President Donald Trump claimed last Wednesday that the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan law signed by former President Joe Biden to invest $52 billion to improve computer chip manufacturing in the U.S., required companies accepting the funding to be run by transgender executives. His claim is completely untrue, and one congresswoman accused him of “spewing disinformation to incite hatred and divide Americans.”
“We had this ridiculous CHIPS Act where you give billions of dollars to a company,” Trump said while speaking at the Pennsylvania Defense and Innvoation Summit in Carlisle, Pennsylvania last Wednesday. “And of course, the standards were so high — if you weren’t transgender, as an example, you didn’t qualify. So they’d get the money, they’d hire, they’d look all over for transgender people to run the company, large portions. They couldn’t find them. They weren’t into the chip making business, I guess, right? They had other things on their mind.”
Related
Insights for the LGBTQ+ community
Subscribe to our briefing for insights into how politics impacts the LGBTQ+ community and more.
The law contains absolutely no mention of transgender people whatsoever.
One of its co-authors, U.S. Rep. Doris Matsui (D-CA) wrote in response to Trump’s claim, “As one of the architects of the CHIPS Act, let me be clear: Donald Trump is lying,” The Guardian reported.
“He’s deliberately spewing disinformation to incite hatred and divide Americans while attacking one of the most important investments we’ve made in American manufacturing, economic growth, and national security,” Matsui added.
The Guardian called Trump’s claim “wildly false”, “entirely untrue”, and said it “set off a scramble to figure out what he was talking about.” The White House reportedly didn’t respond to the publication’s request for explanation, but the publication theorized that he might have misread the law.
The text of the law mentions a Department of Energy office that was named, at the time of the law’s signing, the Office of Technology Transitions. It was renamed the Office of Technology Commercialization after Trump took office last year.
Another provision within the law says its funding should be prioritized for “institutions that demonstrate effective strategies to recruit and provide career and technical education to veterans and members of the Armed Forces transitioning to the private sector workforce.” But the use of “transitioning” in this section refers to a movement from military to civilian workplaces, not medical “transitioning” from one gender to another.
Another part of the law awarded millions to colleges, universities, and nonprofit organizations to better understand the causes, effects, and prevention of sex-based and sexual harassment affecting individuals in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. However, this section made no mention of trans people either.
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.