Tech insiders say Biden is leaving a strong foundation for high-tech industry, boosting broadband access, setting a foundation for AI regulation, and encouraging chip manufacturing. (Rebecca Noble | Getty Images)

As he’s poised to leave office in two months, President Joe Biden will leave a legacy of “proactive,” “nuanced” and “effective” tech policy strategy behind him, technologists across different sectors told States Newsroom.

Biden’s term was bookended by major issues in the tech world. When he took office in early 2021, he was faced with an economy and workforce that was struggling to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, and longstanding issues with a digital divide across the country. As he prepares to exit the White House, federal agencies are working to incorporate the principles from the 2023 AI Bill of Rights, on evolving technologies that will undoubtedly continue changing American life.

Though he was unable to get federal regulations on AI passed through Congress, Biden’s goal was to bring tech access to all Americans, while safeguarding against potential harms, the technologists said.

“I think everything that he does is foundational,” said Suriel Arellano, a longtime consultant and author on digital transformation who’s based in Los Angeles. “So it definitely sets the stage for long term innovation and regulation.”

The digital divide 

For Arellano, Biden’s attempt to bring internet access to all families stands out as a lasting piece of the president’s legacy. Broadband internet for work, healthcare and education was a part of Biden’s 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal, especially targeting people in rural areas.

Biden earmarked $65 billion toward the project, which was dolled out to states and federal departments to establish or improve the physical infrastructure to support internet access. As of September, more than 2.4 million previously unserved homes and businesses have been connected to the internet, and $50 billion has been given to grant programs that support these goals across the states.

Arellano said he thinks there’s still work to do with the physical broadband infrastructure before that promise is realized — “I think that should have come first,” he said.

“But I think as a legacy, I think breaching the digital divide is actually one of the strong — maybe not the strongest, but I would say it’s definitely a strong legacy that he leaves,” Arellano said.

Shaping the U.S. conversation about AI

During Biden’s presidency, practical and responsible application of artificial intelligence became a major part of the tech conversation. The 2023 AI Bill of Rights created the White House AI Council, the creation of a framework for federal agencies to follow relating to privacy protection and a list of guidelines for securing AI workers, for navigating the effects on the labor market and for ensuring equity in AI use, among others.

The guidelines put forth by the administration are subtle, and “not likely to be felt by the average consumer,” said Austin-based Alex Shahrestani, an attorney and managing partner at Promise Legal, which specializes in tech and regulatory policy.

“It was something that’s very light touch and essentially sets up the groundwork to introduce a regulatory framework for AI providers without it being something that they’re really going to push back on,” Shahrestani said.

In recent months, some federal agencies have released their guidelines called for by the AI Bill of Rights, including the Department of Labor, and The Office of Management and Budget, which outlines how the government will go about “responsible acquisition” of AI. It may not seem like these guidelines would affect the average consumer, Shahrestani said, but government contractors are likely to be larger companies that already have a significant commercial footprint.

“It sets up these companies to then follow these procedures in other contexts, so whether that’s B2B or direct-to-consumer applications, that’s like more of a trickle down sort of approach,” he said.

Sheena Franklin, D.C.-based founder of K’ept Health and previously a lobbyist, said Biden emphasized the ethical use and development of AI, and set a tone of fostering public trust and preventing harm with the AI Bill of Rights.

Franklin and Shahrestani agreed it’s possible that President-elect Donald Trump could repeal some of Biden’s executive orders on AI, but they see the Bill of Rights as a fairly light approach to regulating it.

“It was a really nuanced and effective approach,” Shahrestani said. “There’s some inertia building, right? Like a snowball rolling down the hill. We’re early days for the snowball, but it just got started and it will only grow to be a bigger one.”

The CHIPS act

Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which aimed to strengthen domestic semiconductor manufacturing, supply chains and the innovation economy with a $53 billion investment, is a major piece of his legacy, Franklin said. The bill centered on worker and community investments, and prioritized small businesses and underrepresented communities, with a goal of economic growth in the U.S., and especially in communities that needed support.

Two years after the bill was signed, the federal government, in partnership with American companies, has provided funding for semiconductor manufacturing projects that created more than 100,000 jobs and workforce development programs. The U.S. is on track to produce 30% of the world’s semiconductor chips in 2032, up from 10% today.

“He was really trying to position the U.S. as a global leader when it came to technology, because that industry is going to continue to grow,” Franklin said.

It’s hard to quantify what the lasting impact of the CHIPS act will be, but one immediate factor is computing, Shahrestani said. The AI models being developed right now have infinite abilities, he said, but the computing power had previously held the industry back.

“Being able to provide more compute through better chips, and more sophisticated hardware is going to be a big part of what provides, and what is behind the best AI technologies,” Shahrestani said.

Accountability for Big Tech

Many in the Big Tech community see Biden’s AI Bill of Rights, and its data privacy inclusions, as well as the Justice Department’s monopoly lawsuits against tech giants like Apple and Google, as hampering innovation.

Arellano is optimistic about the technological advances and innovation that the U.S. may see under a less regulation-focused Trump presidency, but he cautions that some regulations may be needed for privacy protections.

“My concern is always on the public side, you know, putting the dog on a leash, and making sure that our regulations are there in place to protect the people,” he said.

Franklin predicts that if Biden attempts any last-minute tech policy before he leaves office, it will probably be to pursue further antitrust cases. It would align with his goal of fostering competition between startups and small businesses and reinforce his legacy of safeguarding consumer interests, she said.

When she considered how to describe Biden’s tech legacy, Franklin said she nearly used the word “strength,” though she said he ultimately could have done a little bit more for tech regulation. But she landed on two words: “thoughtful and proactive.”

“Meaning, he’s thinking about everybody’s concerns,” Franklin said. “Not just thinking about the Big Tech and not just thinking about the consumers, right? Like there has to be a balance there.”

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Employees work at a Rivian electric vehicle factory in Normal, Ill., in 2021. A historic recovery in manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023 was concentrated in small urban areas such as McLean County, where Normal is located, and where car and candy factories have added jobs. (Courtesy of Rivian)

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, McLean County, Illinois, was known mostly as the home of State Farm Insurance in Bloomington and Illinois State University in Normal.

Now, the area illustrates a trend that’s bringing more factories to small cities with lower costs of living: It has thousands of new jobs manufacturing Rivian electric vehicles and a new candy factory that will produce Kinder Bueno and other Ferrero candies.

“Food and electric cars. This is not something we were known for before 2019,” said Patrick Hoban, president of Bloomington-Normal Economic Development Council in McLean County.

“We’re primarily an insurance and university town that’s just now seeing a rise in manufacturing. Rivian has ramped up from 300 to 8,000 employees, and I don’t think anyone realized how fast that was going to happen,” Hoban said.

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to rebuild American manufacturing, and he won handily in most areas hollowed out by the movement of factory jobs overseas. But the rebound Trump promises has already been underway in many places: McLean County is part of an unusually strong jump in manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023 — the first time manufacturing employment has recovered fully from a recession since the 1970s, according to a recent report from the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan public policy organization in Washington, D.C.

There were about 12.9 million manufacturing jobs in 2023, slightly more than in 2019. However, the number of manufacturing jobs has declined precipitously since the all-time peak in 1979, when there were 19.4 million of them and they were a much larger share of overall employment.

Joseph McCartin, a Georgetown University professor and labor history expert, said manufacturing has been on an upswing since 2010 as the nation started recovering from the Great Recession. The pandemic interrupted the trajectory, but the United States recently saw a hopeful increase in pay for the new jobs, he said, as the Biden administration aimed to increase both wages and jobs through the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

“The Biden administration tried to use policy to ensure that more of these would be union jobs or at least offer union-level wages,” McCartin said. “This approach is almost certainly dead due to the results of the election.”

Employers may have a hard time filling lower-paying manufacturing jobs such as meat processing if the new Trump administration deports the immigrants who fill them, said William Jones, a University of Minnesota history professor and former president of the Labor and Working Class History Association.

“These will be hard hit if Trump follows up on his deportation plan,” Jones said. “The political rhetoric is that a bunch of native-born workers will move into these jobs, that they’re getting squeezed out, but that’s actually not the case. Some of these industries are extremely dependent on immigrant labor.”

Where growth happened

Small urban areas such as McLean County got most of the increase in manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023, according to the Economic Innovation Group report. Rural areas lost those jobs, and large cities saw no change.

It was mostly Sun Belt and Western states that saw the increases during those years, according to a Stateline analysis of federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The largest percentage changes in manufacturing jobs were in Nevada (up 14%), Utah (up 11%), and Arizona and Florida (each up 9%). The largest raw numbers of new manufacturing jobs were in Texas (up 48,200), Florida (up 35,100) and Georgia (up 22,900).

Southern states such as Alabama and Mississippi also have seen more automotive jobs as manufacturers have taken advantage of lower costs and state “right-to-work” laws that weaken unions. Vehicle manufacturing jumped by 7,800 in Alabama and 6,600 in Mississippi, the largest increases outside California.

Meanwhile, traditional Rust Belt states have seen continued declines, with manufacturing jobs down about 2% in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and also in Illinois — despite McLean County’s success.

Manufacturing is playing a critical role in Nevada as it tries to diversify its tourist-oriented economy so it can better weather downturns such as the one during the pandemic, said Steve Scheetz, research manager for the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development.

Automotive and other battery manufacturing and recycling, driven by electric carmaker Tesla and battery recycling firm Redwood Materials, account for much of the increase in Nevada manufacturing, Scheetz said.

As in Illinois, the job growth tended to be in smaller areas outside big cities, such as Storey County, just east of Reno, with a population of about 4,200.

“Fifteen years ago, this small county in rural Nevada was relatively unknown,” Scheetz said, adding that jobs and economic output has risen tenfold and the number of total jobs — including manufacturing — has grown from less than 4,000 to almost 16,000 in those 15 years. The county also is home to plants making building materials, industrial minerals and molded rubber, among other products.

The Biden administration focused on bringing more blue-collar jobs to small cities like Normal and Bloomington, said Jones, the University of Minnesota professor.

“Much of the growth is due to [President Joe] Biden’s manufacturing investments. There was a conscious strategy to focus on small towns to get the political benefit in places that tended to vote Republican,” said Jones.

If there was a play for political benefit, it got mixed results: Vice President Kamala Harris carried McLean County, Illinois, on Nov. 5, but she lost Storey County, Nevada, by the largest margin for a Democrat in 40 years.

Blue-collar wages

The decline of unions and the availability of cheaper labor overseas have dampened U.S. factory job wages in recent decades. Even so, manufacturing jobs remain an attractive path for blue-collar workers.

Manufacturing pay still ranks fairly high among the blue-collar fields at an average $34.42 per hour as of October — less than wages in energy ($39.98) or construction ($38.72), but considerably more than hospitality ($22.23) or retail ($24.76). That also was the case in 2019, and it has led many state and cities to seek more factory positions to balance out the lower-paying service jobs that have blossomed as manufacturing has waned.

But in the past year, state Republican leaders have pushed back on a burgeoning Southern labor movement that aims to bring higher wages and better benefits to blue-collar workers.

In Alabama, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed a new law in May that would claw back state incentives from companies that voluntarily recognize labor unions. GOP leaders in Georgia and Tennessee also passed laws pushing against a reinvigorated labor movement, viewing unions as a threat to the states’ manufacturing economies.

Much of the increase in Alabama manufacturing jobs has been in the northern part of the state, near Tennessee and Georgia. Since the pandemic began, Mazda Toyota Manufacturing came on line with the goal of hiring 4,000 vehicle production workers and another 2,000 in nearby parts factories as other manufacturers also boosted hiring. Private investment in Alabama automotive manufacturing totaled $7 billion over the same time frame, Stefania Jones, a spokesperson for state Commerce Secretary Ellen McNair, said in a statement to Stateline.

Supply-chain problems during the pandemic illustrated the advantages of American-made goods, said McCartin, the Georgetown University professor. However, without union support, today’s factory workers are unlikely to achieve the middle-class lifestyle enjoyed by earlier generations, he said.

“The growth of manufacturing itself is unlikely to become a panacea for what ails working-class America,” McCartin said.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.

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The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Jennifer Shutt | States Newsroom)

In Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District, a Democratic political veteran is trying to accomplish what a string of newcomers have failed at for three decades: to unseat the Republican incumbent.

Republican U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, a former corporate lawyer from Janesville, has held the seat in the U.S. House of Representatives for three terms, following in the footsteps of his one-time boss, former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Steil’s challenger, Peter Barca, a former Democratic Assembly leader from Kenosha, is seeking to return to the House in the seat he held for one term. With two stints in the Wisconsin Assembly under his belt — first in the 1980s and early ‘90s, then again from 2008 to 2019 — Barca also served as secretary for the Wisconsin Department of Revenue from 2019 until earlier this year.

In the Assembly, Barca led the Democratic caucus, but he’s also billed himself as a pragmatist open to bipartisan cooperation, both as a lawmaker and as Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ revenue secretary.

“In my career, I’ve always worked across the aisle, even when I didn’t need to,” Barca said in an interview. “Even when I left the governor’s cabinet, there was an article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that quoted prominent Republicans saying, ‘Barca gets it. He knows how to work across the aisle.’”

Barca said that in conversations, voters across the district have told him “they’re very disappointed with their government. They feel like [lawmakers are] not accomplishing anything.”

The Wisconsin Examiner reached out to Steil’s campaign seeking an interview with the GOP incumbent and was referred to the communications director. Three requests via email received no response.

In a newspaper column published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Steil emphasized higher prices for groceries, gas and housing. He also called for cuts in federal spending, in federal regulation and in “wasteful government programs.”

In addition, Steil in his column called the U.S. southern border “unsecure” and that an increased flow of migrants has “allowed dangerous individuals to enter our country illegally.”

“Right now, our country is headed in the wrong direction,” the three-term congressman wrote. “I’m committed to getting us back on track.”

Republicans have had a lock on the 1st District for 30 years — ever since Barca,  after serving in the House for one term, narrowly lost to a Republican in 1994. In 1998, Republican Paul Ryan of Janesville won the seat and easily held it after the district lines were redrawn twice in the GOP’s favor following the census in 2000 and 2010.

Ryan, who rose to become U.S. House Speaker, chose not to run again after 20 years. Steil, a corporate attorney who had worked for Ryan from 2003 to 2004 before law school, won the 2018 Republican nomination to succeed his former employer and was elected to the seat that November. He has been reelected twice since then.

The 1st District, meanwhile, was redrawn again before the 2022 election to include the industrial city of Beloit, making it more competitive, according to political analysts. Nevertheless, Steil won by 11 points after spending $2.4 million while Democratic challenger Ann Roe raised and spent about one-third of that amount.

At the start of 2024, two political newcomers were in the running for the Democratic nomination to challenge Steil. Then the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee put the 1st District on its target list and recruited Barca to run. After Barca entered the race in April with an immediate list of high-profile endorsements, the other hopefuls dropped out.

Even with more money to spend than the previous Democratic candidate, Barca heads into Election Day out-funded. As of Oct. 16, according to Federal Election Commission records, Steil has raised $5.3 million and spent $4.5 million. In the same period, Barca raised just under $2 million, spending $1.85 million.

High prices and the economy

Both campaigns center economic issues, but from contrasting vantage points.

In the first two years of the Biden administration Democrats enacted four major pieces of legislation. Two passed with only Democratic votes: the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), enacted in Biden’s first 100 days, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The other two, the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, passed with some Republican support.

Steil voted against all four measures. In his Journal Sentinel column he didn’t name any of the bills but alluded generally to them, blaming the Biden administration for the inflation spike that started in 2021 and continued into 2022.

“Costs are too high,” Steil wrote. “When I’m out talking to workers, families, and seniors across Wisconsin they are struggling with higher costs due to inflation. Whether it’s prices at the grocery store, the gas station, or the cost of housing.”

Accusing the Biden administration of “reckless spending and a regulatory agenda that dramatically increased costs,” Steil asserted, “By cutting red tape, restoring energy independence, and ending wasteful government programs, we can make prices affordable for everyone.”

Mainstream economists have disputed the argument that places all the blame for the inflation spike on federal spending.

Menzie Chinn, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview that COVID-19 pandemic relief checks — issued in the last year of the Trump administration as well as after the passage of ARPA under Biden — could be responsible for about a third of the 2021 price spike.

Chinn said worldwide supply chain clogs are as much to blame for driving up prices as the federal spending infusion, however.

In late 2021 and early 2022, he said, ships were backed up at ports, businesses such as restaurants were “having a hard time getting people to come back” because of fears of catching COVID-19, and oil prices were pushed up as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“Inflation jumped way up to 9% by mid-2022,” Chinn said. “But then you look at it after that, it came down very quickly without lots of unemployment and without lots of cuts in government spending, even before the Fed started raising interest rates.”

Inflation is now back down below 3%. And while the pandemic relief funds may have contributed to the short-term inflation spike, the money they brought to households “were necessary to support the economy,” Chinn said. “And the fact that they were more generous is probably the reason that we’re [now] growing faster than Western Europe on the average.”

Attacking ‘no’ votes

Barca and Democrats are highlighting Steil’s votes against the four bills.

The infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act both included provisions aimed at boosting clean energy to help curb climate change.

At a September news conference in Racine, Mayor Cory Mason praised both bills for funding investments that enabled the city to increase its clean energy and address climate change at the local level. A reporter asked Mason, who has endorsed Barca, about Steil’s votes against the legislation.

“Having federal partners that believe investing in communities like Racine is really critically important,” said Mason. “I think it’s unfortunate that he didn’t take the opportunity to make those investments.”

Barca said that while campaigning, he has heard “a lot about middle class [people not] being able to afford things.” He criticized Steil’s vote against the Inflation Reduction Act in that light, particularly because of provisions in the law that lower Medicare drug costs.

The Inflation Reduction Act instituted a $35-a-month cap on the cost of insulin for Medicare patients. It also capped their out-of-pocket drug costs at $2,000 a year starting in 2025. And for the first time it empowered Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies on the prices of prescription drugs.

Pointing out Steil’s vote against the bill, Barca said, “If I’m in the Congress, I’ll help work to negotiate prescription drug costs for everybody, not just for Medicare.”

In his Journal Sentinel column Steil didn’t address the law directly, but wrote that he favors “more price transparency” by drug companies, including proposed legislation that would require TV drug ads to list the prices of the drugs they’re advertising.

Steil also mentioned his support of a bill nicknamed the SPIKE Act that would require drug companies “to publicly disclose why they jacked up prices.”

That legislation was introduced by Democrats in 2019 and again in 2021, but did not pass, and has not advanced in the current Congressional term.

Federal taxes

Steil was elected after the passage of a signature piece of legislation during Donald Trump’s presidential term: the 2017 tax cut.

The bill permanently cut the corporate income tax rate to 21% from 35%. It also included temporary measures — marginal tax rate cuts across the board, doubling the federal child tax credit and nearly doubling the standard deduction — which will expire Dec. 31, 2025.

Whether to extend or rewrite the 2017 law is expected to be a top issue for Congress in the coming year.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the legislation’s corporate tax rate cut only benefited the highest-paid 10% of employees. The nonprofit center also found that the overall law “was skewed to the rich,” giving the top 1% of households by income an average tax cut of more than $60,000 in 2025 and the bottom 60% of households an average tax cut of less than $500.

Steil has said he would support an extension and has cosponsored U.S. House legislation to make its cuts permanent.

“He’s voted to go along with the old system of giving all the tax breaks to the top 1%,” Barca said. “I would work to give middle-class tax relief.”

As an example, he cited a provision included in the ARPA pandemic relief bill that temporarily expanded the federal child tax credit. Attempts to revive the expanded credit after it expired at the end of 2021 foundered.

Barca has also cited his experience in the Small Business Administration, where he was a regional administrator in the 1990s after leaving Congress, as an additional qualification, along with his success in passing economic development legislation in Wisconsin. “Small businesses need help. They need technical help. They need access to capital,” he said. “Those are things I know a lot about.”

Reproductive rights and immigration

As in many state and national races this year, Barca and the Democrats are also leaning into reproductive rights.

When the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade decision that established a federal right to abortion, Steil praised the ruling on social media, declaring himself “proudly pro-life” on Twitter (now renamed X).

Steil was among a group of Republican members of Congress who signed an amicus brief urging the Court to overturn Roe.

“Today’s decision will bring this important issue back to the states. This is a great victory for life,” Steil tweeted.

Steil has said he favors permitting abortion in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother, according to Wisconsin Public Radio.

Interviewed on WISN-TV, Steil dismissed the prospect of a national abortion ban. “Speaker [Michael] Johnson has made clear that a national abortion ban is not going to move forward in the House,” he told the television station. “And I would not support such a move in the House, either.”

Nevertheless, Democrats and reproductive rights advocacy groups have charged that, if Republicans win the White House and both houses of Congress, a national abortion ban would be on the agenda. They’ve also pointed to anti-abortion advocates who oppose making exceptions for rape or incest.

Barca has also cited Steil’s endorsement of House legislation declaring that a fetus is a “person” under the U.S. Constitution. Advocates for in-vitro fertilization (IVF) have said the law, if enacted, would threaten the technology that many couples have used to enable them to conceive children.

Steil has said he does not oppose IVF. Barca, however, said that the congressman has not signed on to legislation that would explicitly guarantee the legality of the procedure.

Steil’s campaign, and his priorities in the House in the last year, have also highlighted immigration. He has spearheaded legislation banning noncitizens from voting in all elections — they’re already excluded from voting in federal elections — and joined other Republican candidates in decrying the surge in migrants at the Southern border.

In November 2023, Steil and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson held a news conference in Whitewater to call attention to an influx of migrants that had led to strained resources in the community and blame the Biden administration’s management of the border.

Local officials and residents, however, said that event as well as publicity in right-wing media falsely connected the community’s immigrant population, which had been growing for years, to the short-term surge at the border. The city’s police chief also debunked claims of an immigrant-driven crime wave.

Barca has criticized Steil for joining other Republicans in Congress who disavowed a border security bill that the White House negotiated with a group of conservative GOP senators.

Congressional Republicans abandoned the deal at the urging of former President Donald Trump, who has built most of his campaign to return to office around attacking immigration.

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Mike Hoge, senior vice president for global operations at Accuray, takes Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), center, and Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. CEO Missy Hughes, right, on a tour of the company in August. Accuray, part of the Wisconsin biohealth tech hub, makes radiation treatment equipment. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)

When Wisconsin got picked for its proposal to develop a technology hub and a $49 million federal investment, the state had a few things going for it.

One was that the Badger State already had an established and growing technology sector that it proposed to develop further. Another was that it wasn’t already the center of attention — or largesse — for its work.

For Wisconsin, the established area was biohealth and personalized medicine: crafting new diagnostic and treatment technologies that fit with a patient’s distinctive genetic characteristics.

The state’s biohealth sector is Wisconsin’s beneficiary of the federal technology hub program, a national industrial policy aimed at building up important sectors in the U.S. economy.

“We weren’t looking to build a tech ecosystem from scratch,” said Cristina Killingsworth of the Economic Development Administration in the U.S. Department of Commerce, in an interview Monday. “We wanted regions from the country to identify areas where they already were excellent, where targeted federal investment could make them world-class.”

Wisconsin fit the bill with “an incredibly robust ecosystem in the biotech space already,” said Killingsworth. “We would just be accelerating that rather than building it.”

At the same time, the state wasn’t already in the national spotlight for its work.

The point of the tech hub program “is really about making sure we maintain our technological edge, with the idea that we can’t do so if we’re only investing in the same handful of cities over and over again,” Killingsworth said. “This program is about investing in all parts of the United States, because we can’t be competitive unless we take advantage of everything that this country has to offer.”

The technology hub program is part of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act. The wide-ranging bipartisan legislation, passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden, was enacted to bring computer chip manufacturers and related technology industries back to the U.S. from overseas.

The technology hub program made it into the legislation at the encouragement of Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.). It drew on a 2019 Brookings Institution paper that called for fostering “innovation hubs” around the country based on local industrial strengths.

Killingsworth, the acting assistant secretary of commerce for economic development, was in Wisconsin this week as the keynote speaker for an annual conference put on by BioForward Wisconsin, a nonprofit umbrella group for the state’s biohealth industry.  

BioForward CEO Lisa Johnson said the annual conference was larger this year.

“It is really to put Wisconsin on the map and to prove we can protect and be supportive of national and economic security and make the United States more competitive in the future,” Johnson said.

Another qualifying feature of Wisconsin’s tech hub proposal was its case for serving the broader community.

Proposals were required to demonstrate that a tech hub’s benefits would “accrue equitably” Killingsworth told the Wisconsin Examiner, “with a particular focus on ensuring that underserved communities could benefit from the tech hub and have a voice in the governance of the tech hub.”

The Universities of Wisconsin system, the UW-Madison and the Medical College of Wisconsin, as well as the state technical college system, are all integral to the Wisconsin project, as research partners but particularly as part of developing the workforce that participating industries require.

Government and economic development agencies are all key components along with private industry, Killingsworth said, because the ultimate goal is for the tech hub to produce a marketable product or service.

“This program is also about commercialization,” she said. “It’s not an R&D [research and development] program, it really is about how can we make sure that the businesses that are advancing technologies of the  future grow and remain here in the United States.”

And while private industry is essential, government has a role to play as well.

One way that the Wisconsin tech hub is designed to benefit the broader community is through its planned development of a Wisconsin health database. That will include “getting the data from populations that we may not have gathered through other means,” said Wendy Harris of the Wisconsin Biohealth Tech Hub, where she holds the title of regional innovation officer.

There is also a screening program that will focus on areas of “social and economic deprivation” including tribal communities and residents of impoverished zip codes, “which may not happen without some type of federal funding,” Harris said.

“There are certain market gaps, market failures, that it sometimes is incumbent upon outside entities to step in and fill,” Killingsworth said. Government support can help smaller suppliers and manufacturers gain entry “that might otherwise not have access to testing, to lab equipment.”

The result, Killingsworth said, is “more inclusive of private entities that otherwise might not even have a leg up to be able to start the companies that we need to grow and remain in the United States to be commercializing technology that’s critical for our economic and national security.”

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