Best as I can tell, the weird, broken logic is "these funds were already allocated via the chips act and another act, but we axed that, so buying the shares instead is free".

So sure, no new funds, of which "free" is a nutty, insane interpretation, but whatever.

Weird ways to convey it aside, I do like shares as a guarantee for grants, which is not a new thing, but I'd still like to enforce funds allocation for those funds. Not sure if that's happening still.