US President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order this week creating the US Investment Accelerator office to oversee the CHIPS Act, a Biden-era program to re-shore semiconductor production.According to a White House statement, the new entitys mission will be to speed up corporate investments domestically by reducing government regulations and coordinating with federal agencies.Trump has criticized the bipartisan CHIPS Act, signed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2022, and said he wants to negotiate better deals. The office will also work to make it easier for companies to invest in US semiconductor manufacturing. In a speech before Congress last month, Trump called the CHIPS Act horrible and said he wanted to defund it: We dont have to give them money; we just want to protect our businesses and our people, and they will come because they wont have to pay tariffs if they build in America.The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the status of CHIPS Act funding.In February, reports emergedthat the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) planned to cut 497 jobs as part of Trumps federal government downsizing. NIST, a non-regulatory agency within the US Department of Commerce (DoC), helps drive innovation and industrial competitiveness and oversees the CHIPS for America program. The personnel cuts were widely criticized as damaging to the rollout of the CHIPS Act.In 2021, the years-long decline in domestic chip production was exposed bya worldwide supply-chain crisisthat led to calls for re-shoring manufacturing to the US. After more than a year of work from the Biden Administration to respond to acute semiconductor shortages, Congress in August 2022passed the measure.The Commerce Department, which is administering the CHIPS Act, spent months negotiating with semiconductor designers and fabricators to gain commitments from them and to achieve specific milestones in their projects before getting government payouts.With the CHIPS Act spurring them on, semiconductor makers including Intel,Samsung,Micron,TSMC, andTexas Instrumentsunveiled plans for a number of new plants on US soil. (Qualcomm, in partnership with GlobalFoundries,also said it would invest$4.2 billionto double chip production in its Malta, NY facility.)The Department of Commerce has beendivvying up $52 billionin the hopes of spurring on-shore chip manufacturing. While about $32 billion of CHIPS Act money has been allocated, the funds have not yet been dispersed. It was not immediately clear whether Trumps action this week could delay disbursement of the monies.