President Joe Biden’s insistence that technology be littered with diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements at the expense of quality is hamstringing American technology and national security.
The theory behind the CHIPS and Science Act was to make the United States less dependent on advanced microchips from Taiwan, where 90% of them are made and in danger of being cut off if or when China decides to invade the island nation. The law included $39 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturing on U.S. soil, which you would think would encourage companies to begin manufacturing chips on, yes, U.S. soil.
You would be wrong. TSMC, a Taiwanese manufacturer, has twice delayed its manufacturing plans in Arizona and will instead be ramping up production in Japan. Samsung has delayed its planned facility in Texas and will instead look to South Korea. TSMC and Intel are both looking at subsidies in Germany, and Intel is also going to be manufacturing in Israel and Poland after delaying its plan in Ohio.
This is partially the result of all of the DEI requirements tied to the CHIPS funding, which includes quotas for women in construction and labels workplace DEI as “highly effective workforce investments” that are considered “best practices.” TSMC, for example, was pressured into backing down from bringing in 500 workers from Taiwan to rely on less-skilled DEI workers that it would have to train more extensively.
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You can see this when it comes to artificial intelligence as well. Biden issued an executive order pressuring companies that create AI tools to incorporate DEI. As a result of this, or Google’s own DEI brain rot, Google created an AI tool that was both racist and embarrassingly unable to respond to basic prompts because the “inclusive” ideology baked into it severely limited its ability to respond.
These requirements that tech companies and others adhere to the racist principles of DEI make products less likely to be made and, when they are made, more likely to be awful. When it comes to both microchips and Google’s AI tool, we are seeing it play out in real time, and yet Biden and his Democratic colleagues will continue to stifle technology with those same DEI requirements that are already making things worse.