Secret US natsec project with intel revealed

post by Nathan Helm-Burger (nathan-helm-burger) · 2024-05-25T04:22:11.624Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

This is a link post for https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/23/3-billion-secret-program-undermining-bidens-tech-policy-00158757

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Unclear how relevant this news is to AI safety, but it seems like the sort of thing we ought to notice.

A backroom Washington deal brokered two years ago is undercutting a key part of President Joe Biden’s policy to grow the national high-tech manufacturing base — pushing more than $3 billion into a secretive national-security project promoted by chipmaker Intel.

In recent weeks, Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have been taking victory laps for the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, a law intended to create jobs and fund innovation in a key global industry. It has already launched a series of grants, incentives and research proposals to help America regain its cutting-edge status in global semiconductor manufacturing.

But quietly, in a March spending bill, appropriators in Congress shifted $3.5 billion that the Commerce Department was hoping to use for those grants and pushed it into a separate Pentagon program called Secure Enclave, which is not mentioned in the original law.

The diversion of money from a flagship Biden initiative is a case study in how fragile Washington’s monumental spending programs can be in practice. Biden’s legacy is bound up in the fate of more than $1 trillion in government spending and tax incentives aimed at transforming the economy — but even money appropriated for a strategic national goal can wind up being rerouted for narrow or opaque purposes.

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