Earlier this month, US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick told the hosts of the All-In podcast that the contract signed by TSMC with the Biden Administration to secure CHIPS Act funding had “20 pages of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) stuff,” requiring the company to “hire a blind contractor… [or] have… trans lesbian engineers.”

“I’m not kidding, by the way,” the man responsible for promoting American businesses and industries reassured listeners.

While I have not been privy to the final contracts signed by the likes of TSMC, Samsung, Intel, GlobalFoundries, and Micron, having reported extensively on the legislation in previous years, I don’t recall the US government stipulating that it would withhold funds if companies failed to hire workers with specific gender identities or sexual orientations.

That’s not to say, however, that the agreements didn’t come with workforce-related clauses. Most, if not all, of the deals signed by companies required them to hire union workers for construction projects, work with local education institutions to help implement and support training programs, and invest in childcare provisions for employees – although I’m not sure any of the aforementioned daycare centers had to be housed “in the middle of your cleanroom fab,” as Lutnick further claimed.

(Although that last one might be a fun experiment for White House frenemy Elon Musk, who, along with having at least 14 children, made a bet earlier this month that Tesla would build a 2nm chip fab with a clean room that he can “eat a cheese burger and smoke a cigar” in.)

Whatever the “DEI stuff” is that TSMC did agree to, Lutnick says the company is currently in violation of those commitments, and as a result, the chipmaker is facing financial penalties.

However, instead of asking why the company has been unable to meet its previously agreed upon requirements, the Trump administration has decided to waive the fines in exchange for the Taiwanese chipmaker agreeing to increase its investment in the US, paving the way for the company to presumably hire even more male lithography engineers. (“They’ve never had a female. They’re all men,” Lutnick said on the podcast.)

While TSMC has not commented either way on Lutnick’s claims, the company did announce at the start of January that it had purchased a 900-acre plot of land in Phoenix, Arizona, to further expand its planned GigaFab in the state.

The death of DEI

Research undertaken by Accenture and the Global Semiconductor Alliance found that in 2024, 51 percent of chip companies reported having less than 20 percent of their technical roles filled by women. At the same time, at the start of his second term, Trump immediately took an axe to federal government DEI programs that had been implemented under previous administrations, paving the way for many corporations across the States to rollback similar policies and initiatives.

Accenture, the very company that published the survey highlighting how few women make up the current semiconductor workforce, announced in February 2025 that it was scrapping its global diversity and inclusion goals. In the tech sector, IBM, Google, Amazon, and Meta all announced they were eliminating DEI-related initiatives.

Data published by the World Economic Forum in September 2025 found that despite the US data center industry having an anticipated market value of $135 billion this year, “a persistent skills gap” is threatening the sector, while a study from Uptime Institute stated that more than half of data center operators are struggling to attract and retain qualified staff.

When it comes to the semiconductor industry, Deloitte said that by 2030, more than a million additional skilled workers will be required in order for companies to keep up with demand. That equates to more than 100,000 employees joining the workforce every year during the second half of this decade, an ambitious figure considering that, annually, less than 100,000 students enrol in electrical engineering and computer science courses in the US.

A report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics published on January 9, 2026, showed that in December, women made up nearly all the job losses, with 91,000 women exiting the workforce, compared to the 10,000 men who joined it during the same period. For the full year 2025, men joined the US labor market at a rate that was three times greater than women.

Those figures become even more stark when analyzed by demographic, with data showing that some of the biggest workforce declines in 2025 were amongst Black women and mothers. Misty Heggeness, a professor at the University of Kansas and former principal economist at the Census Bureau, told the Washington Post last year that the share of working mothers aged 25-44 had fallen nearly every month in 2025, dropping three percentage points between January and June.

An article published by Forbes examining data from the report stated that in the US, the average national price of childcare for just one child is $13,128 a year, meaning the price to send two children to daycare is higher than the average cost of rent.

Of note, recently elected Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, ran on a platform that included rolling out universal, free, high-quality childcare for every child from six weeks to five years old. He won the election with almost 51 percent of the overall vote, a figure that rose to 55 percent among female voters.

While the Trump administration is perfectly entitled to strike trade deals however it seems fit, rewarding companies for failing to enact the very policies that would most benefit the members of society increasingly shut out of the labor market, feels incredibly counterproductive.

Meanwhile, companies that would rather shell out an extra $100 billion than invest in much-needed childcare provisions for their hard-working employees might want to take a moment to ask themselves why that is.