In his July 15, 2026 speech to the Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the same appearance where he announced his trucker plan (see Trump Proposes Stripping Commercial Licenses From Undocumented Truckers and Handing Them to Veterans Automatically), Trump claimed the CHIPS Act's standards were so high that “if you weren't transgender, as an example, ... you didn't qualify,” and that companies receiving the money would “look all over for transgender people to run the company.”
None of that is in the law. The CHIPS Act, the bipartisan semiconductor law Joe Biden signed in 2022, contains no such requirement, and the word “transgender” does not appear in it. Asked by Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik to identify what Trump meant, White House spokesman Kush Desai pointed to “non-statutory policies” of the Biden administration on construction jobs for women, day care at construction sites and renewable energy; none involved transgender people, and the White House declined to provide examples. The administration's own conduct also cuts against the premise: Hiltzik noted it has announced more than $5 billion in CHIPS grants, including a $225 million grant to Bosch two days before the speech.
Hiltzik called the remark part of Trump's long campaign against transgender rights.
Correction (October 2, 2026): This entry quoted Trump as saying the act required companies to “hire transgender people to run the company”; his words, as transcribed by The Advocate and the Los Angeles Times, were that companies would “look all over for transgender people to run the company.” It also described the audience as military; the summit drew more than 1,300 attendees, including hundreds of defense-industry executives. Both were corrected, and an unsourced description of the program as “popular” was removed.