The White House Launched a Politically Potent High-Tech Program This Year. There’s a Reason You Haven’t Heard of It.

A Biden administration program aimed to pour billions of dollars into technologies of the future in the U.S. heartland. Instead, it’s been starved by Congress and potentially destined to stay that way.

When Congress created the Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs program two years ago — part of a massive plan signed by President Joe Biden to bring tech manufacturing dominance back to American shores — the idea had support from both parties, and came with potential political payoff in both red states and blue.

The idea was to seed new innovation centers in at least 20 regions across the nation. Part of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, the program called for spending $10 billion over half a decade to turn those regions into globally recognized centers for technologies like quantum, biotech and lithium batteries.

Since then, Congress’ spending chiefs have provided less than a fifth of the planned funding for Tech Hubs, and the Commerce Department has given major grants to only 12 locations. At times, the future of the program has seemed so unclear that some regional winners found themselves checking with Washington to be sure the money would actually come through before a new administration is sworn in.

“Knock on wood they get it done before the election,” said Zachary Yerushalmi, a leader of the Elevate Quantum Tech Hub in Colorado and New Mexico.

The Tech Hubs program was built on a big idea with a checkered history: that a well-placed injection of federal money can drive economic recovery and innovation in key areas. Previous attempts at government-subsidized regional business clusters have had mixed results. In one Florida example, a $500 million plan to develop a biomedical hub over 15 years failed to break even and dramatically missed job creation targets.

For that reason, Tech Hubs was built around larger, more ambitious projects. Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro who co-wrote research that inspired Tech Hubs, said the program was born from “an impatience with small ball,” and a dream of “making some really big investments and see what happens.”

It never got the promised amount of money, and turned into something of a small-ball program after all. But with a well-placed scattering of federal cash across the U.S., the Tech Hubs program seemed designed at least for an impressive stump speech and a deep well of political support.