The House has approved a proposal originally sponsored by Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo (Calif.) that is meant to direct a further boost to the U.S. production of semiconductors, which are technological components used in large numbers in a wide variety of products.
The House backed the proposal in a voice vote, meaning there is no record available of the breakdown in support across members of the Democratic and Republican parties. Republicans, though, hold the majority in the House at present, meaning the approval of Eshoo’s proposal could buck some expectations.
Democrats also orchestrated a new round of support for the U.S. production of semiconductor chips when their party still held the House in the last Congress. In 2022, the House and Senate approved what is known in shorthand as the Chips and Science Act, which appropriated funding for the domestic semiconductor industry and boosted development efforts.
The proposal from Eshoo is oriented specifically around foreign investment in semiconductor production housed in the United States, requiring “the SelectUSA program to solicit comments from state economic development organizations regarding federal efforts to increase foreign direct investment in semiconductor-related manufacturing and production,” as summarized by the Congressional Research Service.
SelectUSA is a program at the federal Department of Commerce. In a final roll call vote in the House on the earlier Chips and Science Act, most Republicans who participated in the vote were in opposition, with 187 registering their frustration. At the time, there was discontent from Republicans with the emergence in the Senate of the budget reconciliation deal that became the wide-ranging Inflation Reduction Act, which included policy proposals in health care, renewable energy, and more. Procedurally styled as it was, that deal didn’t need any Republican support in the Senate despite the longstanding and frustration-inducing filibuster rules to be approved and become law.
Supporting the U.S. semiconductor supply has been cast as a strategic and national security issue, considering the foreign reliance that emerges without higher levels of U.S. production and the use of those technological components in bulking up national defense capabilities.
