Stories about the design and delivery of new policies and programs often get lost and we want to make sure we preserve those accounts. In short, we also want to hear your stories. If you worked on economic development and innovation policies and programs such as CHIPS, IRA, ARPA, or Build Back Better and have a story to tell, please share your story with us here. We can encourage you to share, even if you were not in government, and instead were on the recipient side of CHIPS funding. It can be a paragraph, a longer story, or even a short video. Our team will review the story and may feature it on the Reimagining the Economy blog and other sources.
By Daniel Goetzel
Introduction
The CHIPS and Science Act was signed into law on August 9, 2022. It was the largest technology and industrial policy program in modern history, investing hundreds of billions of dollars into research, manufacturing, and American competitiveness.
When the government announces flagship programs like this, a bill signing or a ribbon cutting is often all the public sees. They rarely see the quiet, often messy work that goes into creating, passing, and implementing a major piece of legislation. This piece is an attempt to change that by digging into the CHIPS and Science Act and the NSF Regional Innovation Engines (NSF Engines) program.
While much of the media coverage and debate around the bill has focused on the multi-billion dollar incentives to large corporations like TSMC, Samsung, and Intel, the CHIPS and Science Act had a complementary focus and multi-billion dollar investment in R&D and economic development, spanning everything from chips and AI to battery storage and biotech. One investment vehicle that came out of the bill was the , an up to $1.6 B program aiming to create the industries of the future in communities that were historically ignored in past tech booms.
Why was this program so exciting?
- The investment and accompanying awards represent the broadest and most significant investment in place-based science and technology research and development since Congress created the modern university system over 160 years ago with the Morrill Land-Grant Acts.
- There was an intentional focus on communities outside the traditional tech hubs of Boston, San Francisco, and New York City.
- NSF had never run a program like this before. Historically, the federal government invested in research, and the geographic clustering of job creation was just a byproduct. NSF Engines flipped the script, funding projects that intentionally focused on commercialization-ready research projects and infrastructure, transforming a geographic region into a world-class tech ecosystem. A colleague of mine called it a “jobs program disguised as a research program.”
- The program was built at unprecedented speed—hundreds of millions awarded within two years—proving that NSF could rapidly and innovatively deploy capital.
We tell the story of this program from the perspective of the people who built it, in their own words. You will hear from scientists, program managers, White House legislative staffers, and even interns who were on the front lines of developing the program, rolling it out, and building a community around it.
The story transcends political boundaries and individual administrations. The CHIPS and Science Act passed with bipartisan support, and only one of the ten interviewees in this piece was a political appointee. The rest of the interviewees were non-political federal staff members or academic leaders.
This story is a reminder that the government can (and will again) do big, bold, ambitious things. Who might be interested?
- People who care about the “how,” and not just the “why” behind launching big initiatives in government.
- Policymakers who were involved in this legislative effort (and future efforts) and want to understand whether what they wrote into legislation actually works.
- The federal government workforce (current, past, and future), who may need a reminder and inspiration that their work matters.
- Lastly, aspiring leaders who are new to this space and curious about the public sector.
Our focus is the two years leading up to the passage of this landmark legislation and the launch of the NSF Engines.
In the years following the passage, the program continued to develop as it was implemented.
The stories
- Winter/Spring 2021: The workshop, the beginnings of an idea
- Summer/Fall 2021: The NSF Engines program takes shape, small team begins working behind-the-scenes
- Fall 2021: A similar program, the Build Back Better Regional Challenge, takes flight... at Department of Commerce
- Spring 2022: Day one of the NSF Engines program
- Spring/Summer 2022: Will the Endless Frontiers USICA the CHIPS and Science Act even pass? The Capitol Hill Rollercoaster and Resultant Bipartisan Legislation.
- Summer 2022: The bill passed, now what? The sprint to review and publish 679 concept outlines, building new public facing technologies from scratch
- Postscript: The aftermath of the launch and how it shaped the trajectory of peoples’ lives
- Conclusion
We also want to hear your stories. If you worked on economic development and innovation policies such as CHIPS, IRA, ARPA, and/or Build Back Better and have a story to tell, .
Spring 2022: Day one of the NSF Engines program
I will start with my story and then transport us back to the very beginning.
It was May 2022, I was three months into my new role at the National Science Foundation. It was a dreary, rainy day in Little Rock, Arkansas and I was delivering our first public presentation on the newly created National Science Foundation’s Regional Innovation Engines program (NSF Engines), a $1 B+ funding opportunity focused on creating R&D innovation and economic development ecosystems in regions that have seen historic underinvestment from both government and the private sector. The CHIPS and Science Act was still being debated in the backrooms of the Senate and wouldn’t be passed for another two months. But our agency had made the uncharacteristically bold decision to pre-emptively announce our new flagship program that morning, an initiative at the heart of the newly created .
The slide deck for my presentation had only been approved by NSF leadership as the plane touched down in Little Rock the evening before. It laid out our high-level vision for the NSF Engines program for an audience of hundreds of economic developers, C-suite executives from universities, state government employees, and entrepreneurial organizations. Some of them had stayed up all night reading the 30 page solicitation, while others squinted in disbelief when I mentioned that the National Science Foundation 1) was a federal government agency and 2) had a $9 B+ budget. When I finished my 5-minute presentation, I turned to the audience for questions.
First question: “This all sounds very exciting but you don’t have any money to do this, right?”
People awkwardly shuffled papers and whispered among themselves as they waited on my response.
As required by NSF policy, I started with the boilerplate language that NSF does not comment on the appropriation process, but we had historically benefited from bipartisan legislative support because of NSF’s research-oriented mission. However, I could quickly see that response was not going to cut it with this audience , so I pivoted and said, “I am confident that once people see the outpouring of support and excitement for this initiative and the other new programs coming out of the TIP Directorate, we will have the resources needed to make these transformational investments. We have announced the funding opportunity and we intend to move forward.”
During a coffee break, I made a beeline to the questioner and asked him what he hoped to achieve by asking that question. He responded that our program was a long-shot, and some universities were advising their teams to avoid putting much effort into TIP-funded initiatives, choosing instead to prioritize the bread-and-butter research programs from other NSF directorates.
I responded, “I would hate to be the person who would need to explain to a university president or provost that my institution did not seriously go after the NSF Engines program when a university down the street or in the neighboring state was announcing a transformational $160 M award. And by the way, this program is not only for universities…for-profits and nonprofits are eligible to lead applications. State and local governments can receive millions of dollars in funding too.”
He smirked at me and said, “we all know that only universities will win. You’re the National Science Foundation for crying out loud.”
This skepticism was anticipated, given NSF’s past track record, but we were blazing a new path, driving an intentional multi-pronged effort to engage startups, corporations, non-profits, and even venture funds who might be hearing about NSF for the very first time.
Fast forward to January 2024 when we announced $150 M in initial awards, with the potential to receive up to $1.6 B in funding over 10 years. Forty percent of our Engines were led by non-academic institutions, NSF’s average rate is 12%.1
Announcement of the inaugural NSF Engines awards
A new Directorate at NSF
Two months before that presentation, in March 2022, it was an uncertain time at NSF. NSF had recently announced its first new Directorate in over 30 years - the Technology, Innovation & Partnerships Directorate (TIP).
This meant making two risky strategic choices.
- Establishing a new directorate before Congress took action. This is rare within government agencies, where it is far safer (though not required) to wait for Congress before shifting the gears of a large bureaucracy. The Berlin Wall had just fallen the last time NSF created a new Directorate.
Why? We wanted to create advocates for the program before having funding in hand. We needed to sell the vision of NSF Engines in a way that people could imagine one in their backyard. This required doing the pre-work of creating buzz outside of our core constituency of academia. If congressional leaders had constituents, ranging from mayors to industry leaders to Nobel Prize winning scientists, banging down their doors saying that they wanted an $160 M NSF Engine award in their community, these leaders would take notice.
- Doubling down on supporting the later stages of research. Before TIP, NSF generally funded early stage research — often theoretical, foundational research in universities.2 The creation of TIP created a new strategy around funding later stage innovations, focusing on technologies and their surrounding ecosystems, which were significantly closer to market adoption. We also placed an intentional focus on expanding the geography of innovation, moving beyond established hubs on the coasts.
Why? This broadened the scope of funding beyond a small number of university cities and research hubs. As tech and innovation have driven more and more economic growth in the US, too many Americans have remained isolated from these opportunities. As NSF made transformative investments in frontier technologies from electric vehicles and autonomous systems to quantum computing and AI, it was crucial that we get these technologies to market quickly while building capacity in the nation’s overlooked places, both to mobilize more Americans to meet these challenges and to create economic opportunity in the communities where they live.
These were risky decisions, but carefully considered, and they ultimately panned out. The CHIPS Act passed with language about the NSF Engines program. At the same time, we reached an entirely new audience of potential partners, applicants, and communities, significantly expanding the universe of innovative startups, investors, and corporations who wanted to work with the TIP Directorate. Finally, it ignited the imagination of Congress around what a science agency could do leading to NSF receiving its largest ever one year budget increase.
What follows is a series of interviews with the individuals who were at the table as NSF Engines, TIP’s flagship program, was imagined, designed, and launched.
1 The comparison point for this statistic is NSF’s portfolio of large-scale awards of at least $5 M in size.
2 NSF had been funding SBIR and STTR programs since the 1970s, piloting the approach of supporting emerging technologies and startups with non-dilutive capital. The Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program built on that foundation. These programs set the stage for the rest of the federal government to follow suit. However, SBIR/STTR was a very targeted strategy while TIP built on these successes to take a much broader and more ambitious view of what an innovation and translational thesis could look like.
Winter/Spring 2021: The workshop, the beginnings of an idea
Background: The NSF Engines started with a workshop in May 2021. It was a virtual convening bringing together 75 investors, entrepreneurs, and university leaders to create a new network of research institutes that looked fundamentally different from anything the federal government had created before.
People were going through a lot in their professional and personal lives because of the pandemic. So this wasn't an easy time for people. But it was just amazing. The positive energy behind that workshop was unbelievable.
Pramod Khargonekar, Vice President of Research at UC-Irvine,
and co-organizer of the workshop
Key players
University of California, Irvine
Vice President of Research, former senior leader at NSF
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Professor and former senior leader at NSF
Harwich Partners
Former acting director at ARPA-E, Department of Energy's innovation arm
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation
Origin Story for NSF Engines
Pramod: Jim [Kurose] contacted me in early 2021 saying that he had just talked to Erwin Gianchandani (future NSF Assistant Director for the TIP, leading the TIP Directorate),who had an idea that he wanted to run by me. I knew Erwin well from my time at NSF. The idea was about building research centers and institutes that were very different from NSF’s traditional and . Jim asked: “Are you interested?”
I said, “I’m jumping in with both my feet!”
The next step was finding co-conspirators.
Enter Susan Martinis and Cheryl Martin. Susan was Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation for the University of Illinois, a major public university with a strong track record of producing entrepreneurial spin-outs and a history of shaping the region’s economic development strategies. Cheryl had most recently helped set-up the Department of Energy’s program, which pioneered a new model for the federal government to support high-risk, high-reward energy technologies and startup companies. She had a long career in industry, startup and venture capital worlds and brought that perspective to the government and the workshop.
Susan: One of the things that was really important [about the workshop] was that 50% or less of the attendees were academics. Because if you're going to bridge this valley of death, you need perspective from entrepreneurs from small companies, ones that have made it. You need venture capitalists. You needed nonprofits that thought about diversity in the STEM workforces. I'm really really proud of how many people this workshop attracted [from outside of the traditional NSF world].”
There was a big discussion about inviting other agencies because of the competition between the federal agencies that I hadn't really appreciated before.
Cheryl: Yeah, it was a big discussion… I'm not sure agencies are really used to having cross talk. I mean, heck, we were in DOE to promote DOE, right? The [agencies] didn't like talking between the different visions.
So I do think it broke new ground in terms of being able to say what's the [collective] benefit [for the American people], and really, really bring people together. It pushed a conversation that needed to happen.
Read more about this new interagency and collaborative model.
Many of the innovative ideas which surfaced in the workshop played an instrumental role in the ultimate design of the NSF Engines program
The creation of the NSF Engine CEO role
A critical design choice of the NSF Engines, Economic Development Administration (EDA) , and programs was that the need for a full-time senior person to lead these large scale ecosystem efforts. This was a marked departure from the usual federal grant approach where a faculty member or non-profit leader would manage a grant while maintaining a full slate of other, unrelated responsibilities at their home organization.
Jim: People in the workshop felt really strongly about this, that you needed a CEO, you needed a leader who wasn't gonna say, “Oh, you know what? I've got my research group. I have to teach a course a year, and I'm going to this Institute at the same time”... who wakes up every morning thinking about the Engine. And if you wake up at night and you worry about things. This is what you worry about.
Giving communities the freedom to innovate, not restricting them with requirements on who can lead an NSF Engine
Jim: These [Engines] were meant to be different things. They weren't meant to be Engineering Research Centers++ or Science Technology Centers++ (super-sized research centers). They had different missions than those of many universities... moving technologies beyond foundational research to market, thinking about the workforce, interacting with the State, bringing together all these partners. The number of universities that do that super super well are few and far between. And this was clearly going to be something to expand the geographic footprint of innovation.
Thinking intentionally about reaching communities that were not already “superstar regions” and bringing them together in new ways
Susan: The idea of Engines just caught fire [after the workshop]. Everybody wanted to have an Engine in their backyard. It gave an advantage to those communities that weren't built up. It wasn’t just about the money but building networks. And the money can’t just go to Kendall Square in Boston. Can't just go to Silicon Valley.
Summer/Fall 2021: The NSF Engines program takes shape, small team begins working behind-the-scenes
Background: After the workshop, a small team of 3-4 program officers at the National Science Foundation took the workshop’s high-level recommendations and transformed them into a living, breathing funding opportunity. Originally, many of the program officers were doing double duty, working on designing the Engines while also managing a full workload of other NSF programs. Others were quietly recruited into the Director’s office with the promise that something big was forthcoming. Many had backgrounds that were not traditional for NSF, coming out of industry, economic development, or state and local government. There were robust debates about the direction of the program, lengthy negotiations with NSF policy and legal teams about if certain things were even possible, and ultimately this team (plus 10+ new program officers who joined over the next two years) designed, implemented and oversaw some of the largest investments in the history of NSF.
Key player
Lead program officer for NSF Engines and first full time hire
Dmitri took a leave from his academic role at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) - via the NSF (IPA) program - to join the small, fledgling team.
Dmitri: I grew up in a small rural area in Mississippi and I was good at math and science... but I was in a small rural area. At that time [late 1980s], computers were not even mainstream. There was no robust innovation ecosystem in my area so I had nowhere to take my ideas… I didn’t even know where to start.
It wasn't until I was in college and I had a chance to go to MIT Lincoln Labs [in Cambridge, MA]. I'm like, “Oh, this place exists.” This is the place I've been wondering about since I was a kid. They're doing it...working on stuff that no one even knows about.
When NSF approached me about the about what came to be known as the NSF Engines program, my first thought was what if we can build Engines in an areas throughout the U.S. that are not already thriving…So that when younger Dmitri has these ideas, there is a place for him to take them.
You don't just have to go to the east coast or west coast. We can build Engines all over the US, including places like my hometown.
And I’m thinking, let's see how we can make this work. So, I viewed it like an experiment. Can we make it happen?
Key debates over how to move at speed and scale, even before the CHIPS Act passed
Dmitri: There was concern, probably at all levels [within NSF]. Should we wait? Or should we just move forward? There was a healthy debate… I think the ultimate decision was that the CHIPS Act would eventually pass and when it did NSF needed to be ready to go because there had been some debate, and I am not sure how to say this, if NSF was the right agency to lead the Engines program. This was not something that NSF typically does and so there was a desire to 1) do a great job 2) prove that we move quickly and not at NSF’s or academia’s typical pace.
So there was some sense that we should announce the program and that could be leveraged once the CHIPS funding came in.
Chris Slevin (deputy assistant to President Biden and chief negotiator of CHIPS Act): In hindsight everything kind of worked out [with NSF announcing early]. But in the moment, there was some tension there.
How did the NSF Engines name come about?
Dmitri: There were so many names. I remember something about NNRI [National Network of Research Institute] or something. I don't even know what the acronym was. NSF loves these crazy, academic, long acronyms.
I don't know if many people know this but my wife is a writer and elementary school teacher. She isn’t a computer scientist or engineer. I was describing to her what we were trying to do in layman's terms.
She said, “Oh, it sounds like you guys are trying to build an engine to drive all of these activities in a region. Why don't you just call it an engine, like a car engine?”
And that's how we decided that. It needed to be a digestible name.
I took it back to Erwin and he liked it so the program became the Regional Innovation Engines or NSF Engines.
The name really set the tone.
Making NSF’s bureaucracy more flexible. What’s a norm vs. a legal requirement?
Dmitri: We really pushed the limits of NSF and its policy office, we were asking folks to be innovative inside the building. It was going to require bureaucratic policy changes. We were changing things that impacted the way NSF funded projects and that had impacts across the agency, not just the TIP Directorate. Things like concept outlines. I’ve gotten so many calls from other programs asking how did you do that. We want to build a dashboard like you all. How did you get approval to use Airtable? We want to do those things.
Skip to the final section to learn more about the sprint to publish the concept outlines.
Fall 2021: A similar program, the Build Back Better Regional Challenge, takes flight... at Department of Commerce
Background: The Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBBRC) was the first large-scale regional economic development program, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s new model for place-based economic development. Unlike the other programs launched under the CHIPS Act banner, $1 B in American Rescue Plan Act funding funded it. Given the size of the program and novelty, it was unclear how communities would respond, nobody knew if there would be interest from the community for this style of program which was a marked departure from EDA’s more traditional economic development programs focused on physical infrastructure like roads, office parks, and sewage systems.
Key player
Program lead for Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) Build Back Better Regional Challenge
Scott would go on to be a co-architect of Tech Hubs and the Recompete Pilot Program, which collectively deployed $1.7 B over four years.
My entire career is built on the belief that more regional economies can be globally competitive. And the rate prior to these programs was communities fighting for a quarter million dollar grant. The average EDA grant since the 1970s, was between $1 M and $2 M. And this was a billion dollar program. It was a no-brainer. I lived in Pittsburgh at the time. It was a huge pain in the butt to get back to DC. I didn't want to do it, but this was the Super Bowl of what I had wanted to do my entire career, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
Scott Andes, Program lead for EDA's Build
Back Better Regional Challenge
Fostering collaboration with other government agencies, a new model for economic development
Scott: The most effective coordination was when we just got on the phone and built things together, talked about what worked and what didn't work. I honestly think that that's where we saw some real tangible wins, like the Regional Economic Competitiveness officer [EDA’s equivalent of NSF Engines CEO concept], joint application reviews, or how we went through this whole big thing about getting all of our applications made public…It happened at the program officer level but with the political cover of leadership. But there's always an opportunity to innovate based on what's going on in other agencies.
The two-phase competition structure
Scott: I can't say enough good things about the two phase competition. It is a lot more work than a one phase competition. But it is orders of magnitude higher quality. When you've got 30 to 60 finalists, if you want to and you work hard, you can know everything about them, you can perform an extraordinary diligence process. When you've got 500 or 600 applicants, things have to be mechanical. You can't fairly get under the hood on all of them. So the two phase competition [and NSF Engine’s development awards], I think, is worth its weight in gold. It is absolutely a critical element of all this. I'm thrilled that we did it with and Tech Hubs. I'm thrilled [NSF] did it. I hope others do it in the future.
Susan Martinis (co-organizer of 2021 workshop): We had two global companies in the small town of Decatur, Illinois who had never worked together. This effort (and Tech Hubs) brought them together for the first time. It got people together who wouldn't normally get in the same sandbox…and when people got knocked out of the competitions, they had an opportunity to team up with others because of the program’s scale..”
These networks across institutes ended up taking shape through NSF’s first-of-its-kind that created a community and venture platform for all of the Engines across the country. It was operated by a for-profit startup incubator and venture fund, another marked departure from business as usual at NSF.
The volume and quality of applications from off-the-beaten path places (529 applications)
Scott: This is something that has fundamentally changed my view of the country… the quality of applications that came in from places I didn’t know anything about. I knew nothing about Tulsa, Oklahoma in Phase One BBBRC… Central Valley… Manchester, New Hampshire… Just so many places… Excellence is everywhere. You just need something like this to kick up dust.
Burning the midnight oil, working around the clock to get these programs launched and the dollars out the door. Life as a federal employee on a high-profile program.
Dmitri: So, we needed to get this solicitation on the street. We are working at a very rapid pace, So you couldn't really work on your component in isolation.
And so, there were times when I'm online at 12:30 am. And I see another program officer online too. We would jump on a Zoom call to try to solve problems in the middle of the night. There were times when everybody left to go to dinner and it was like, I will see you online tonight after our kids go to sleep.
So that's really what we did, for, at least a year, a year and a half trying to get this thing ready to go.
Scott: It was a brutal, brutal few years in terms of personal life. You know I've been a long-time runner for the last 25 years. I barely ran for two years and gained thirty pounds. I'll give you an anecdote. So Tech Hub proposals, phase one came in and I had a week vacation planned in the middle of nowhere Montana with my brother, my parents, and my family. I downloaded several hundred applications, copied and pasted them into a hard drive, because I had no internet, and I brought them all with me. I read 300 applications on vacation.
Spring/Summer 2022: Will the Endless Frontiers USICA the CHIPS and Science Act even pass? The Capitol Hill Rollercoaster and Resultant Bipartisan Legislation
Background: Passing the CHIPS and Science Act was a political tightrope, involving active leadership from the White House, a bipartisan group of legislators, and a full court press by cabinet secretaries and industry CEOs, and key stakeholders. While its policy objectives garnered bipartisan support, the legislation took many shapes and forms over the first year and a half of the Biden administration, finally crossing the finish line in a frenetic sprint.
Key player
Deputy Assistant to President Biden (2021-2023), Chief of Staff to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo (2023-2024)
Responsible for getting the CHIPS and Science Act passed and implemented
The work begins even before President-elect Biden takes office
Chris: I served on the Biden-Harris Transition Team before he took office, thinking about the prioritization of what we're going to push legislatively on those first weeks and months of 2021. How do you translate the “Build Back Better” [rhetoric from the campaign trail] into a legislative agenda. I was part of a small group, including Jake Sullivan, then the incoming National Security Council Advisor and others who supported trying to lift up [legislation proposed in 2019 to boost investment in domestic high-tech research] as something to shoot at early.
Not only was it important, it was actually bipartisan. It took a big swing at reinvesting in science and technology as a major national bipartisan priority.
A bipartisan Senate letter about semiconductor supply chains creates an opening
Chris: Early February 2021, several Senators sent President Biden a letter on the semiconductor shortage as it related to autos. I used that letter to pitch with a to talk about semiconductors. It laid the groundwork for what we're trying to do legislatively and was an opportunity to
It gave us an opening to start negotiating.
Bringing together the semiconductor fab incentives and the R&D piece
Chris: We looked at it through a national security lens, bringing Senator Todd Young (R-IN) in. This bill was going to have as good a shot as anything we hoped to pass because of the bipartisan support with people like Senator Cornyn, and [large and small] companies driving support for it on Capitol Hill.
It was not all smooth sailing, discord within the Democratic Party, among agencies, and across party lines
We had to deal with legitimate frictions between the Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Commerce and the expanded role of NSF around this new idea of a Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships Directorate (TIP). We needed to be sure DOE and the national lab network didn't perceive TIP as any kind of threat to its mission, leadership, funding and that they were in fact bought into the vision. It was a healthy tension. We were meeting with agency leadership multiple times a week over the course of months as things heated up. Plus, the Senate Energy Committee was chaired by Senator Manchin (D-WV), whom you'll recall was . We had enough bipartisan support for CHIPS so Manchin was not a deciding vote, but we also didn’t want to rattle the apple cart without good reason.
In late 2021, the House released the , including chips language, but it also included a laundry list of other democratic priorities that were getting less traction on Capitol Hill. The House Democrats were not enthusiastic about considering what the Senate passed until there was more progress on their other key priorities. There were definitely inter-party concerns on corporate incentives and possibility of companies using [government funds] for stock buybacks.
The whole legislative effort was a balloon inflating, a bunch of other stuff added in, making it bigger, but in the end, it was CHIPS and Endless Frontiers [in the final bill], which was most likely scenario all along but you had to go through the process first in the Senate, and then with the House to bring everyone along.
A couple of weeks before the CHIPS Act was on the floor, Senate Minority Leader McConnell (R-KY) basically said, this thing's gotten too big and Democrats have overplayed their hand. We're not going to play ball on this. And to Senator Young and Senator John Cornyn’s (R-TX) credit, they kept their caucus together.
The [64-33, with 17 Republican votes. The only Democratic holdout was Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT)].
But then that President Biden and Majority Leader Schumer cut a deal with Senator Manchin on the Inflation Reduction Act
Chris: word leaks that Senator Manchin had cut a deal with White House on what soon became known as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and McConnell and the Senate Republican caucus, all went bananas. The CHIPS and Science Act hadn’t passed the House yet, so there was a 24 hour sprint to get the House lined up.
The bill passed the House the next day [without any changes to the bill3]. It passed 243-187 with 24 Republican votes.
Chris: We had another 10-15 Republicans who would have voted for it [if the Manchin news hadn’t leaked]. That number could have been in the forties.
It was a rollercoaster but people like Senator Portman, Senator Blount, Senator Young and several others in both parties hung in there and made sure it passed. And they were pleased when Secretary Raimondo briefed them on the people that she was hiring to lead the implementation work, recruiting from the private sector and finance. People who understood the sector and could negotiate. If we had only brought in a bunch of government and policy people, we would have run into issues. But we brought in practitioners.
Adding in programs like NSF Engines and EDA Tech Hubs into package helped get the bill across the finish line
Chris: 100% it made a difference. It's hard to find anybody, including people in the Bay Area or Boston, who don't support the concept of [more hubs for innovation distributed across the country]. Geography matters, what and how we produce it matters, and where we do, it increasingly matters.
3 It was important that the House of Representatives passed the Senate’s version of the bill without any changes because language changes would have sent the bill back into the reconciliation process and required additional votes. In light of development over the past 24 hours around the Manchin deal, it was unclear if they had the Republican votes needed to pass in through the Senate again.
Summer 2022: The bill passed, now what? The sprint to review and publish 679 concept outlines, building new public facing technologies from scratch
Background: President Biden wouldn’t sign the CHIPS and Science Act into law until August 9, 2022 but we were already off and running.
In June 2022, NSF was flooded with nearly 700 two-page concept papers outlining what Engines applicants hoped to build, including information on their technology area of focus, proposed partners, and geographic footprint.
In a business as usual world, NSF would read through the concept outlines over several months and then privately invite eligible teams to submit full proposals. The information on the applicant pool would only ever be released at the finalist stage of the competition or after award decisions were made, which is what Build Back Better Regional Challenge had done. We decided to take a radically different approach for three reasons:
We were seeing multiple teams in the same topic area and even the same zip code apply independently from each other. Either they didn’t know that another team from their region was applying or they didn’t want to work together because of long-standing political dynamics. We wanted to eliminate the real or faux excuse that the teams didn’t know about each other since “going at it alone” would be an unsuccessful strategy for building a true regional ecosystem.
We were getting a lot of incoming outreach from investors, philanthropists, startups, corporations, and even individual researchers who were very excited about the Engines’ program potential and wanted to team up with a region(s) but didn’t feel equipped or inclined to lead an application. We needed to create a frictionless process for these critical stakeholders to begin a dialogue with applicant communities and do it in a way where NSF program officers didn’t spend all day facilitating introductions.
We wanted to show congress and other critical stakeholders that there was massive pent up demand for this program and that the demand wasn’t just on the coasts of America or in urban communities but across a wide swath of communities and congressional districts spanning almost every state.
So the challenge was, how do we build the connective tissue and digital infrastructure so that anybody in the country could understand the data and reach out to interesting applicants while concurrently incentivizing applicants to collaborate? A tall task made even more difficult by the fact that we had set the ambitious goal of publishing all of the concept outline data in a month.
Key players
24-year-old Binghamton University graduate student
Interned in the TIP Directorate as a part of the (HACU) sponsorship program
20-year-old University of Virginia undergraduate student
Interned in the TIP Directorate as a part of the
Suleima and TJ were two of the major architects of the NSF Engines collaboration and visualization dashboard, working closely with the data science, communications, and program teams at NSF. The aims to expose technically minded students to the intricate interplay between policy decisions and engineering.
Building the prototype
Interns largely built the early minimal viable product (MVP) and communications strategy, under the supervision of the NSF Engines program team. You can see the and an , narrated by TJ and Suleima.
TJ: I remember we contacted [redacted company name] and were trying to solicit a proposal from them on building out the platform. And then we realized that maybe we could build this on our own in house using Airtable [a venture backed startup that had never been used at scale in government] and automation/visualization tools.
Suleima: I still have PTSD from that long, long spreadsheet of concept outlines. Concept outlines, concept outlines, concept outlines.
TJ: We built a very early Beta prototype version using Googe Maps API, and we were going to host it on Github. Once people saw what was possible with the protype, we shifted gears and started working with Grace Yuan (NSF TIP’s Senior Data Analytics Officer) to build on tableau, using more advanced integrations. It was a really dynamic environment.
Building a tech platform to drive collaboration, breaking through the technology adoption bureaucracy and bringing a venture-backed startup along for the ride
TJ: There was a lot of pressure on if we publish this, it has to be right. We were handling sensitive information in a very public facing way. We also wanted to make sure that our platform could handle the incoming capacity of people interacting with the data, sending messages through the Airtable interface.
Airtable didn't anticipate the platform to be used that much. At that point, Airtable hadn’t even envisioned their technology being used as an outward facing, public facing platform for a government running tons of traffic running through it. It was more of an internal productivity tool.
There was a moment where we were stuck in government bureaucracy, and the amount of checks and balances of getting a new software approved. We had to go to an emergency hearing for approval to prove it was a safe platform for government use.
Creating a common language between sectors, working together to build something bigger than what they could build alone
Suleima: People who are academics speak a very specific language. People who are in the nonprofit, industry, and venture capital worlds have a different language of their own. How do you support concept design collaboration between these different stakeholder groups that don't speak the same language, and may also have different visions or missions of what they're trying to accomplish
Jim Kurose (co-organizer of the original workshop in 2021): I think the applicant community had to go through that 1st year, not quite understanding exactly what the goal was…This was going to be different from other center scale activities that NSF has done. It became pretty clear over time, with the events (like virtual roadshows spanning every state) leading up to the 1st Engines deadline. People finally began to understand when you had people like speak at events. She was the founding President and CEO of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, a $1-billion public-private partnership aimed at accelerating breakthroughs in the life sciences, scientific education, research opportunities, and workforce expansion. And then, when [the awards] were announced, I think people said, “Oh, it's that kind of stuff.”
Government as a startup
TJ: They were passing the CHIPS bill in Congress at that moment. It was a really exciting time to work at NSF that summer. Erwin [AD for the TIP Directorate], was really interested in getting the tool out by a certain deadline.
Suleima: At first, I didn't know if this [internship] was a right fit for me specifically, because my undergrad was in graphic designing and I was in a Masters in Public Administration program. Science wasn't my strongest suit. But you convinced me this was more like working on a startup within the government. That gave me confidence that I could do this...
TJ is like a unicorn. He is very tech-savvy. He could be very technology driven, but he also is, has a really great visionary, and how he sees the bigger picture. So I think working together, even though we were remote and had different backgrounds, was seamless.
It had startup energy. We were doing a lot of different things at once, embracing experimentation the entire way through. It was amazing to not only see it accepted but embraced. Everyone from my boss to my boss’s boss was willing to stop what they had going on, and get it done, even if it was grunt work.
It was obvious that this was going to get a lot of attention. It was inspiring but also daunting. And you wanted everything to be perfect.
Postscript
The concept outline platform went . The platform didn’t break. But it did catch fire.
Within the first month, over 40,000 people had viewed the data online. Thousands of people used the Airtable interface to reach out to other teams, teaming up, and bringing onboard new partners. NSF fielded calls from multiple government agencies about how they built the platform and if we could teach them how to replicate it.
In fall 2022, NSF received its largest budget increase in the agency’s history with a specific mandate to fund the NSF Engines program.
After so much work, it was clear that people across the country wanted an NSF Engine in their backyard.
An internship that meaningfully shaped career paths for TJ and Suleima
TJ: Before accepting the internship offer, my [UVA] advisor put into perspective how unique it was to work at a new directorate at NSF, which doesn't come along that often. My summer internship taught me that you don’t have to choose between academia and industry. There's also a 3rd option. You could work in government, as well. You can contribute to designing policy and translating research that's being done in labs into real world products. That realization was one of the motivating reasons for why I entered a PhD program.
I left DC more optimistic. I saw all these really passionate people working behind the scenes within these programs to create meaningful change, targeting areas that maybe have not seen the full effects of the tech boom and had been neglected. It’s really cool to be able to share a positive and optimistic view of government.
Suleima: You have a sense of pride that you got to actually see the impact. Internships are only a couple of months. It's rare to see something from the beginning to an end product. It was really great to see the impact of the concept outlines and how people used the tool. I am not sure if I would be in my current role [working in local government] if not for this internship.
Conclusion
Reimagining the Economy Practitioner in Residence
Former Program Director, NSF TIP Directorate
There was a lot of public and private skepticism that we needed to overcome at every stage in the NSF Engines and CHIPS Act journey. Questions ranging from whether we were the right agency to manage the program to whether we were deploying too much money (or not enough!). It was impressive that we were able to weather the many storms and successfully launch this program. It was a period of uncertainty and turbulence but also a moment of great optimism about what the government could do. It took courage from a bipartisan group of members of Congress and Senators who set aside their political differences to pass an incredibly important piece of legislation that will reverberate for decades to come. But there was also a small army of public servants who dreamed up these programs and fought day and night to bring them to life. To them, I say do not lose faith. The government can (and will) still achieve ambitious goals.
There were many more people who helped design the NSF Engines program but many are still working within the government and cannot speak openly about the program. They should not be overlooked or forgotten in this story. I want to thank the 10+ people who participated in interviews for this piece and the fantastic team at the Harvard Kennedy School who helped bring this story to life.
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