SerpApi.Org
A California congresswoman has criticised Donald Trump for falsely claiming that a law signed by Joe Biden offered $52billion in funding to improve computer chip manufacturing, but only if the companies being funded were run by trans executives.
The US president made the comments while speaking at the Pennsylvania Defence and Innovation Summit on 15 July.
“We had this ridiculous CHIPS Act where you give billions of dollars to a company,” Trump said, referring to the CHIPS and Science Act that was signed into law in 2022 by Biden.
“And of course, the standards were so high – if you weren’t transgender, as an example, you didn’t qualify,” Trump falsely continued.
“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.”
The CHIPS and Science Act does not mention transgender people at all, a point that one of its co-authors, US Representative Doris Matsui, knows all too well.
“As one of the architects of the CHIPS Act, let me be clear: Donald Trump is lying,” she told the Guardian on 16 July.
“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.”
The Guardian then reported: “The president’s wildly false claim set off a scramble to figure out what he was talking about, with several competing theories about how he had misread the law circulating online.”
It also shared that the White House has not yet responded to a request to explain Trump’s comments.
A provision within the CHIPS and Science Act states that funding should be prioritised 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”.
However, the term “transitioning” refers to personnel who are moving from military to civilian workplaces as opposed to transitioning in the transgender sense. It is unclear whether or not this is how Trump misinterpreted the law.
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