One of the largest investments in Idaho’s 134-year history could be in question after President Donald Trump called for the end of a $280 billion subsidy program called the CHIPS and Science Act.

The law, which passed with bipartisan support in 2022, directed $52 billion in federal funding to boost semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, though Idaho’s congressional delegation voted against the legislation.

“Your CHIPS Act is a horrible, horrible thing,” Trump said during an address to Congress Tuesday night. “We give hundreds of billions of dollars and it doesn’t mean a thing. They take our money and don’t spend it.”

But the calls come as Micron, a multinational semiconductor company that was founded and headquartered in Boise, is well underway on a $15 billion expansion of its Southeast Boise campus with a subsidy under the law.

In December, after Trump’s election, and after Trump had criticized the CHIPS Act as wasteful, the Biden administration awarded Micron more than $6.1 billion in federal subsidies to help pay for new chip-making plants in Boise and upstate New York. Boise’s share was $1.5 billion.

The Commerce Department said then that it was disbursing money based on Micron’s completion of project milestones. But the department did not say what those milestones were and whether some were yet to be met. So it wasn’t clear Wednesday whether Micron already had all its promised money or not — and if not, whether the rest would actually be paid.

Micron did not immediately return a voicemail or email request for comment.

Trump said the nation could attract more semiconductor investment through the use of tariffs, rather than subsidies, and touted a $165 billion investment from Taiwan Semiconductors to build a plant in the U.S. He said Congress should get rid of the CHIPS Act and House Speaker Mike Johnson should use any leftover funds instead for reducing the nation’s debt or “any other reason you want to.”

Micron builds computer microchips and dynamic random-access memory semiconductors used in everything from smartphones to video game consoles. With 5,400 employees in Boise as of May 2024, the company is Idaho’s largest for-profit employer and the nation’s largest maker of memory, a class of semiconductor chips.

The $15 billion expansion is one of the largest investments in state history. The company has said its new semiconductor chip manufacturing plant, or fab, would directly employ 2,000 people and create 15,000 jobs in the community.

The fab is the first dynamic random-access memory manufacturing plant built in the United States in 20 years, Scott Gatzemeier, Micron’s corporate vice president of U.S. expansion, previously told the Statesman.

“It’s incredibly exciting to bring manufacturing back to the U.S.,” Gatzemeier said.

The development has spurred further investment in Southwest Idaho, with technology-adjacent and logistics companies jumping into the market to support the company. The company has also partnered with 14 universities across the Northwest, including at Boise State University and Idaho State University, and helped fund programs that would boost the semiconductor workforce.

The call to end the CHIPS Act comes after Bloomberg News reported that about 60 employees with the government office responsible for the program had voluntarily left or were terminated as Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk have tried to cut the federal workforce.

Semiconductors were invented in the U.S., and the country remained the leading producer for decades, but production capacity has dropped from about 37% in 1990 to 12% today, according to prior Statesman reporting. The U.S. has dropped to fourth place behind Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and China.

The CHIPS Act drove a national boom in construction spending for manufacturing facilities, with spending nearly quadrupling since the start of 2022 for computer, electronic and electrical manufacturing.

Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra previously told the Statesman that the CHIPS Act would help grow domestic memory production from under 2% to 10% of the global market over the next decade and would make the U.S. the “home to the most advanced memory manufacturing and R&D in the world.”

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