No one has to ask why the Biden-Harris administration is taking certain foreign policy steps before Trump takes office. But why this obsession with spending all the CHIPS Act money before Trump takes office?

Why rush to spend all the money?

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is on an urgent mission: get as much high-tech spending out the door before Donald Trump takes office.

The Biden administration is aiming to commit nearly every unspent dollar in its $50 billion microchip-subsidy program before President-elect Donald Trump takes over in January, an effort that would effectively cement a massive industrial legacy before the GOP can reverse course.

“I’d like to have really almost all of the money obligated by the time we leave,” Raimondo said in an interview with POLITICO. “That’s the goal, and I certainly want to have all the major announcements done as it relates to the big, leading-edge companies.”

Trump has criticized the CHIPS Act as a “bad deal”, and urged using tariffs to achieve the same results.

“We put up billions of dollars for rich companies to come in and borrow the money and build chip companies here, and they’re not going to give us the good companies anyway,” Trump said on the podcast.

“When I see us paying a lot of money to have people build chips, that’s not the way,” Trump said. “You didn’t have to put up 10 cents, you could have done it with a series of tariffs. In other words, you tariff it so high that they will come and build their chip companies for nothing.”

I’m skeptical of the CHIPS Act, but how much of this is really about a likely doomed plan to bring chips manufacturing to America?

Is Gina Raimondo really rushing to ‘lock in’ some sort of legacy or is this about the usual D.C. corruption?

To hit her target, Raimondo still needs to nail down contracts with Intel, Micron, Samsung and SK hynix — multibillion-dollar deals that have, at times, been rocky and required renegotiations.

Raimondo said she recently directed staff to work through the weekend — and even made personal calls to tech CEOs — to speed the talks along.

You would think that if what Raimondo is saying is true, they’d be eager to get a deal done before Trump comes in so something doesn’t square here.

Raimondo rushed to lock in a deal with TSMC, the Taiwanese giant, while Intel still isn’t on board.

Trump complained about foreign companies. Intel and Micron are the two American companies on the list. Samsung and hynix are Korean. Intel has been lobbying Raimondo to promote US companies over TSMC.

Is this really about protecting the CHIPS Act or protecting a deal with foreign companies?