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A former Top Wall Street and Elon Musk Ally banker has led a purge of the US government office responsible for administering billions of dollars in semiconductor subsidies.
The Chips program office, a three-year-old agency in the heart of the United States, is trying to bring the manufacture of vital fleas to America, has become the last target of the Trump administration attack on government bureaucracy.
Last week, Michael Grimes, a former investment banker from Morgan Stanley who helped finance the acquisition of Twitter of $ 44 billion in musk, and a small entourage carried out a series of interviews with certain employees of the Chips office, according to several people familiar with the problem.
Grimes and his team told the office employees, who is within the Ministry of Commerce, that they were looking for a particular profile of the employees they were looking for to keep.
“They asked mathematical questions like:” What are the four to the fourth power? “” Said a person. Another said they had been asked questions about their “intellectual capacity”. A third described the interviews, which included senior executives, like “degrading”.
A last-minute decline on weekends by senior executives against the initial plans aimed at chopping all members of probation staff except five has led 22 years, people said.
But dozens of employees on probation contracts for one or two years were still abruptly terminated, reflecting a directive of the staff management office in January and clarified by the administration on Tuesday.
The office previously had around 150 employees. These personnel layoffs came in addition to a certain number which had already chosen to accept the deferred resignation.
The dismissed persons included the whole team of “external and government affairs”, as well as political advisers in its strategy division, said the people. On Tuesday, some staff members already wrote to the agency management asking to be restored.
A senior administration official confirmed that Grimes met the staff, but said that decisions on whom shooting had been made in collaboration with leadership in the office and that he had not acted unilaterally.
Grimes occupied a former suite of Advocate General on the fifth floor of the Ministry of Commerce, next to the Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lungick, according to a person familiar with the issue.
“Everyone is very minor about what Grimes does,” they said. “It is not a psychologically healthy place to work.”
Grimes is in the first weeks of a second career in the government after three decades with Morgan Stanley, where he was one of the company’s star bankers.
He managed stock market announcements for several technological companies, including the mandate to direct the IPO of Uber after working on the side as one of his pilots.
Several Musc allies have recently been installed in US government agencies, responsible for reducing costs and staff. Similar efforts have been underway in the USAID, the Vétéran Ministry of Affairs, the GSA and even the Ministry of Defense, with thousands of licensed civil servants and billions of dollars in contracts disturbed.
In his speech at Congress on Tuesday, Trump described the 2022 flea law, one of the flagship policies of his predecessor Joe Biden, as a “horrible thing”. He said he would give the industry “no money” and called the president of the Mike Johnson Chamber to repeal the law and redistribute what the funds remained.
The American chip manufacturer in Intel difficulties and the TSMC of Taiwan are among the largest beneficiaries of the Puaces Act and have already received financing trays for major construction projects.
They received $ 7.9 billion respectively and $ 6.6 billion, Intel receiving an additional $ 3 billion via an initiative from the Ministry of Defense. The Samsung in South Korea received $ 4.8 billion. The three companies refused to comment.
People familiar with the discussions between the team and Trump industry said they could only speculate on what the last movements could mean for the program, with it, it is therefore not clear if they should expect a complete decline in subsidies or a more measured re -evaluation of each agreement.
But they added that, at least at least, key staff were to supervise the distribution of subsidies still seemed in place.
“President Trump has received a resounding mandate by the American people to restore common sense to government and to invigorate American manufacturing with their first economic policy of prices and deregulation in America,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai, in response to a comment request.
“The historic advertising of $ 100 billion in TSMC is indicative of the real and tangible results that the Trump administration’s approach provides the American people,” he added.
Additional Demetri Sevastopulo reports, Joshua Franklin, Antoine Gara, Joe Miller and Arash Massoudi
