Stories highlighting civil servants who have made significant contributions to our country.
Over the last few years, several pieces of major legislation—such as the American Rescue Plan Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act), and the CHIPS and Science Act—have made historic amounts of federal funds available for investments in communities across the country.
Governments at all levels, from small municipal governments to large federal agencies, have a role to play in ensuring that funding from these investments reaches individuals and communities in a timely and equitable manner. Many government organizations have adopted creative strategies to implement these major federal investments—building on existing frameworks or creating new tools or processes to ensure that programs and funding created by these bills achieve the intended public benefit.
These case studies describe examples of how federal, state and local government agencies are approaching implementation of these major federal investments, with a focus on ensuring the funding is distributed equitably. The examples in these case studies offer promising practices that government leaders—no matter their level—can adopt or use as inspiration for contributing to the equitable implementation of recent major federal investments.
The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act contains programs that aim to strengthen manufacturing and supply chains of technologies such as semiconductors, as well as programs to invest in research and development related to emerging technologies. The law includes incentives for private industry investment, as well as grant programs for communities.
The Economic Development Administration’s Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs (Tech Hubs) program, a program funded under the CHIPS and Science Act, announced the first round of designees under the program in October 2023. Tech Hub designees will need to be intentional about incorporating equity as they prepare their applications for funding from the next phase of the program. Many state, local and tribal governments that are part of designated Tech Hub consortia are already doing so:
The Tech Hub in Tulsa, Oklahoma is approaching equity by understanding the history of the region and emphasizing how current economic efforts can build on historical successes and help redress historical inequalities. For example, one of the Tulsa consortium’s members is an organization focused on creating opportunities for Black communities to participate in innovative industries, building on Tulsa’s history as a center of economic opportunity for the community while recognizing that those opportunities have also often been limited.
The Headwaters Hub in Montana is centering its equity efforts on ensuring that tribal and rural communities can participate in the economic benefits of innovative technologies. To do so, the hub plans to build on the existing efforts of organizations, such as the Salish Kootenai tribal college and the State Tribal Economic Development Commission, that already work in these communities. Connecting these organizations through the Tech Hub will ensure their existing efforts are aligned and enable expansion that each organization might not have been able to achieve independently.
The Wisconsin Tech Hub, which is centered on personalized medicine technology, is prioritizing equity at two levels: in the economic benefits of the tech hub designation, and in the potential medical benefits of its work. For example, the consortium plans to focus on creating job training and entrepreneurship opportunities in underserved communities to advance economic equity, and plans to establish a patient advisory group to ensure that the needs of patients, particularly those from underserved populations, are reflected in research and product development.
Programs such as the Tech Hubs explicitly require collaboration between many different types of stakeholders. Todd Fisher, chief investment officer for the CHIPS Program Office at the Department of Commerce, highlighted intentional collaboration between the many different types of entities involved—including governments, and private sector, nonprofit and educational organizations—as key for implementing CHIPS Act programs. State and local governments should “make sure everybody’s talking to each other … that proactive outreach and those efforts to really bring parties to the table and knock down barriers,” Fisher said.
