 1: “The CHIPS and Science Act is a way to directly pay semiconductor companies to set up semiconductor manufacturing plants – or “fabs ” – and make future investments in the U.S. It set aside around $50 billion for semiconductor companies with $39 billion to build, expand or modernize domestic facilities, and $11 billion for research and development. Another $2 billion will help fund areas of the semiconductor industry – education, defense and future innovations.
But that definition misses the mark of the full scope of CHIPS and the Science Act — in which Congress authorized but did not end up providing some $81 billion for National Science Foundation research over five years, another $11 billion for the U.S. Trade Technology Center, and $9 billion for the National Institute for Standards and Technology. In short, NSF’s authorization could be the largest — if they’re really needed — funding increase since the agency’s inception in 1950.
So, Hyde-Smith’s immediate concern about the deficit spending bill and the impact of the national debt is well founded. But what about Wicker’s vote in support of the CHIPS Act? The wicker vote gutsy takes the long and global strategic view that the US should not rely on our enemies.
The Semiconductor Industry Association defines semiconductors as the brains of modern electronics, “enabling advances in medical devices and health care, communications, computing, defense, transportation, clean energy, and future technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and advanced wireless networking.”
While the US semiconductor industry remains the world leader with sales of $258 billion (2020) and more than 250,000 employees, competition from Taiwan, China and South Korea is large and growing. As in shipbuilding after World War II, America has seen massive offshoring for semiconductor fabrication and the trend is growing exponentially.
The US has the most powerful Navy in the world – yet no less than the Pentagon report verifies that the People’s Republic of China has the largest navy in the world, with a total combat power of about 350 ships and submarines. In comparison, the US Navy’s combat force was about 293 ships at the beginning of 2020.
In June, the Center for Strategic and International Studies offered this bipartisan assessment: “All major U.S. defense systems and platforms rely on semiconductors for their performance. Consequently, the erosion of U.S. capabilities in microelectronics is a direct threat to the United States’ ability to defend itself and its allies.”
Moreover, the US civilian economy is highly dependent on semiconductor-based platforms for its daily operations. Assuring U.S. leadership in semiconductor technology and securing the integrity of the value chain that designs, manufactures, packages, and distributes these chips is perhaps the most important economic and national security issue of the modern era,” CSIS concluded.
Do you doubt it? The average new car in the US has more than 1,000 computer chips. Now think about military aircraft, ships, tanks, or NORAD monitoring. Technology and global politics make growth in advanced semiconductor fabrication and research a matter of national security.
Sid Salter is a syndicated columnist. Contact him at sidsalter@sidsalter.com.
