Stories from America’s Industrial Policy Playbook: Within the Government

This photo is from my very first trip as a government employee, just one month after I joined the Commerce Department. In April 2023, I traveled with a small team of colleagues from the CHIPS Program Office to Phoenix, Arizona, to visit the rapidly expanding construction site that would soon become Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s growing U.S. cluster.

It’s wild to think back on the timeline. Just a year earlier, the CHIPS Act hadn’t even passed yet. Seven months before this trip the CHIPS Program Office didn't exist or have a single employee. By February 2023, we had already released our first funding opportunity to help guide the $39 billion Congress had entrusted to us to rebuild America’s semiconductor manufacturing capacity. And here we were, six weeks later, in April, making our first company site visit.

This visit to Phoenix was the moment the work really felt real for me. The scale of the construction—the largest cranes I’d ever seen rising out of the desert—was staggering. It made tangible the ambition, even the audacity, of what we were trying to do. Beyond meeting with the company to hear about their plans for expansion, we also had the chance to connect with local stakeholders on the ground. What struck me most was how transformational this investment, and the policy behind it, could be for the region. You could feel the excitement. The idea that a national strategy like CHIPS could reshape the economic future of a city like Phoenix wasn’t abstract anymore. You could start to see how it might take shape on the ground.

I had the opportunity to work on a handful of the policies and programs mentioned throughout this blog, being a part of the team at EDA that established the Build Back Better Regional Challenge to providing input into early Tech Hubs legislative language to diving into the deep end on CHIPS as Commerce and NIST were getting the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC) program off the ground. I'll focus on the latter and most recent of my experiences, as the Director of Strategy for the NSTC program team. Undertaking a brand-new public-private partnership with ~$7B budget and a fairly flexible program mandate made for a lot of policy / strategy work in a space many people, including myself, were learning for the first time. I was privileged to work with incredible experts at NIST, including the program's director, Jay Lewis, who taught me about the semiconductor R&D landscape thoughtfully, albeit at top speed. 

My story with the NSTC started out in January of 2024, where I got brought in from a stint at the NEC to run a policy sprint to help narrow the program's design space, get a lot of interested parties on the same page, and participate in negotiating the framework of a $7B contract to set up our public-private partnership. What I remember most is the dedicated people on our team, and a few we recruited from other teams across the Department, who threw themselves into this effort, working 70+ hour weeks at a relentless pace. We had assembled one of the most cross-functional teams I've ever been a part of: from an ex-venture capitalist, to a government contracts expert, to extremely sharp lawyers, to an IP expert, to semiconductor industry veterans, and more. A lot of eyes were on the program, but each person on that team was driven by the mission at hand. Through a year of work -- and recruiting many people to help along the way -- we were able to shape a program that started as a high level strategy white paper into what is now a successful organization that runs R&D competitions, implements best practices for workforce, and is a leader in the semiconductor industry.

In early 2021, I joined the U.S. Department of Education as a Senior Advisor to Secretary Miguel Cardona. At the time, only 47% of schools were fully open. Tens of millions of students had been out of classrooms for nearly a year—often without internet access or laptops. Rates of depression, chronic absenteeism, and academic disengagement were soaring. Yet there was no national system to even track which schools were open. President Biden made it clear: the goal was to reopen every school as quickly and safely as possible. The passage of the American Rescue Plan, which delivered over $140 billion to school districts, was a critical turning point—but dollars alone wouldn’t get the job done. We had to execute.

Working closely with an incredible team across the Department, the CDC, and the White House COVID Task Force, we launched the first nationwide school status tracker. It sounds basic, but it didn’t exist: we needed real-time visibility into which districts were offering in-person, remote, or hybrid learning. We partnered with outside researchers, survey firms, and advocacy groups to collect data from over 10,000 districts. Internally, we stood up new infrastructure to organize and visualize the results, enabling the Department to direct resources and technical assistance where they were needed most. It was gritty, unglamorous work—but it helped unlock progress nationwide.

As reopening accelerated, we turned to a bigger question: how would we help students catch up? The American Rescue Plan gave districts powerful tools to expand learning time, mental health support, and high-dosage tutoring. President Biden called for a national effort to recruit 250,000 new tutors and mentors by the summer of 2025. In response, we helped launch the National Partnership for Student Success—a collaboration with over 100 organizations including nonprofits, higher education institutions, and AmeriCorps. The administration hit the goal of 323,000 tutors and mentors a full year early.

At every step, we had to build new systems to understand how districts were using their ESSER funds—and whether those dollars were translating into real student support. We stood up rapid-cycle surveys, partnered with the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, and created spotlights and technical assistance to lift up strong practices from the field. The work wasn’t always glamorous—but it was deeply mission-driven. I was proud to serve alongside colleagues who brought urgency, creativity, and care to one of the most complex public delivery challenges of our time.

My journey with the CHIPS and Science Act started in early 2019, when then-Majority Leader Senator Schumer’s staff approached me and a couple of other science and technology policy practitioners about a draft of what became the Endless Frontier Act (EFA). At that time, I was working outside government at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) as a Senior Advisor for Science Policy. I had worked with the other people, mostly representing research-intensive universities on America’s coasts, for a long time. 

The draft bill was substantially similar to what was introduced in the Senate as the Endless Frontier Act a year later in 2020. It would have renamed the National Science Foundation (NSF) as the National Science and Technology Foundation (NSTF) and essentially created a massive, parallel new Directorate for Technology half of NSF to match the traditional ‘science’ part of NSF, complete with a new Advisory Board that would parallel the existing National Science Board (NSB), NSF’s governing body, and a new Deputy Director for Technology who would be a counterpart to a Deputy Director for Science overseeing ‘traditional’ NSF and its existing science and education-oriented Directorates. 

This group worked on the bill for the next year, in dialogue with the Senator’s office, to shape the concept of the NSTF. Among many things, I worked to include a regional lens to NSTF; the original vision was, let’s say, geography-agnostic in that it didn’t pay much attention to where in America the new technology and innovation activities would take place. We worked to make sure this new vision for engaging NSF in technology, innovation, and partnerships would involve and provide benefits for institutions, companies, and people all across America rather than reproducing the distribution of NSF’s traditional research grants, which are geographically concentrated in certain parts of the country. But there were limits to how much we could steer the bill at this stage. 

Senator Schumer introduced the Endless Frontier Act in early 2020. The bill was literally breathtaking for many people when it was introduced: the bill authorized (not appropriated) $100 billion over 5 years for this new Directorate! At a time when the total NSF budget was less than $10 billion a year. In addition to the sticker shock, many people were stunned by the renaming of then-70-year-old NSF to be the NSTF. In retrospect, that was a bad idea and disappeared in subsequent versions of the legislation, as we know, although it certainly got people’s attention that NSF needed to expand its mission to take in what eventually became the work of the NSF TIP Directorate. 

As a side note, the original EFA also authorized, at the Department of Commerce, an explicitly regional focus for Regional Technology Hubs and an entire section dealing with Geographic Distribution. That was a victory, which I thought of as a starting point for migrating that concern with regional innovation and geographic diversity to the NSF part of the bill. 

After the 2020 election, I had the chance to participate in the Biden-Harris Transition Team as a member of the OSTP transition and the lead for the NSF transition. That meant I had the opportunity to prepare the way in the new administration for a re-envisioned NSF. During the transition, the team laid out a policy agenda for the Biden Administration and that already included, long before the EFA passed the Senate, expanding NSF’s mission to enhancing the economic and societal outcomes of NSF-supported research all across the nation. In other words, supporting regional innovation through a technology directorate. During that time, I met people, some of whom are also present in this narrative, who ended up in the new administration to execute the policies we designed during the transition.  

On Inauguration Day 2021, I became the Acting Director of OSTP and Chief of Staff. As the acting director of a newly-designated member of the President’s Cabinet, I had the opportunity to work with White House and agency colleagues to make big changes to NSF and other parts of the S&T enterprise in advance of legislation, and I had some power and influence to get EFA elements started. We weren’t going to wait for authorizing legislation to get signed into law! That’s why, in spring 2021, long before the CHIPS and Science Act became law, President Biden’s first budget proposed a new vision for NSF. While keeping the NSF name (abandoning the ‘NSTF’ proposal), the May budget proposed, for the federal government’s fiscal year 2022, funding for a ‘new technology directorate’ at NSF within a large budget increase for NSF. 

In parallel with our efforts to move EFA along, which led to EFA finally passing the Senate in July 2021, we also worked to match the authorizations with appropriations (real money) to follow the budget proposal. Over the next year and a half, additional funding (beyond regular budgets) for NSF and its new Technology Directorate was a part of the Biden Administration’s reconciliation bill proposal, originally called Build Back Better (BBB) and eventually signed into law in diminished but still-tremendous form as the Inflation Reduction Act (of August 2022). At one point, a draft of BBB provided $100 billion over 5 years for NSF, nearly matching that original EFA vision, to support not only the new directorate but also enhance support for NSF’s traditional research, education, and research infrastructure programs. That funding didn’t make it into the final IRA, but it was an important signal that the Biden Administration was serious about the new directorate. 

EFA passed the Senate in summer 2021, but I wasn’t fully satisfied with the result. Our collective attention turned to the House, which introduced an America COMPETES Act (the fourth, after COMPETES legislation in 2007, 2011, and 2017) that eventually passed the House as the Strategic Competition Act in early 2022. It was criticized as a grab bag of policy proposals, but I’m proud of that. The House bill contained provisions I had been working on since my previous time at OSTP in the Obama Administration, some of which had fallen out of earlier COMPETES Acts, to do things like: create policies to make sure research environments are free from sexual and other forms of harassment; expand research capacity all across the country; support Historically Black Colleges and Universities and other minority-serving institutions to become more competitive in research funding; and provide support for scientists in federal and academic labs with caregiving responsibilities to have active research careers. 

Most importantly for this discussion, I worked with House congressional staff colleagues to make sure the House bill gave NSF’s new directorate some key missions to add to the technology focus areas of the Senate bill: 5 societal and national challenges, one of them being to address “Inequitable access to education, opportunity, or other services.” In the final CHIPS and Science Act, this and other challenges, plus the technology focus areas, ended up just above (Sec. 10387) the authorizing language for the Regional Innovation Engines (Sec. 10388), and it was a clear signal that regional innovation had to happen all across the country, not just areas where innovation was already strong. 

Powering America’s Next Era of Growth: Why Place Is the Missing Link

Summary: As trillions in federal investment reshape America’s industrial landscape, one critical question remains: can local communities turn national ambition into local prosperity? Drawing on my experience as the inaugural Counselor for Equity at the U.S. Department of Commerce, I reflect on the urgent need to match visionary policy with place-based capacity—and why getting this right transcends any one administration.

We Never Built This Muscle Before—Now We Must

When I stepped into the U.S. Department of Commerce in 2021 as the inaugural Counselor for Equity, I knew we were at the edge of something historic.

The country was deploying trillions in federal dollars through the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the American Rescue Plan. These weren’t just recovery measures—they were an audacious bet on America’s ability to lead us into a new industrial era. To rebuild domestic manufacturing. To regain our edge in critical technologies. To tackle the challenges of aging infrastructure. And to bring more people, in more places, into the fold of economic opportunity.

It was one of the boldest assertions of national purpose I’ve ever seen in government in my lifetime.

But as I moved through the corridors of Commerce, sat in policy meetings, and listened to stakeholders across the country, one thing became painfully clear: Our industrial policy had never been designed with place in mind.

That gap carries real consequences. America’s future hinges on winning the race to lead the technological revolution that is reshaping the global economy—a race where our economic leadership, national security, and shared prosperity will be decided in cities and regions across the country.

And yet, for far too long, federal industrial strategy has been place-agnostic. We focused on sectors, not ecosystems. We funded innovation, but rarely asked where it would land—or whether local communities had the capacity to leverage it. There was an implicit assumption: if we invest enough in the right technologies, benefits will follow. But the economic map tells a different story—one of deepening divides and shrinking opportunity

This time, we wanted to do it differently. But there was no playbook.

Inside Commerce, I saw ambitious programs launching across multiple bureaus—but delivery was uneven. Many regions lacked the civic infrastructure, workforce systems, or local coordination needed to absorb the scale of investment we were sending their way. Even where multiple streams of federal funding converged—in what I came to think of as a “federal capital stack”—it was often unclear who was responsible for stitching it all together.

Meanwhile, private and philanthropic capital often stayed on the sidelines, unsure of how to engage. The risk wasn’t just inefficiency. It was the very real possibility that we’d miss the moment.

It became clear to me that national ambition isn’t enough if local capacity can’t carry it.

This wasn’t a failure of vision or intent. It was a gap in design. Many assumed that money would be enough. But places need more than capital. They need support to align housing with workforce, infrastructure with innovation, and supply chains with small business ecosystems. They need governance structures that can braid funding, convene partners, and adapt to complexity. They need systems that translate investment into capacity—and capacity into results.

Not as passive recipients of federal policy and investments, but as essential co-creators of the future we are trying to build.

This is the moment we’re in. A technological revolution is redrawing the map of power and opportunity. If we don’t intentionally center place in how we build this future, we will replicate the mistakes of the past—concentrating wealth and innovation in a few places while leaving large parts of the country economically and politically adrift.

The federal government has made the bet. Now we have to deliver on it.

And here’s the truth: Our country needs this win no matter who occupies the White House.

Because the stakes are bigger than any one administration. Getting this right means strengthening our economy, rebuilding trust, and restoring a sense of possibility across regions that have long been left behind. In the end, it’s not about left or right—it’s about whether we can follow through. It's about building the connective tissue between national vision and local power so that prosperity can take root, grow deep, and be shared more broadly.

If we do it right, we don’t just make America more competitive. We make prosperity more democratic.

And that may be the most important investment of all.

It was an honor to serve as chief of staff at the Economic Development Administration during the launch of the Tech Hubs and Recompete programs -- two transformative economic development initiatives that expanded EDA's toolkit with bold bets on America's distributed capacity for innovation and growth.

The Tech Hubs program aimed to catalyze dynamic innovation ecosystems nationwide, advancing technologies critical to our national security and economic competitiveness while spurring broad-based regional economic growth. The Recompete Pilot Program targeted distressed communities with high prime-age unemployment, investing in initiatives that create jobs and connect people to opportunity. Both represented novel approaches to addressing the diverse economic development needs and untapped potential of communities across the country.

This piece focuses primarily on reflections from building the Tech Hubs program for clarity and depth, though many insights apply equally to Recompete: thoughtfully distributing limited resources across America, designing application processes that themselves create value, and moving with speed while seeking to build durable coalitions for continued investment.

The $500 Million Dollar Question

Extensive discussion surrounded how to allocate the $500 million allocated for the first Tech Hubs round—a potentially transformational sum of money, yet simultaneously just 5% of the soaring ambitions Congress had originally authorized. Should we select only a few places for larger awards that could meet many of a region's investment needs? Or pursue broader distribution across many places and technologies, focusing on a few critical investment strategies per region?

We awarded 12 Tech Hubs grants to begin implementing their innovation visions, while also funding a number of smaller strategy development awards for other promising regions. I'll leave it to readers to judge whether that number was optimal, but what is clear is that America has much more innovative potential and need than we had resources to support. The CHIPS and Science Act identified ten technology categories critical to our competitiveness -- from biotech to quantum computing to advanced manufacturing. Too many places need catalytic funding to advance these technologies and participate in the coming technological boom. We are a big country. Picking just 2-3 metropolitan areas or states to succeed technologically wouldn't have been feasible. Concentrating all funding in a few metros also wouldn't have survived Congress, which holds the purse strings. Understandably so -- Members want their constituents to benefit from opportunities to participate in this technological security push.

More fundamentally, the application process revealed genuine innovative capability in places rarely mentioned in innovation conversations. The constraint holding these regions back is not innovative potential -- it is available funding.

Bringing People Together

I heard time and time again that the application process itself was impactful. The Tech Hubs program required multi-stakeholder consortia – universities, companies, community organizations, and economic development groups -- to submit a joint application and collaboratively developed vision. For some regions, this became a forcing mechanism for these disparate stakeholders to start conversations about their shared technological mission and operate as an ecosystem for the first time, rather than continuing as a smattering of uncoordinated, geographically proximate players.

Two-Round Application Process

The two-round application process for the Build Back Better Regional Challenge, which my former colleague Scott Andes led and discussed in this series, carried over to the Tech Hubs program. Scott outlined the many advantages of the two-round process, where finalists were first publicly identified before a subset of those finalists were ultimately selected for funding. We hypothesized and then was validated to see that the finalist label itself was significant. First-round finalists received an official "Tech Hub Designation," signaling that the U.S. government recognized the region's foundational assets and potential to become a global leader in their chosen critical and emerging technology area. This designation sparked increased interest from national and international technology producers and investors across many designees, even those not among the 12 ultimately receiving implementation awards. Through thoughtful process and program design, we were able to stretch the impact of the Tech Hubs legislation a bit beyond “just” what government funds were appropriated to do.

What You Ask For is What You Get

Ongoing policy discussions debate how detailed legislation should get in dictating program implementation by agencies. The law called for regional consortia applying for the Tech Hub program to include certain stakeholder communities that might not have traditionally been included in innovation ecosystems but were indeed critical players to their long-term success. As a result, the notice of funding opportunity issued by EDA implemented this requirement, prompting these consortia to incorporate those stakeholder groups and expand both the innovation potential of the region as well as the communities that would benefit from such engagement. We could argue that the agency would have reached the same conclusions as what the legislation intended, but we do know for a fact that the legislative prescriptions had to be included in the notice of funding opportunity and thus had their chosen impact.

Going as Fast as Possible

We moved quickly. Deep urgency drove getting these programs to be operational immediately. Delay meant more time for international competitors to advance, supply chain vulnerabilities to persist, and communities ready for economic growth to wait.

The team at EDA and the Commerce Department was extraordinary. Civil servants and political appointees worked nights and weekends, driven by "go" energy and genuine commitment to program effectiveness. No extra compensation motivated this work -- just mission focus. Nothing could stop the push to fulfill these program mandates. (Speaking of pushing, I even sent a major Recompete announcement email blast while going into labor at the hospital!)

That execution urgency was matched by communities' remarkable responsiveness. Regions assembled applications within months -- an impressive feat requiring coordination across dozens of stakeholders, trust-building essential for collaboration, and identification of critical investment priorities.

With consistent, multi-year funding from Congress, regions can have more time to plan, build, and bring in a broad group of players across their community.

An Ending that is Not About the End

Congress did the right thing in passing the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, authorizing many billions of dollars for investment because they understood the scale of what needed to be done. But they have only appropriated a fraction of that – enough to prove the concept works, not enough for the scale of transformation we need.

Demand clearly exists. Every funding announcement generated far more qualified applications than we could support. Applicants that did not get full implementation awards in the first round did not give up. Those applicants that received strategy planning or consortium accelerator awards (approximately $400-500K each) have used the funding to keep their coalitions together, further develop their strategies, seek out private capital, and prepare for additional federal grant opportunities.

If Congress provides consistent, multi-year funding, the government could support not just the finalists from both Tech Hubs and Recompete, but also the dozens more that are and have been building their capacity since the launch of these programs. Private capital is paying attention to where federal dollars go, and sustained support could turn into many more dollars of total investment.

The basic policy framework is in place, but its vast potential hinges on sustained follow-through. The CHIPS and Science Act was never meant to be a one-and-done round of appropriations. What we need now are states, localities, philanthropy, and private investors to fill in the gap, and the political commitment to follow through on the initial investment for the years to come.