Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has ordered staff to work overtime so they can spend cash as quickly as possible before Donald Trump assumes the presidency, which a Republican senator called “extremely concerning.”
“I’d like to have really almost all of the money obligated by the time we leave,” Raimondo told POLITICO, in reference to the $53 billion microchip program, which Congress passed as a part of the CHIPS Act. Raimondo set a “clear deadline” and asked her staff to work weekends to accomplish it, she said.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus, criticized Raimondo in a Wednesday letter.
“Shoveling out heaps of taxpayer dollars as fast as possible, with little to no oversight, is part of the reason the United States government is nearly $36 trillion in debt today,” she wrote, saying $280 billion in COVID money may have gone to fraudsters under similar spend-it-as-fast-as-you-can circumstances.
Ernst said the department had spent as much CHIPS money in the last month as it had since the beginning of the program, and asked Raimondo to “immediately suspend the shopping spree and discontinue awarding new grants until a new secretary is confirmed.”
She asked if the department is cutting corners by doing away with typical contracting rules to get money out the door, and inquired about how it is communicating with the Trump transition team about the work.
Raimondo’s goal would require doing multi-billion dollar deals with Intel, Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix, according to POLITICO. So far, only two deals have been done, and there have been delays and culture clashes.
The deals have been bogged down in part due to Democrats pushing diversity and union policies.
An April column in the Hill said it is not normally hard to convince companies to take “multi-billion dollar subsidies,” but blame lies in large part with “frustration with DEI requirements embedded in the CHIPS Act… The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a Chief Diversity Officer at the National Science Foundation.”
It contains “requirements that chipmakers submit detailed plans to educate, employ, and train lots of women and people of color, as well as ‘justice-involved individuals,’ more commonly known as ex-cons.”
Republicans have fought to remove provisions that aren’t focused on helping the U.S. build chips as efficiently as possible so the country is not dependent on imports for a key resource.
Raimondo isn’t the only Biden administration official attempting to tie Trump’s hands. On his way out the door, recently departed Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley signed a deal with his agency’s union giving employees telework through 2029, The Daily Wire reported.
Raimondo has fashioned herself the “Sec of Tech” and said that Commerce’s work will be key on issues like artificial intelligence. But she has also raised eyebrows as a Cabinet secretary more willing than most to play politics — sometimes, seemingly, at the expense of a focus on her job.
After Trump narrowly avoided assassination, she said, “Let’s extinguish him for good.”
When the Department of Labor revised its job creation estimates and acknowledged that the numbers were 800,000 jobs worse than they had previously stated, Raimondo said “I don’t believe it because I have never heard Donald Trump saying anything truthful.” When her interviewer pointed out that they were official statistics from the Biden administration, the Commerce Secretary said “I don’t, I don’t, I’m not familiar with that.”
Raimondo was a surrogate for Vice President Kamala Harris during the latter’s presidential campaign. As the International Longshoreman’s Union threatened to shut down the U.S. economy if their demands for a massive pay raise were not met — a massive commercial crisis — Raimondo said she had “not been very focused on that,” and instead launched into a critique of Trump.
