With billions at stake, Trump administration scrubs federal chips contracts for words like ‘diversity’ and ‘immigrant’

The Trump White House is demanding that government workers hunt for words like “immigrant” and “diversity” in billions of dollars worth of federal contracts with American companies to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing, raising concerns among staff that the contracts could modified or voided.

The Trump White House is demanding that government workers hunt for words like “immigrant” and “diversity” in billions of dollars worth of federal contracts with American companies to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing, raising concerns among staff that the contracts could modified or voided. On Friday night, workers at the Commerce Department office charged with overseeing the buildout of American semiconductor chip factories and training the workforce to make them received a list of dozens of words to search, according to a source familiar with the effort. The Tuesday deadline gave them just a handful of days to comply. The CHIPS and Science Act, a Biden administration priority, passed Congress with bipartisan majorities. But the new administration is scrutinizing CHIPS contracts for those buzzwords as it seeks to enforce a series of executive orders President Donald Trump signed in his first days in office. A sampling: immigrant, undocumented, foreign assistance, Green New Deal, climate change, diversity, equity, racism, discrimination, transgender, LGBT, abortion, pregnant, birth control and fetus. There are nearly 150 terms in all. The stakes are high: The government has allocated more than $5 billion to the National Semiconductor Technology Center to make sure the US isn’t dependent on China or any other country for the critical semiconductor chips that power everything from artificial intelligence to the cars we drive. Of it, $250 million is allocated to creating a workforce training center based in Silicon Valley. Congressional Republicans and other conservative critics have complained since the CHIPS Act passed that the Biden administration was making US companies meet too many requirements related to diversity and other liberal priorities in order to qualify for contracts. The Trump administration could simply be looking to modify the contracts to remove those requirements.