Comment by Terr_
6 hours ago
> On the other hand, I wish it were a more formalized process
It must at least involve Congress!
What's happening here is crazy: It's the same as if Congress authorized $X for a city bridge and Trump comes in and holds up the funds demanding a cut/kickback of the tolls.
The Constitution does not give the Executive the power to arbitrarily modify what Congress has authorized, converting between grants versus loans versus stock-purchases versus plain extortion.
I thought this too, but after reading some of the other comments here I read some of the text of the chips act and the 2021 NDAA (mostly section 9902) and AFAICT Congress appropriated a bunch of money for financial assistance for semiconductor companies and gave the Dept of Commerce the authority to determine the funding type.
That they were grants instead of any other instrument appears to be a Biden Commerce decision, not a congressional one.