> I support the CHIPS Act and IRA

So do I. As I understand it, those bills involved incentives that any company could access provided that they met the conditions (manufacture in US, etc). The IRA also provided direct incentives to consumers to spend their money as they saw fit (EVs, solar, heat pumps, etc).

Direct investment by the executive branch is something else entirely. For example, Intel is now blessed and too big to fail. Why would anyone start a competitor to it? If you did start a competitor, your first call would be to Commerce, right? Seems like a heaping dose of moral hazard.

I can understand direct investment in very narrow circumstances, such as rare earth minerals and possibly something like nuclear power generation.

An alternative is a truly-independent sovereign wealth fund, or independently-governed pension investment arm such as the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. But I doubt, in light of the Humphrey's Executor decision, that it's possible for the United States to create such an entity now.