One small city waiting to learn how the Trump administration changes the nearly $53-billion CHIPS and Science Act program, signed into law in 2022 by then-president Joe Biden, is West Lafayette, Ind. The biggest question mark in its construction future is whether and when a $3.87-billion facility in the Purdue Research Park will be built.

Local communities where new semiconductor and microchips projects are planned with support from the CHIPS Act have a lot on the line. So do open-shop contractors who felt that the Biden administration had tilted the program too far toward union employers.

So far the Commerce Dept. has obligated about $32 billion in grants and several millions more in loans under the law, most of it for a handful of companies such as Micron and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. 

Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the CHIPS program has been in flux. On March 31, Trump folded the oversight and implementation of the CHIPS Act into a newly created U.S. Investment Accelerator within the Commerce Dept. That entity is being established to accelerate investments of more than $1 billion into the United States, as well as to negotiate “much better CHIPS Act deals than the previous administration.” Bloomberg reports that the CHIPS grants remain in limbo as Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick pursues “bigger investments.”

In other construction programs, the newly confirmed cabinet secretaries have been seeking to end or alter contracts signed during the Biden administration that require the use of “cleaner” construction materials or reward renewable energy use.

But open-shop contractors will benefit as the Trump administration continues to eliminate project labor agreement requirements, allowing the nonunion employers to land a bigger portion of the construction work than they have so far.  Last month Trump issued an executive order rescinding a Biden administration order that favored projects with PLAs.

To date, many open-shop contractors have been awarded and are planning to build the projects or the infrastructure needed to support the manufacturing facilities, says Ben Brubeck, ABC’s vice president of labor, regulatory and state affairs. 

“I haven’t seen any paper or intelligence that they will undo” the CHIPS Act program, Brubeck says. “Nothing suggests they will get rid of it.”

CHIPS Act projects are subject to federal prevailing wage requirements. And during the Biden administration the Commerce. Dept. strongly encouraged but didn’t formally require applicants for CHIPS Act funding to use union project labor agreements. On its website, ABC described the requirement as “unfortunate.”

Open-shop contractors still could build CHIPS projects if they complied with other labor-related rules. Significantly, the program’s Notices of Funding Opportunity required each project to produce a Project Workforce Continuity Plan in its Construction Workforce plan, detailing efforts to boost workforce development, minimize labor disputes, enhance safety and ensure adequate workforce pay.

ABC stated on its website that it was part of a coalition that successfully advocated for assurance from the Commerce Dept. that the “notice does not penalize applicants who submit the PLA alternative.”

Scarce CHIPS Act Information

So far information about the CHIPS Act’s future has been scarce and available only secondhand. The Commerce Dept.’s public affairs staff did not immediately reply to a request for an update.

Tidbits of information are all the public has to go by. The Trump administration has been reworking the terms of the CHIPS Act projects in a way that “signaled delays to some upcoming semiconductor disbursements,” a spokesperson for manufacturer GlobalWafers told Reuters in February. “Certain conditions that do not align” with President Trump’s policies and are now under review, the company said.

That same month, President Trump described the CHIPS Act as “horrible” in his State of the Union address to Congress. And more recently the New York Times reported that sources told it 40 out of about 120 CHIPS Act Program employees had been laid off.

Brubeck says ABC’s main hope is that any changes imposed by the Trump administration would eliminate the incentive to build them under union project labor agreements, so that future investments in semiconductor and microchip production “won’t leave out open-shop contractors” who “were getting muscled out for political reasons.”

Meanwhile, in Indiana, the waiting continues.

The Korean semiconductor manufacturer, SK Hynix, was counting on a $458 million grant from the Chips Act and a $500 million loan as incentive to build in West Lafayette.

Earlier this month, the West Lafayette Redevelopment Commission approved up to $10,000 to pay engineer American StructurePoint for advance design and environmental work at the site where SK Hynix is planning to build, reports journalist Dave Bangert in a post on Substack.

And as Bangert wrote, despite Trump’s CHIPS Act “disdain,” the city “kept moving forward.”