A Republican coauthor of the bipartisan law President Donald Trump used to authorize the federal government to acquire a 10% stake in tech giant Intel said Tuesday that the move violated the legislation’s original intent.
Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) criticized Trump’s use of the Biden-era Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors and Science Act, crafted in 2022 to boost U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, to take an equity stake in the chipmaker — worth nearly $9 billion — in exchange for unpaid federal CHIPS grants.
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“The intent was not for this to happen under the law, as someone who drafted the legislation,” Young told reporters at the U.S. Capitol.
He refrained from describing his position as “concerned” but added that the tactic should not be used on additional companies, something Trump and his economic advisers have suggested he will do.
“I didn’t use the word ‘concern,’ but it was not the intent of the law to allow an equity stake to be taken,” Young continued. “But it was the intent to ensure that we enhance our economic security and national security, which is the objective that the administration is trying to advance.”
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, White House spokesman Kush Desai did not directly address Young’s remarks. Desai blamed the Biden administration for having “prioritized [diversity, equity, and inclusion] over taxpayer return” in grants worth billions of dollars to large semiconductor makers, and that the Trump administration was focusing on investment return for taxpayers.
“The Trump administration is ensuring that taxpayers are able to reap the upside of the federal government’s investments into safeguarding our national and economic security — all while simultaneously pushing supply-side reforms like deregulation and The One Big Beautiful Bill’s tax cuts to let the free market restore America as the world’s most dynamic economy,” the statement said.
Trump posted on Monday to Truth Social that he would “make deals like that for our Country all day long.” Later that day, he defended his Intel deal and denied critics’ notions that the federal government seizing a portion of a private company was akin to socialism, a phrase he regularly used last year on the campaign trail to describe the policy positions of former Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I want to try and get as much as I can,” Trump told reporters at the White House during an executive order signing ceremony. “I hope I’m going to have many more cases like it.”
Trump described Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, whom the president has advocated be fired, as coming to the White House for the deal “under a little bit of a cloud.”
“I said, ‘I’d like you to give 10% of Intel to the United States of America, not to me, to the United States of America.’ And I said, ‘If you have them as a partner, you have the United States as a partner, I think that would be a very good thing for Intel,’” Trump said. “And he thought about it, and he said, ‘I like that idea very much. We have a deal.’”
TRUMP DEFENDS INTEL STAKE AFTER CRITICIZING SOCIALIST DEMOCRATS
White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told CNBC the Intel deal is part of a broader plan to develop a “sovereign wealth fund” for similar financial arrangements with other companies.
“I think this is a very, very special circumstance because of the massive amount of CHIPS Act spending that was coming in,” Hassett told the network. “But the president has made it clear, all the way back to the campaign, he thinks that in the end, it would be great if the U.S. could start to build up a sovereign wealth fund. So, I’m sure that at some point there’ll be more transactions, if not in this industry then other industries.”