When Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act with bipartisan support three years ago, it established a new national center focused on semiconductor R&D—not just around technology, but also workforce development.
The National Semiconductor Technology Center, which was legislatively mandated as a public-private consortium, was incubated in the Department of Commerce and then spun out to a separate nonprofit, Natcast, at the end of the Biden administration. Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary, is now calling foul on that move—saying it was illegal and designed to install Biden-aligned leadership and wrest control from the incoming administration.
In a letter to Natcast’s CEO late last month, Lutnick severed the government’s ties with Natcast and effectively dissolved the organization.
“From the very beginning Natcast served as a semiconductor slush fund that did nothing but line the pockets of Biden loyalists with American tax dollars,” Lutnick said in a press release.
In a letter to its stakeholders following Lutnick’s decision, Natcast emphasized the qualifications of its leadership and staff, many of whom have extensive industry experience, and it outlined the ways in which the organization was required to be accountable to the Commerce Department—including weekly, monthly, and quarterly reviews of its programming and approval of its operating budget and major project outlays. It also emphasized that its trustees are not paid.
“Natcast operates with multiple levels of oversight and disciplined fiscal management,” the letter said.
The stated intent of Natcast’s structure was to position industry as an equal player with the government when it came to semiconductor and workforce R&D. Industry leaders had made it clear that for the NSTC to succeed, it had to be seen as a “neutral, trusted, and science-driven player.”
The Bottom Line: The immediate impact of the administration’s decision will be at least a period of disruption for the NSTC and its workforce center, as the work transitions to Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, without existing staff or structures. But it’s not clear what the move means for the center’s workforce agenda longer term—including research, coordination, and guidance that regional leaders have said is badly needed in some form. Nobody we reached seemed to know, or be willing to talk if they did.
Natcast put out an overview of its work to date, and some leaders in the NSTC’s Workforce Center of Excellence publicly shared what they had been working on.
Adam Leonard joined the workforce center in February to stand up its data analytics team, after 22 years at the Texas Workforce Commission. He said in a public post that his team and others had been making progress: developing products, issuing competitive funding, and attracting blue-chip membership.
Leonard said he was attracted by the opportunity to build a new workforce development model that actually achieved industry alignment, an area where so many other efforts had come up short.
“The work focused on one industry, but what we were building could have been replicated across others—especially for emerging technologies like quantum computing,” he wrote. “It could have helped inform a replacement for WIOA in the years ahead.”
A Playbook: Natcast’s dismantling follows a pattern of Trump administration moves to renege on agreements, including those under the CHIPS and Science Act, made by the previous administration. In May, for example, the Commerce Department announced it was rescinding six awards for regional Tech Hubs made during the Biden administration, and that it would revamp the grant program.
The new administration is not backing off federal involvement in industrial policy, though. If anything, it’s demanding more direct control with new equity stakes in chipmakers like Intel and a rare earths mining firm.
“The Trump administration’s implementation approach looks significantly different from the Biden administration’s,” says Shalin Jyotishi, founder and managing director of the Future of Work & Innovation Economy Initiative at New America. “But it’s becoming clearer that the second Trump term will be doubling down on and even expanding the toolbox of government influence of markets and actions to spur public-private partnerships, as well as investments—especially in sectors strategic for national competitiveness.”
What that means for workforce development remains to be seen.