One of the hardest things for Americans to get right when it comes to developing new technologies is long-term consistency of purpose. We allow the funding to be put on hold or we turn it into a partisan wrangle. That’s what happened with Solyndra, a solar power start-up in California and A123 Systems, an innovative lithium ion battery maker based in Massachusetts. The Obama Administration tried to jumpstart the solar and battery industries by supporting those companies, but withdrew funding when Republicans turned the funding into a political hot potato. Both companies failed. (Ironically, one other company, Tesla, made it.)
Today, we learn from this article in the NY Times that the budget deal hammered out between President Biden and House Speaker McCarthy now calls into question whether the the CHIPS and Science Act will be fully funded. The $52 billion set aside for semiconductor development has been allocated so that is safe. But another $170 for a variety of other high-tech research efforts may be at risk because it has not yet been allocated.
One critical need is for greater education for workers who are needed to build semiconductors. The current American work force is woefully unprepared to support all the new semiconductor factories being built in Ohio, Texas, Arizona and upstate New York. “to make America a manufacturing superpower, we have to have advances in technology,” Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, is quoted as saying. “Technology has to be the driver of that because it requires massive increases in productivity.”
Let’s not shoot ourselves in the collective feet again. Let’s follow through on building a brighter technological future. The Chinese are having no such hesitations.
