Trump is right to reject the attempts by some in Washington to generate bipartisan support for big-government industrial policy.

In his address to the joint session of Congress, President Trump called for the repeal of the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan industrial policy law signed by Biden. “We don’t have to give them money,” he said of semiconductor companies benefiting from the law’s subsidies.

Trump portrayed it as a Democratic law, saying, “Your CHIPS Act is a horrible, horrible thing,” while gesturing toward the Democrats’ side of the House chamber.

Trump urged Speaker Mike Johnson to send him legislation repealing the law and directed him to use the money saved to reduce the national debt.

The CHIPS Act was supposed to be an example of a new consensus in Washington in favor of industrial policy and government planning of “strategic” industries. The law did have some support from Republicans in Congress but was largely a Democratic effort, supported by Chuck Schumer and signed by Biden.

It is mostly standard-issue corporate welfare, giving gobs of money to politically favored companies such as Intel. Last year, Intel announced it was cutting 15,000 jobs, which was 5,000 more jobs than it said it expected to create with CHIPS Act funding.

One positive announcement last year from a TSMC facility in Arizona had industrial-policy advocates praising the CHIPS Act, but the law had little, if anything, to do with it. TSMC announced the investment over a year before the CHIPS Act was introduced in Congress, and Arizona had been cultivating its relationship with Taiwanese businesses for decades.

TSMC is nonetheless set to receive CHIPS Act funding, and one of the men responsible for that is Brian Harrison, the former president of TSMC Arizona. In a previous life, Harrison was the CEO of Solyndra, the green energy company that benefited from corporate welfare under the Obama administration only to go bankrupt. The U.S. does not need more Solyndras.

The CHIPS Act is an extremely expensive and inefficient way to boost American industries. Rather than picking companies to subsidize, the federal government should pursue sector-neutral reforms such as allowing full expensing in the tax code for business investments. Trump is right to call for repealing the CHIPS Act, and in doing so, to reject the attempts by some in Washington to generate bipartisan support for big-government industrial policy.