An article in Roll Call reports on how the CHIPS Act is going so far. The headline says, “Officials juggle several US goals as they award CHIPS money.”

I’ll say.

The story begins:

Armed with $52 billion, a team of experts drawn from the worlds of finance, science and technology, national security, economic policy, trade and the environment have assembled at the Commerce Department to attempt to reverse a decades-long decline in U.S. semiconductor manufacturing.

That’s $52 billion of your money that this “team of experts” is disbursing. If you don’t remember electing these experts to spend your money, that’s because you didn’t. When I think of successful industries in the United States, heavy involvement from the Department of Commerce in deciding how resources are allocated and investments are made does not come to mind. As Veronique de Rugy has written, most of this money will end up going to large firms such as Intel that were not in financial trouble and could have raised capital privately. But fear not, the “team of experts” is on it.

One such expert:

Morgan Dwyer, the chief strategy officer at the CHIPS office and a former Pentagon official with degrees from Yale, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sees the complexity of the challenge in the ubiquity of semiconductors in modern life.

Profound.

“The unique nature of the CHIPS program and semiconductors themselves is that they are inherently dual use, and some chips are not only used for military systems, but they also power our economy,” Dwyer said in an interview. “We really have to focus on sort of the two core objectives of how we’re going to judge our success in 10 years, and that is, did we strengthen national security? And did we also get a good deal for the American taxpayer?”

That semiconductors are dual-use is, of course, not unique. Countless inputs to production can be used for defense and nondefense purposes — but I didn’t go to Yale, Stanford, and MIT, so take that with a grain of salt.

Dwyer says there are two objectives: national security and getting a good deal for taxpayers. The objectives change multiple times in the Roll Call article:

Got that? It’s a program to let a team of experts from finance, technology, national security, economics, trade, and environmental science allocate taxpayer money to: strengthen America’s position against China and supplant two of our closest allies against China (South Korea and Taiwan) in semiconductor production; engineer economic outcomes and not engineer economic outcomes; subsidize existing businesses and promote R&D in new businesses; target support at U.S. businesses and secure the entire global supply chain; support commercially viable businesses and put commercial considerations aside for national-security purposes; and support defense objectives from the Pentagon and other objectives from intelligence agencies and the Energy and Commerce Departments.

Very straightforward. And the Washington experts are in charge, so it’ll all go smoothly.

Except that the experts, it seems, didn’t quite think through the existence of other countries, which also have governments that can throw money at semiconductor companies. The Roll Call story says:

The effectiveness of the policy to draw more chipmakers to the country has become complicated by global events, said Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank that has supported the subsidy program.

As Congress worked to pass legislation last year, other countries, including Japan, Canada and the European Union, created their own incentives to attract chip makers, “making it harder for the U.S. to compete for fab and related investment,” Atkinson said.

From a national-security perspective, it doesn’t really matter whether Japan, Canada, or the EU — all close American allies — produce semiconductors. But then politicians don’t get to attend fancy ground-breaking ceremonies in front of factories in Ohio or Arizona or brag about “creating” new American jobs. And Department of Commerce bureaucrats don’t get to decide which conditions are attached to grants or ensure the employees have government-approved child care. And who knows whether other countries meet every EPA standard?

Juggling is very difficult. The world record for most balls juggled at once is eleven. The jugglers implementing the CHIPS Act are going to have to do a whole lot better than that.