President Biden yesterday signed into law the CHIPS and Science Act, a $280 billion bipartisan bill to boost domestic high-tech manufacturing and increase funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other research agencies, including the Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Institute of Science and Technology.
CHIPS and Science comprises select provisions from the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), the Senate-passed research and competitiveness bill, and the House-passed America COMPETES Act of 2022, which had been two years in the making and which congressional negotiators had been working since May to reconcile.
After those talks stalled, the Senate proposed a narrower bill focused on subsidizing the semiconductor industry and ended up attaching science funding provisions that the conference committee reached agreement on earlier this summer.
Both chambers passed the slimmed-down legislation last month.
The bill does not include any of the proposals for the Department of Education in either USICA or COMPETES, including changes to Section 117 regulatory foreign gift reporting, a new Section 124 that would have required individual faculty and staff to report foreign gifts and contracts, or the requirement for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to review foreign gifts and contracts over $1 million. Neither does it include short-term Pell Grants or the new unit record reporting system for postsecondary data, both of which were in the House bill.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has said these provisions could be considered after the August recess.
Among the research funding included in the CHIPS and Science Act is a five-year, $81 billion authorization for the NSF, including $20 billion for the new NSF Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships. Twenty percent of NSF-appropriated funding in key programs is directed to EPSCoR institutions over the next seven years. EPSCoR seeks to enhance the research competitiveness of targeted states that may otherwise receive fewer NSF dollars.
The bill also authorizes new funding for STEM education programs and programs supporting minority serving institutions, HBCUs, and HSIs.
The Department of Commerce will receive $10 billion to create 20 geographically distributed “regional technology hubs” for technology development, job creation, and expanding U.S. innovation capacity.