The CHIPS and Science coalition is mostly gone. Its programs are not.

In July 2022, 41 Republicans in Congress voted for the CHIPS and Science Act. Seventeen were senators, and 24 were House members who voted yes after party leadership told them not to. 

Along with Democrats from across the country, this diverse coalition authorized the federal government’s largest investment in technology, science and entrepreneurship-led economic development. Invention and economic dynamism remained a bipartisan priority.

When the new Congress is seated in January, Jason Rittenberg counts fewer than 10 of those Republicans still there.

That number matters because the science half of the law, which created the EDA Tech Hubs and the NSF Regional Innovation Engines, is up for reauthorization in the next session. Rittenberg is principal of Excel Regional Solutions and spent years at influential tech-policy trade group SSTI. He works with a national coalition of Tech Hubs on how they talk to Congress. His read on the Nov. 3 midterms is more hopeful than you might expect, as long as people do the work of explaining.

“There’s been a lot of change,” he told me on a recent Builders Live. “So there is a lot of education that needs to be happening around them to make sure that people understand why they were created, what they’ve been doing, and why they are still relevant.”

What the results changed

Together, the Biden and Trump administrations, with bipartisan Congressional support, introduced a sweeping new era of place-based economic development. A raft of big “industrial policy” bills have funded 150 regional coalitions to develop advanced science, commercialize emerging technologies and speed high-growth entrepreneurship.

The America Rescue Plan funded programs  in 2021 and 2022 at the SBA and the EDA. Then the EDA Tech Hubs and NSF Engines program followed, all with an explicit encouragement to take a more collaborative “coalition-style” approach that insiders often call “ecosystem building” or “systems stewardship.” Together, close to $2.75 billion has been put toward these programs.

The commitment is unfinished, though. The CHIPS and Science Act authorized $10 billion to be spent on this strategy, yet just 10% has been appropriated and even less has been actually awarded. Rittenberg is among those who will advise new members of Congress on these programs, and want state and local organizers to advise their elected officials too.

The turnover is large. In a post-election analysis, Rittenberg counted more than 135 new members of Congress, 21 new governors and more than 1,500 new state legislators. 

Control moved from Republicans to Democrats in both chambers of Congress, six governorships and 12 state legislative chambers. Almost all entrepreneurship programs are paid for out of the non-defense discretionary budget, and Democrats have historically protected that spending more than Republicans have. (Independent analyses show both parties have contributed to our country’s rising indebtedness, just in different ways.)

“On average, you can expect less funding pressure,” Rittenberg said. With two years left in President Donald Trump’s term, he expects fewer big legislative changes and more debate that sets up whoever governs next.

Last year, the Trump administration canceled more than 3,000 research grants worth over $8 billion. It also pulled back a $210 million Tech Hubs slate that had already been announced. But the same administration has since made awards through both programs. In July, 12 new NSF Engines were named (including one in Northeast Ohio, where Rittenberg lives), and six Tech Hubs split $169 million (the leanest round the program has had). 

What worries Rittenberg most is not appropriations necessarily. It’s whether agencies stay stable. Awards were going out “on a more normal basis” by late 2026, and he hopes congressional oversight keeps it that way. He is concerned that a mix of officials who want more executive authority and a backlash against that oversight could bring back the disruption of 2025.

The story that works on the Hill

In September, Tech Hub leaders held a round of Hill meetings. Rittenberg says only a couple of those conversations ran into real pushback or a lack of interest.

What worked was having two stories ready and knowing which one to lead with. The national story is about competing in emerging technology, since the US designs chips and quantum systems but often doesn’t build them. The district story is about jobs at home. His example was Kansas City, home to a BioSecure Manufacturing Tech Hub that won $34 million in July. A member from that region may care less that China is pulling ahead in some measures of drug innovation.

“What I really care about is the fact that you’ve got a strategy that can help us manufacture more of those drugs here,” Rittenberg said, describing how that member might react. “Both parts are equally true.”

Builders by Chris Wink

More than half of today’s startup weeks launched after 2020

The entrepreneurship pirates joined the economic development navy. Now what?

Why West Virginia put a startup office under an elected official

Some state legislatures open as early as Jan. 5, which is less than two months away. Rittenberg advises five priorities for economic leaders now, and two of them stand out to me.

First, evaluate your own work honestly, with both numbers and stories: “Evaluations by third parties will earn the most trust from policymakers,” he advises, echoing my advice that “the new battleground for economic development is information.”

Second, find your advocates. You may not know the people who just won elected office (at the local, state or federal levels), but your board members, funders and clients might. The other three are about how you deliver it: build proposals backed by evidence, communicate without jargon and “light on acronyms,” and make a plan to talk with officials early and often.

“Talk to them fresh just like you would if you were trying to explain to your parents or your kids,” he said. Be precise about the technology as well. Voters favored limits on data centers in 40 of 41 local ballot measures on Election Day, so AI will be part of the reauthorization fight.

Rittenberg recalled a policy meeting where someone asked for “physical AI” in a bill. Another person asked whether they just meant robotics, which already has supporters. “Physical AI” as if yet has none.

New governors face choices of their own. In Ohio, where Rittenberg lives, the voter-approved Third Frontier bonds that funded startups for decades have run their course, he said, so renewing them falls to Gov.-elect Amy Acton. His advice to new administrations: Don’t scrap what works just to look new, and don’t copy your neighbor’s program until you understand why they built it.

The bipartisan story of Tech Hubs and Engines is still true. They are in red and blue districts, rural and urban counties, and they’re bringing lab work to market and creating new firms. But most of the lawmakers who wrote that story into law are gone. The programs outlasted the coalition that passed them. Getting them reauthorized means building a new coalition one office at a time, starting with the nine Republicans who are left.