Foundation analysis · One World Development
Expanded edition · September 24, 2026
Foundation draft · Not enacted law
A proposed FY2027–2040 investment framework spanning research, domestic production, clean facilities, workforce, trusted partnerships, and 40 sector programs, with corporate conditions and public accountability.
Research, Domestic Production, and Public Accountability
Expanded federal legislative discussion draft · September 24, 2026 · 61,141 words · 20 titles · 232 sections · 40 sector programs
Foundation model docket. Identifiers and proposed referrals are internal and are not official congressional or legislative assignments.
A guide to this proposal
The act would finance research and productive capacity while requiring recipients to protect workers, communities, and public funds. Its $7 trillion initial support envelope includes $6.3 trillion in direct appropriations and $700 billion in capped refundable credits. Interest and other specified costs sit outside that envelope; the proposed revenue and economic benefits remain unscored.
Analysis is commentary. Model text is a proposal. Fiscal scenarios, where provided, are illustrative.
Foundation Analysis
The supplied September 24 expanded edition replaces the earlier 16-title package. Twenty titles assign agency responsibilities, specify 40 sector programs, and connect competitive awards to environmental, corporate, workforce, digital-rights, and enforcement duties. Nine appendices explain the draft without forming part of its proposed law.
In plain language: The act would finance research and productive capacity while requiring recipients to protect workers, communities, and public funds. Its $7 trillion initial support envelope includes $6.3 trillion in direct appropriations and $700 billion in capped refundable credits. Interest and other specified costs sit outside that envelope; the proposed revenue and economic benefits remain unscored.
The proposal follows research through shared testbeds, production, and deployment. Additionality and funding-gap reviews, staged payments, parent covenants for major recipients, independent verification, public reporting, and surviving cleanup duties make assistance conditional on identifiable public value. Coverage is tied to assisted activity; the separate corporate tax changes extend beyond recipients.
Forty programs share seven direct funding accounts rather than forty guaranteed allocations. Agency staffing, competitive selection, engineering baselines, grid and water availability, permits, skilled workers, tax administration, and long-term servicing must mature together. Fixed FY2027–2040 funding dates and environmental rulemaking lasting up to 720 days require realistic sequencing; a later enactment would require a revised transition.
Named agency powers, prospective conditions, court-imposed punitive penalties, individual criminal culpability, and judicial review address identifiable legal risks. Parent-wide financial restrictions, compelled governance terms, private remedies, tax-credit codification, intellectual-property continuity, bankruptcy, and trade obligations still require specialized review. Funding does not substitute for environmental permits, FDA authorization, or other applicable law.
The initial envelope combines $450 billion in annual direct appropriations and $50 billion in annual credit allocations for 14 years. The $3 trillion loan-principal ceiling is separate from subsidy cost. Appendix C's arithmetic reproduces approximately $6.9924 trillion in 30-year primary effects and $16.261 trillion in added debt at a constant 4% rate with no offsets. These are sensitivities, not expected net costs or a score of the proposed taxes.
the expansion makes program responsibilities, limits, due process, and continuing obligations substantially more explicit. Its public value depends on selecting additional productive investment, credible delivery capacity, and enforceable conditions that qualified firms can accept. Priorities before introduction are integrated CBO/JCT scoring, tax and conforming-Code review, sector engineering and workforce validation, agency operating plans, and instrument-specific constitutional, trade, and bankruptcy analysis.
Supplied September 24, 2026 discussion draft, reviewed September 25, 2026. Not introduced or enacted law, an official legislative-counsel product, or an official CBO/JCT score. Source checks and reproducible arithmetic do not establish legal validity, engineering feasibility, or fiscal self-financing. The supplied DOCX is preserved unchanged; the Foundation assessment is separate editorial analysis.
Policy Brief
This edition supersedes the previously published 16-title, 252-section package. Its 232 sections include five preliminary sections and 227 sections within twenty titles. The funding window is fixed at FY2027–2040. All nine nonoperative appendices are included in the same document.
$450 billion per fiscal year, FY2027–2040, across seven accounts.
Up to $50 billion annually; included within the $7 trillion initial envelope.
Sections 2001–2040; designation does not guarantee an award.
Revenue, economic feedback, financing, and credit risk need an integrated estimate.
Named agencies assess eligibility, funding gaps, private alternatives, cost sharing, and milestones. Research independence and access to public knowledge accompany support for testbeds, pilot lines, manufacturing, and operating resilience.
Facility duties address greenhouse gases, electricity, local pollution, water, hazardous substances, waste, and closure. Compliance finance and infrastructure support accompany technical rulemaking; permits and independent legal protections remain necessary.
Defined major recipients accept limits on extraction, compensation, and related-party transactions, plus worker participation and taxpayer-return terms. Workforce, regional services, and access provisions support implementation; these covenants are not an economy-wide pay cap.
Conditional trusted partnerships operate alongside security and trade obligations. Assisted digital systems, medical products, education, creative tools, procurement, and shared infrastructure carry distinct privacy, safety, access, competition, and rights protections.
Federal credit uses subsidy accounting; the refundable investment credit uses capped allocations. Inspectors General, GAO, administering agencies, Treasury, DOJ, and courts retain defined roles. Remedies distinguish repayment, punitive penalties, and crimes requiring individual proof.
Forty programs specify eligible work, responsible agencies, and performance questions. Measures address useful output, access, reliability, costs, and harms; announcements, spending, popularity, or equipment counts alone do not demonstrate public benefit.
Funding in the supplied draft
Nominal statutory amounts. The $14 billion long-tail reserve is included in the $70 billion oversight account, with $400 million available annually in FY2041–2075. Loan principal is not an additional grant appropriation. Debt interest, legally required credit reestimates, refund interest, judgments, and future appropriations are outside the initial envelope.
Research & Scrutiny
Reviewed September 25, 2026 against the supplied document and the legal, agency, and research sources below. The review checks the central legal and fiscal distinctions and independently reproduces Appendix C arithmetic. It does not supply an official score, comprehensive case-history review, or engineering certification.
Federal credit law separates initial subsidy cost, loan principal, financing-account flows, and later reestimates. It provides permanent indefinite authority for reestimates. The draft acknowledges that exposure; its $7 trillion envelope is therefore not an all-in debt or risk ceiling.
Reconstructing Appendix C's stated ramp, payment lags, reserve, and interest convention reproduces its rounded tables. At 4%, the no-offset 2056 debt illustration is $16.261 trillion; about $307.0 billion in annual net offsets from 2028–2056 would balance that illustrative window. Neither figure estimates Title XIX receipts. The DOCX refers to separate model and CSV files that were not supplied; this check uses the assumptions printed in the document. CBO's February 2026 baseline supplies context, not a score of this act.
Title XIX would change the regular corporate rate from 21% to 28%, the corporate minimum rate from 15% to 18%, and the covered repurchase rate from 1% to 4%. These changes generally begin in 2028, extend beyond recipients under their existing tax bases, and do not sunset in 2040. Their interactions and yield require tax-staff scoring. The source identifies these rates as additional drafting choices, not previously selected user instructions.
GAO's August 2026 CHIPS review reports 49 manufacturing projects, $13.1 billion disbursed from $31.5 billion in direct funding, and canceled R&D awards without a complete plan to meet statutory requirements. This evidence supports close attention to staffing, milestones, statutory continuity, and independent verification; it does not predict outcomes for this much larger proposal.
Fieldhouse and Mertens study public nondefense R&D and productivity, including a CHIPS-related research scenario. That evidence supports evaluating research spillovers, but it cannot be multiplied across forty sectors to validate this act's GDP gains or tax receipts. Additionality, displacement, local costs, and who receives benefits require separate estimation.
Loper Bright requires independent judicial interpretation of agency authority. Jarkesy addresses jury rights for the securities-fraud penalties at issue, not every administrative remedy. The draft's specified powers and court-sought punitive penalties respond to those concerns. Seven County addresses NEPA review; the draft's added funding assessment must rest on its own express authority.
WTO rules distinguish prohibited export or domestic-input contingencies from other potentially actionable subsidies. Procurement has its own origin and trade-agreement rules. CHIPS guardrails demonstrate a targeted security mechanism, not authority to extend every semiconductor restriction across forty sectors. Each assistance instrument and partnership needs review.
DOE's December 2024 data-center report offers dated load projections, not proof that a particular facility can obtain clean power. NIST's AI framework is voluntary guidance; FDA device authorization remains a separate legal process. Sector engineers and affected communities must test baselines, deadlines, utilities, safety, and lifecycle costs before major commitments.
FinCEN's August 11, 2026 announcement removes general beneficial-ownership reporting for U.S. companies and persons. Section 1506 creates a distinct assistance-specific disclosure duty with protected personal fields. Implementation cannot assume every domestic applicant already appears in a universal registry.
Full Text
Read the legislation.
Complete text of the supplied expanded DOCX, including its cover, reader's note, legislative index, proposed Act, and appendices A–I. The proposed Act consists of sections 1–5 and titles I–XX; all appendices are nonoperative. References to prior drafting conversations are part of the source document, not instructions or statements of Foundation endorsement. The download preserves the supplied file unchanged.
EXPANDED FEDERAL LEGISLATIVE PACKAGE
Research, domestic production, clean infrastructure, corporate conditions, trusted partnerships, and public accountability.
20 TITLES · 232 SECTIONS · 40 SECTOR PROGRAMS
$7 trillion initial support envelope Fiscal years 2027–2040
DISCUSSION DRAFT September 24, 2026
Includes the complete proposed Act, nine nonoperative appendices, a 33-source research register, and a reproducible thirty-year financing illustration.
Not enacted law. Not an official CBO/JCT score. No guarantee of judicial validity, implementation success, or fiscal self-financing.
This is a complete discussion draft implementing the policy architecture specified in the conversation. The operative Act begins after the full legislative index. The counsel memorandum, fiscal illustrations, research register, and other appendices are not part of the proposed law.
The draft contains forty sector programs and specifies agencies, eligibility, award terms, environmental standards, corporate covenants, workforce protections, allied cooperation, enforcement, judicial review, appropriations, tax-credit mechanics, and continuing obligations.
Important fiscal distinction. The initial $7 trillion is composed of $6.3 trillion in direct appropriations and $700 billion in maximum allocated refundable-credit face value. It is not an all-in ceiling on borrowing interest, credit reestimates, refund interest, judgments, or later appropriations.
Additional revenue assumptions. Title XIX proposes a 28 percent regular corporate income-tax rate, an 18 percent corporate alternative minimum-tax rate, and a 4 percent covered stock-repurchase excise-tax rate. These particular rates were not selected by the user. They generally take effect in 2028, extend beyond program recipients under the existing tax bases, and do not sunset in 2040. Their yield is not scored here.
Correction of earlier return claims. Prior conversational figures for added GDP and Treasury receipts were unvalidated illustrations, not expected results. This package instead provides transparent, reproducible financing scenarios and identifies the evidence needed for an official estimate.
Review boundaries. Numerical policy choices are labeled as proposals, not established engineering optima. Cross-references and arithmetic were checked during assembly, but formal legislative-counsel review, current case-history verification, official fiscal scoring, and sector engineering validation remain necessary.
Navigation. The contents entries link to the corresponding sections. The source register uses numbered references R1 through R33 and linked source titles. The separate fiscal model and CSV files reproduce the appendix calculations.
Sec. 1. Short title; arrangement.
Sec. 2. Purposes; statement of national objectives.
Sec. 3. Constitutional basis; limits on authority.
Sec. 5. Construction of duties; prospective application.
TITLE I. NATIONAL STRATEGY, ADMINISTRATION, AND PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY
Sec. 101. American Innovation Council.
Sec. 102. Lead and sector agencies.
Sec. 103. National Innovation Strategy.
Sec. 104. Evidence standards and public-benefit tests.
Sec. 105. Public advisory panels and conflicts.
Sec. 106. Implementation plans and staffing.
Sec. 107. State, Tribal, territorial, and local participation.
Sec. 108. National performance dashboard.
Sec. 109. Program evaluation and independent review.
Sec. 110. Rulemaking schedule and administrative transparency.
TITLE II. ELIGIBILITY, SELECTION, AWARD CONDITIONS, AND ANTI-EVASION
Sec. 201. Eligible applicants and basic exclusions.
Sec. 202. Single application and due-diligence record.
Sec. 203. Competitive selection and written findings.
Sec. 204. Additionality and funding-gap analysis.
Sec. 205. Cost sharing and eligible expenditure.
Sec. 206. Stage gates, milestones, and disbursement.
Sec. 207. Concentration limits and access for smaller enterprises.
Sec. 208. Binding covenants, parents, and flow-down duties.
Sec. 209. Material changes and successor obligations.
Sec. 210. Applicant explanations and award-process review.
Sec. 211. Benefit stacking, affiliates, and anti-circumvention.
TITLE III. RESEARCH, SCIENTIFIC INDEPENDENCE, AND PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE
Sec. 301. Frontier Research Program.
Sec. 302. Research infrastructure and national laboratories.
Sec. 303. Grand challenges, prizes, and milestone research.
Sec. 304. Public access to funded research.
Sec. 305. Funded inventions and background intellectual property.
Sec. 306. Domestic commercialization commitments.
Sec. 307. Continuity and emergency access licenses.
Sec. 308. Research integrity, reproducibility, and negative results.
Sec. 309. Research security without nationality-based exclusion.
Sec. 310. Public-interest research compute and data access.
TITLE IV. LAB-TO-FACTORY DEVELOPMENT AND DOMESTIC PRODUCTION
Sec. 401. Translational development program.
Sec. 402. Pilot lines, testbeds, and shared demonstration assets.
Sec. 403. Applied innovation institutes.
Sec. 404. Strategic domestic manufacturing awards.
Sec. 405. Critical inputs, tooling, and repair capacity.
Sec. 406. Domestic capacity and operating-period covenants.
Sec. 407. Offshoring, sensitive transfers, and foreign expansion.
Sec. 408. Publicly supported assets, leases, and disposition.
Sec. 409. Continuity, disaster readiness, and operating resilience.
Sec. 410. Small-manufacturer extension and practical adoption.
TITLE V. CLEAN FACILITIES, POLLUTION PREVENTION, AND COMMUNITY PROTECTION
Sec. 501. Scope, independent duties, and facility boundaries.
Sec. 502. Sector standards, methods, and technical rulemaking.
Sec. 503. Greenhouse-gas performance and verified decarbonization.
Sec. 504. Clean electricity and credible energy matching.
Sec. 505. Local air pollution, toxic emissions, and operating limits.
Sec. 506. Water budgets, discharge, and watershed safeguards.
Sec. 507. Hazardous substances, PFAS, and chemical substitution.
Sec. 508. Waste prevention, repairability, and material recovery.
Sec. 509. Monitoring, verification, auditor independence, and disclosure.
Sec. 510. Community assessment, participation, and enforceable mitigation.
Sec. 511. Financial assurance, closure, and long-tail environmental duties.
TITLE VI. CLEAN ENERGY, ENABLING INFRASTRUCTURE, AND COMPLIANCE FINANCE
Sec. 601. Clean compliance financing program.
Sec. 602. Transmission, distribution, and interconnection.
Sec. 603. Performance-based clean generation and storage.
Sec. 604. Industrial efficiency, heat, and emissions reduction.
Sec. 605. Data centers and other major new loads.
Sec. 606. Water and waste infrastructure serving innovation districts.
Sec. 607. Coordinated permitting without deemed approval.
Sec. 608. Clean industrial sites and shared infrastructure.
Sec. 609. Demonstration safeguards for emerging energy technologies.
Sec. 610. Technical extensions and emergency operating adjustments.
TITLE VII. CORPORATE CONDITIONS, FINANCIAL EXTRACTION, AND PUBLIC PARTICIPATION IN RETURNS
Sec. 701. Corporate covenant and restriction period.
Sec. 702. Stock repurchases and equivalent extraction.
Sec. 703. Dividends, distributions, and leveraged transactions.
Sec. 704. Executive compensation and severance limits.
Sec. 705. Incentive compensation recovery and indemnification.
Sec. 706. Board oversight and worker participation.
Sec. 707. Taxpayer participation in commercial upside.
Sec. 708. Related-party transactions, tax compliance, and ownership.
Sec. 709. Officer certifications and internal controls.
Sec. 710. Repayment, exit, and no automatic release.
TITLE VIII. WORKFORCE, REGIONAL CAPACITY, AND ACCESS TO OPPORTUNITY
Sec. 801. Labor standards for assisted work.
Sec. 802. Apprenticeships and technical training.
Sec. 803. Community colleges, universities, and portable skills.
Sec. 804. Regional innovation and production partnerships.
Sec. 805. Housing, transit, and local service capacity.
Sec. 806. Worker participation in project earnings.
Sec. 807. Technology adoption and worker transitions.
Sec. 808. Talent mobility and lawful international recruitment.
Sec. 809. Rural, Tribal, territorial, and disability access.
Sec. 810. Worker remedies and program coordination.
TITLE IX. TRUSTED INTERNATIONAL PARTNERSHIPS AND LAWFUL GLOBAL COMMERCE
Sec. 901. Initial core innovation partners.
Sec. 902. Partnership criteria and binding arrangements.
Sec. 903. Joint research and reciprocal co-investment.
Sec. 904. Expansion and associated cooperation.
Sec. 905. Sensitive technologies and foreign entities of concern.
Sec. 906. Suspension, revocation, and transition.
Sec. 907. Supply assurance and mutual assistance.
Sec. 908. Trade obligations and domestic-location support.
Sec. 909. Customs integrity and trusted supplier verification.
Sec. 910. International scientific, educational, and cultural exchange.
TITLE X. DIGITAL RIGHTS, CYBERSECURITY, AND RESPONSIBLE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Sec. 1001. Scope and covered digital systems.
Sec. 1002. Privacy by design and data minimization.
Sec. 1003. Sensitive data, biometrics, and children.
Sec. 1004. High-impact automated decisions.
Sec. 1005. Model evaluation and safety documentation.
Sec. 1006. Secure development, support, and software supply chains.
Sec. 1007. Incident reporting and breach response.
Sec. 1008. Interoperability, portability, and avoidance of lock-in.
Sec. 1009. Prohibited uses of assistance and protected expression.
Sec. 1010. Digital accountability, complaints, and technical assistance.
TITLE XI. SECTOR-SPECIFIC PUBLIC-INTEREST AND SAFETY REQUIREMENTS
Sec. 1101. Clinical and biomedical research safeguards.
Sec. 1102. Medical products, quality systems, and supply resilience.
Sec. 1103. Access conditions for publicly supported health technologies.
Sec. 1104. Biomanufacturing and biological risk management.
Sec. 1105. Agriculture, food systems, and farmer rights.
Sec. 1106. Creative technologies, performers, and editorial independence.
Sec. 1107. Education, accessibility, and evidence of learning.
Sec. 1108. Financial technology and digital identity.
Sec. 1109. Transport, space, maritime, and autonomous systems.
Sec. 1110. Public infrastructure and disaster technology.
TITLE XII. PROCUREMENT, COMPETITION, STANDARDS, AND PUBLIC ACCESS
Sec. 1201. Domestic, clean, and secure procurement.
Sec. 1202. Advance purchase and market commitments.
Sec. 1203. Competition review of major assistance.
Sec. 1204. Mergers, acquisitions, and concentration after award.
Sec. 1205. Shared infrastructure and nondiscriminatory access.
Sec. 1206. Measurement science and conformity assessment.
Sec. 1207. Repair, interoperability, and lifecycle purchasing.
Sec. 1208. Pricing integrity and public-purchaser protection.
Sec. 1209. Small supplier payment and fair subcontracting.
Sec. 1210. Procurement data, conflicts, and vendor exit.
TITLE XIII. FEDERAL CREDIT, FINANCIAL RISK, AND MANAGEMENT OF PUBLIC INVESTMENTS
Sec. 1301. Authority to provide direct loans and loan guarantees.
Sec. 1302. Subsidy accounting; financing accounts; reestimates.
Sec. 1303. Independent underwriting and repayment determination.
Sec. 1304. Loan terms, collateral, and disbursement controls.
Sec. 1305. Portfolio diversification and stress testing.
Sec. 1306. Loan servicing, default, and workouts.
Sec. 1307. Taxpayer participation instruments and valuation.
Sec. 1308. Fees, intermediaries, and credit access for smaller enterprises.
Sec. 1309. Independent financial reporting and asset reconciliation.
Sec. 1310. Credit program termination and continuing stewardship.
TITLE XIV. ALLOCATED REFUNDABLE CLEAN INNOVATION INVESTMENT CREDIT
Sec. 1401. Establishment of a capped refundable investment credit.
Sec. 1402. Qualified investment and qualifying property.
Sec. 1403. Allocation procedure and reservation of authority.
Sec. 1404. Qualification, environmental conditions, and domestic benefit.
Sec. 1405. Coordination, basis adjustment, and prevention of duplicate benefit.
Sec. 1406. Claims, verification, tax procedure, and refund authority.
Sec. 1407. Recapture, dispositions, and continuing compliance.
Sec. 1408. Registry, nontransferability, and taxpayer protections.
Sec. 1409. Administration, enforcement boundaries, and reports.
Sec. 1410. Effective dates, regulations, and termination of allocation authority.
TITLE XV. INTEGRITY, INDEPENDENT OVERSIGHT, RECORDS, AND PUBLIC DISCLOSURE
Sec. 1501. Innovation Integrity Coordination Office.
Sec. 1502. Inspectors General and Government Accountability Office access.
Sec. 1503. Risk-based monitoring and independent verification.
Sec. 1504. Inspections, subpoenas, and protection of legal rights.
Sec. 1505. Records, retention, preservation, and correction.
Sec. 1506. Independent beneficial-ownership and control disclosure.
Sec. 1507. Conflicts of interest and improper influence.
Sec. 1508. Public dashboard, confidential information, and disclosure appeals.
Sec. 1509. Evaluation, counterfactuals, and scientific transparency.
Sec. 1510. Integrity remediation and continuity of independent oversight.
TITLE XVI. ENFORCEMENT, REMEDIES, EXECUTIVE ACCOUNTABILITY, AND WHISTLEBLOWERS
Sec. 1601. Allocation of enforcement authority and evidentiary rules.
Sec. 1602. Notice, cure, technical assistance, and escalation.
Sec. 1603. Recovery of assistance, interest, and proportional remedies.
Sec. 1604. Civil monetary penalties and proportionality.
Sec. 1605. Emergency protection, payment holds, and prompt review.
Sec. 1606. Defined criminal offenses.
Sec. 1607. Personal responsibility of executives and organizational liability.
Sec. 1608. Suspension, debarment, and restoration of eligibility.
Sec. 1609. Whistleblower protection, remedies, and lawful awards.
Sec. 1610. Limited private enforcement and protection of court access.
Sec. 1611. Limitations, coordination, and protection against duplicative recovery.
Sec. 1612. Settlements, remediation priorities, and public accountability.
TITLE XVII. JUDICIAL REVIEW, FEDERALISM, IMPLEMENTATION, AND CONTINUING OBLIGATIONS
Sec. 1701. Judicial review of final agency action.
Sec. 1702. Procedural fairness and prohibition on coerced waivers.
Sec. 1703. Federalism, savings, and nonpreemption.
Sec. 1704. Civil liberties, research independence, and nondiscrimination.
Sec. 1705. Rulemaking, technical incorporation, and retrospective change.
Sec. 1706. Implementation schedule and sequencing of obligations.
Sec. 1707. Review, amendment proposals, and no automatic policy renewal.
Sec. 1708. Severability and preservation of material award bargains.
Sec. 1709. Effective date and survival of duties.
TITLE XVIII. APPROPRIATIONS, ALLOCATION CEILINGS, LIFECYCLE FUNDING, AND FISCAL DISCIPLINE
Sec. 1801. Fourteen-year support envelope and separate legal instruments.
Sec. 1802. Fund accounts and annual allocations.
Sec. 1803. Portfolio boundaries, sector coverage, and limited reprogramming.
Sec. 1804. Availability, obligation, liquidation, and lawful closeout.
Sec. 1805. Post-award oversight and servicing reserve.
Sec. 1806. Administrative limits and protection against unfunded commitments.
Sec. 1807. Fiscal reporting and required separation of measures.
Sec. 1808. Fiscal review and corrective legislation.
TITLE XIX. REVENUE PROVISIONS AND FINANCING TRANSPARENCY
Sec. 1901. Corporate income tax rate.
Sec. 1902. Corporate alternative minimum tax rate.
Sec. 1903. Excise tax on covered corporate stock repurchases.
Sec. 1904. Collection, compliance, and limits on new enforcement authority.
Sec. 1905. Independent revenue estimates and long-term financing assessment.
Sec. 1906. No automatic fiscal guarantee; preservation of congressional authority.
TITLE XX. FORTY STRATEGIC SECTOR PROGRAMS AND PERFORMANCE REQUIREMENTS
Sec. 2001. Artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Sec. 2002. Semiconductors, advanced packaging, and microelectronics.
Sec. 2003. Quantum information, sensing, and enabling systems.
Sec. 2004. Cybersecurity and cryptographic resilience.
Sec. 2005. Cloud, edge, and data-center infrastructure.
Sec. 2006. Telecommunications, broadband, and secure networks.
Sec. 2007. High-performance computing and scientific instrumentation.
Sec. 2008. Robotics and industrial automation.
Sec. 2009. Advanced manufacturing and additive production.
Sec. 2010. Advanced materials, photonics, and nanotechnology.
Sec. 2011. Critical minerals and strategic materials recovery.
Sec. 2012. Batteries, storage, and power electronics.
Sec. 2013. Electric transmission, distribution, and grid equipment.
Sec. 2014. Advanced nuclear energy and nuclear enabling technology.
Sec. 2015. Geothermal and other clean firm energy systems.
Sec. 2016. Renewable generation and industrial heat.
Sec. 2017. Clean hydrogen and industrial feedstocks.
Sec. 2018. Carbon management and durable removals.
Sec. 2019. Transportation electrification and charging systems.
Sec. 2020. Rail, public transit, and intelligent transportation.
Sec. 2021. Aviation, aerospace manufacturing, and sustainable propulsion.
Sec. 2022. Civil space, satellites, and space services.
Sec. 2023. Maritime technology, ports, and shipbuilding.
Sec. 2024. Biotechnology and biological research platforms.
Sec. 2025. Biomanufacturing and industrial fermentation.
Sec. 2026. Pharmaceuticals and active pharmaceutical ingredients.
Sec. 2027. Medical devices, diagnostics, and imaging.
Sec. 2028. Digital health and interoperable care infrastructure.
Sec. 2029. Public health preparedness and essential medical supplies.
Sec. 2030. Precision agriculture and farm systems.
Sec. 2031. Climate-resilient crops and agricultural biotechnology.
Sec. 2032. Food processing, alternative proteins, and food-system resilience.
Sec. 2033. Water treatment, reuse, and efficient delivery.
Sec. 2034. Construction technology and resilient buildings.
Sec. 2035. Education technology and accessible learning systems.
Sec. 2036. Workforce learning, credentials, and assistive employment tools.
Sec. 2037. Financial technology, secure payments, and user-controlled identity.
Sec. 2038. Creative, entertainment, and cultural-production technology.
Sec. 2039. Emergency response, disaster resilience, and public-safety technology.
Sec. 2040. Circular economy, measurement science, and enabling public infrastructure.
APPENDIX A. COUNSEL MEMORANDUM AND DRAFTING ASSUMPTIONS
APPENDIX B. CONSTITUTIONAL, STATUTORY, AND INTERNATIONAL-LAW ANALYSIS
APPENDIX C. ILLUSTRATIVE FISCAL NOTE AND REPRODUCIBLE FINANCING MODEL
APPENDIX D. IMPLEMENTATION ROADMAP AND OPERATING MODEL
APPENDIX E. TITLE-BY-TITLE COMMENTARY AND SECTION MAP
APPENDIX F. COMPARATIVE MODELS, STAKEHOLDERS, AND DESIGN TRADEOFFS
APPENDIX G. PUBLIC SUMMARY AND FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
APPENDIX H. RESEARCH REGISTER AND SOURCE LIMITATIONS
APPENDIX I. QUALITY-CHECK AND REMAINING INTRODUCTION-STAGE WORK
A BILL
To establish programs for research, development, domestic production, clean industrial facilities, enabling infrastructure, workforce development, and trusted international cooperation; to provide assistance and allocated refundable credits subject to corporate, environmental, security, and public-interest conditions; to establish enforcement, oversight, revenue, and fiscal provisions; and for other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
(a) SHORT TITLE. This Act may be cited as “The American Innovation Act”.
(b) ARRANGEMENT. This Act consists of sections 1 through 5 and titles I through XX. The section-by-section table of contents immediately preceding the enacting clause is a finding aid and does not alter operative text.
(c) STATUS OF ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL. The counsel memorandum, fiscal illustrations, research register, implementation commentary, and Quality-Check accompanying this discussion draft are not part of the Act. No numerical projection or characterization in those materials creates an entitlement or enlarges agency authority.
The purposes of this Act are to expand the capacity of the United States to discover, develop, demonstrate, manufacture, maintain, and responsibly deploy useful technologies; to support a diverse domestic industrial and research base across the forty sectors specified in title XX; to improve productivity, public health, infrastructure reliability, food and water security, educational access, creative tools, and resilience; to finance reductions in industrial pollution while imposing enforceable environmental duties; to establish reciprocal cooperation with qualified foreign partners without extinguishing lawful global commerce; to protect workers, consumers, communities, scientific independence, and civil liberties; and to establish measurable conditions, recovery rights, and oversight for Federal assistance.
Congress intends that assistance purchase identifiable public benefits rather than compensate a recipient merely for undertaking activity it would have undertaken on substantially equivalent terms without assistance. Commercial success is not guaranteed, and an unsuccessful, honestly conducted experiment is not, without additional proof, fraud or a violation of this Act.
(a) BASIS. Congress exercises its powers to tax and spend for the general welfare, regulate interstate and foreign commerce, establish rules respecting inventions and discoveries, and provide for the common defense and necessary and proper execution of those powers. Each award agreement shall identify the funded activity and the connection between each material condition and that activity or protection of the Federal investment.
(b) JURISDICTIONAL NEXUS. Except for amendments to the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, duties imposed on a non-Federal person by this Act apply to the acceptance, administration, performance, use, disposition, or monitoring of assistance under this Act; to a facility or product materially supported by such assistance; or to conduct that obstructs the administration of this Act and affects interstate or foreign commerce. No provision confers general regulatory jurisdiction over all businesses merely because they operate in a priority sector.
(c) VOLUNTARY PARTICIPATION. A State, Indian Tribe, territorial government, local government, or private person may decline assistance without forfeiting funding under another law. A recipient may not extinguish accrued obligations merely by returning an award after a violation. No State or local officer is required to administer a Federal regulatory program as a condition unrelated to an award accepted by that government.
(d) NO IMPLIED DISPENSATION. National innovation, economic importance, emergency terminology, or designation as a priority sector does not excuse compliance with a statute, confer immunity, authorize surveillance, or constitute independent authority to appropriate money, impose a tax, acquire property, issue a permit, or employ military force.
In this Act:
(1) ADMINISTRATOR. The term “Administrator” means the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, unless a different administrator is expressly identified.
(2) ADMINISTERING AGENCY. The term means a department or agency expressly assigned a program or function by this Act. An interagency agreement may allocate support work but may not transfer an adjudicatory, regulatory, or spending power reserved by law to a particular officer.
(3) ASSISTANCE. The term means a grant, cooperative agreement, assistance-funded procurement, loan, loan guarantee, investment, allocated tax credit, advance purchase commitment, or subsidized access to a facility provided under this Act. The term does not include an unrelated benefit under another law or an ordinary arm’s-length payment to a supplier, except to the extent an express flow-down requirement applies.
(4) AWARD. The term means a legally binding instrument providing assistance, including a tax-credit allocation certificate together with the covenants required by title XIV. An announced selection, letter of interest, or provisional negotiation is not an award.
(5) COMMERCIAL RECIPIENT. The term means a recipient carrying on a business for private profit, including a partnership and a for-profit subsidiary of a nonprofit institution. It excludes a governmental body acting in its governmental capacity and a nonprofit institution with no distributable private ownership interest.
(6) CONTROL. The term means direct or indirect power to direct management or material policies through ownership of more than 50 percent of voting power or value, a right to appoint a majority of the governing body, or enforceable contractual rights over budget, production, technology transfer, or disposition of substantially all assets. Ordinary minority protective rights, an arm’s-length loan covenant, or participation in a pension fund does not alone establish control. An agency shall state the particular facts supporting a finding of contractual control.
(7) CONTROLLED GROUP. The term means the ultimate controlling entity, the recipient, and entities controlled by either, with ownership traced through intermediate entities. Aggregation for eligibility, financial extraction, and award caps does not by itself make an affiliate liable for another entity’s tort, debt, or crime.
(8) COVERED FACILITY. The term means a geographically identifiable production, processing, research, data-processing, energy, water, logistics, or demonstration installation for which assistance finances construction, substantial expansion, modernization, or operation. Integrated adjacent units under common control and functionally dependent units shall be treated together. The purchase of a portable instrument, scholarship, software license, or training service does not subject an otherwise unrelated campus, farm, hospital, or household to facility-wide conditions.
(9) MAJOR COVERED FACILITY. The term means a covered facility receiving at least $10,000,000 of assistance for physical assets or operations in a rolling five-year period, or a covered facility whose assisted project is designed to consume at least 100,000 megawatt-hours of electricity annually or emit at least 25,000 metric tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases annually. Aggregated, phased, leased, or commonly controlled projects may not be divided to avoid this definition.
(10) COVERED PRODUCT. The term means the product, service, or substantially integrated system specifically identified in an award as the output of the assisted activity. A corporation’s unrelated products are not covered solely by common branding.
(11) DISTRESSED AREA. The term means a census tract, county, Tribal statistical area, or territory with a three-year average unemployment rate at least 150 percent of the national average, a poverty rate of at least 20 percent, or a documented loss of at least 10 percent of its employment attributable to closure of a major industrial operation within five years. The Secretary may approve an equivalent, statistically reliable territorial or Tribal measure after public notice.
(12) DOMESTIC PROJECT. The term means a project whose assisted productive assets and principal performance are located in the United States. It does not require that all inputs be domestic unless another express provision lawfully imposes a procurement preference.
(13) ELIGIBLE COST. The term means a necessary, reasonable, allocable, documented cost of an approved activity, net of rebates, insurance recoveries, duplicative subsidies, related-party inflation, and salvage value where applicable. Financing expense, land, and working capital are eligible only when the relevant program expressly permits them.
(14) EXECUTIVE OFFICER. The term means a chief executive, financial, operating, or equivalent officer, or an individual with actual authority to direct the assisted activity or the particular compliance function at issue. A title, ownership interest, or membership on a board, without the conduct and state of mind required by title XVI, does not establish personal liability.
(15) FEDERAL SUPPORT VALUE. For a grant, credit, or direct payment, the term means its maximum dollar amount; for a loan or guarantee, its estimated subsidy cost under the Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990; and for an investment or other instrument, its estimated Federal budgetary cost under applicable scorekeeping conventions. Face principal and contractual maximum exposure shall also be disclosed separately. A negative estimated credit subsidy shall not create new award authority.
(16) FOREIGN ENTITY OF CONCERN. The term means a person blocked under applicable Federal sanctions law; a person determined under section 905 to be controlled by a government or entity engaged in the specified threatening conduct; or a person expressly made ineligible by a Federal statute applicable to the assistance. Citizenship, ancestry, national origin, or an institution’s foreign location alone is insufficient.
(17) GREENHOUSE GAS. The term means carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, sulfur hexafluoride, nitrogen trifluoride, and another gas the Administrator finds, by rule supported by scientific evidence, materially contributes to atmospheric warming. Conversion factors shall be specified, versioned, and prospectively applied by rule.
(18) INDIAN TRIBE. The term has the meaning given in section 4 of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, 25 U.S.C. 5304.
(19) MAJOR RECIPIENT. The term means a commercial controlled group receiving, in any rolling five-year period, aggregate Federal support value under this Act of at least $100,000,000 or aggregate original principal commitments under title XIII of at least $1,000,000,000. A group receiving at least $1,000,000,000 of Federal support value or at least $10,000,000,000 of such original principal commitments in that period is a substantial recipient for provisions expressly applicable to that category. Principal commitments shall be measured under section 1301. A zero or negative estimated credit subsidy does not exclude a group meeting the principal-commitment threshold.
(20) MATERIAL. In relation to a representation or omission, the term means having a natural tendency to influence, or being capable of influencing, a payment, eligibility, regulatory, or other legally authorized decision concerning this Act. An immaterial typographical defect does not become material merely because it appears in a required report.
(21) PERSONAL DATA. The term means information that identifies, relates to, or is reasonably linkable to an individual or household, including biometric, health, genetic, precise-location, financial, communications, and inferred information. Properly deidentified information is excluded only where reasonable technical and contractual safeguards prohibit reidentification and linkage.
(22) PRIORITY SECTOR. The term means a sector specified in title XX. Designation identifies eligible fields and does not guarantee an award, a market share, or an exemption from regulation.
(23) PROJECT YEAR. The term means a successive twelve-month period beginning on the verified commencement of ordinary operation of the assisted facility, excluding commissioning not exceeding twelve months. An agency shall establish a fixed commencement date when commercial operation is deliberately deferred to evade compliance deadlines.
(24) RECIPIENT. The term means the legal person accepting an award. A parent shall be bound to an express parent covenant only by accepting the covenant in writing as a condition precedent to a major-recipient award.
(25) SECRETARY. The term means the Secretary of Commerce, except where another Secretary is identified.
(26) SMALL BUSINESS. The term means a business concern meeting the applicable size standard established under the Small Business Act, with affiliation determined under that Act and without disregarding affiliation solely because a holding company or special-purpose entity applies.
(27) UNITED STATES. The term includes the several States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the territories and possessions of the United States.
(28) VERIFIED. The term means supported by records adequate for independent replication or audit under a method specified before the determination. Verification does not require disclosure to the public of protected personal data, classified information, or a trade secret lawfully withheld under section 1508.
(29) KNOWINGLY AND RECKLESSLY. For a criminal offense created by this Act, knowingly requires actual awareness of the relevant fact; recklessly requires conscious disregard of a substantial and unjustifiable risk constituting a gross deviation from lawful conduct. Civil False Claims Act liability retains the definitions in that Act. No agency may expand the mental state required for a crime by regulation or guidance.
(30) SERIOUS BODILY INJURY. The term means bodily injury involving a substantial risk of death, extreme physical pain, protracted and obvious disfigurement, or protracted loss or impairment of a bodily member, organ, or mental faculty.
(a) DUTIES AND DISCRETION. “Shall” imposes a duty and “may” confers discretion within the stated limits. An agency may not treat guidance, a press release, a contractor manual, or an unpublished scoring practice as a legislative rule imposing a new binding obligation.
(b) PROSPECTIVITY. Except for recovery of fraud or enforcement of an independently existing obligation, this Act does not impose a penalty for conduct completed before its effective date. A new award shall disclose the applicable statutory duties, operative regulations, baseline measurements, reporting dates, remedies, and review procedures before acceptance.
(c) SPECIFIC CONTROLS GENERAL. A specific statutory tax procedure, judicial forum, criminal element, or program ceiling controls a general provision of this Act. References to a statutory authority include amendments enacted before the relevant action; a private technical standard becomes binding only to the extent specifically adopted through lawful rulemaking, with lawful public access to the incorporated requirements.
(d) ADDITIONALITY OF APPROPRIATIONS. Except as expressly provided in title XVIII, funds under this Act supplement and do not repeal or transfer an appropriation under another Act. An agency shall not count an existing commitment as a new investment under this Act, or claim an existing statutory program has been reauthorized merely because its subject appears in title XX.
(a) ESTABLISHMENT. There is established an American Innovation Council within the Executive Office of the President. The Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy shall chair the Council. Its members shall be the Secretaries of Commerce, the Treasury, Energy, Defense, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Transportation, Labor, Education, the Interior, and Housing and Urban Development; the Administrator; the Directors of the Office of Management and Budget and National Science Foundation; the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; the United States Trade Representative; and the Administrator of the Small Business Administration.
(b) ROLE. The Council shall coordinate the strategy, resolve nonbinding planning disagreements, maintain an integrated implementation calendar, and identify overlapping solicitations. It shall not make an award, impose a penalty, decide an individual enforcement matter, direct an independent commission’s adjudication, or exercise a rulemaking power vested in another officer.
(c) RECORD. The chair shall publish meeting summaries, decisions on coordination, unresolved interagency disagreements, and the officer accountable for each statutory deadline, excluding information lawfully withheld. A disagreement shall not suspend a statutory duty. No contractor or private adviser may exercise a member’s governmental authority.
(a) COMMERCE. The Secretary shall administer the national award portal, manufacturing and commercialization programs, regional coordination, portfolio accounting, and assistance-integrity coordination, subject to the authorities assigned to other agencies.
(b) SPECIALIZED ADMINISTRATION. The National Science Foundation shall lead investigator-initiated nonmedical basic research and research access; the Department of Energy shall lead energy and industrial decarbonization financing; the Department of Health and Human Services shall lead health and biomedical programs; the Department of Agriculture shall lead agricultural and food programs; the Department of Transportation shall lead transportation programs; the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shall lead civil space programs; and the National Institute of Standards and Technology shall lead measurement, testing, and technical standards. Title XX further allocates sector responsibilities.
(c) AGREEMENTS. Within 120 days after enactment, participating agencies shall execute written agreements allocating application review, disbursement, monitoring, data custody, audits, and closeout. An agreement shall identify the appropriations account supporting each function and shall not create unfunded liabilities or an additional layer of applicant reporting without necessity.
(d) REGULATORS. The Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and other regulators retain their distinct statutory decision-making responsibilities. Promotion of an industry is not a basis to direct approval of a particular regulated product or project.
(a) DEADLINE AND PERIOD. Within 180 days after enactment, the Council shall submit to Congress and publish a fourteen-year National Innovation Strategy, with implementation chapters for the first five years. It shall update the strategy every two years after at least 60 days of public comment.
(b) CONTENT. The strategy shall identify, for each priority sector, the public problem, measurable domestic capability gap, existing Federal programs, bottlenecks, alternative interventions, estimated public and private costs, workforce needs, energy and water requirements, research milestones, commercial uncertainty, and proposed exit criteria. It shall distinguish discovery, demonstration, commercial scale, and maintenance rather than treating all expenditures as research.
(c) BASELINES. Targets shall specify the measurement year, unit, data source, counterfactual, geography, expected time lag, and responsible agency. Targets shall include quality and reliability, not merely announced investment or floor space. Where reliable baseline data do not exist, the agency shall disclose the limitation and fund baseline development before using the proposed metric to impose a financial sanction.
(d) REVISIONS. A revision may change prospective program emphasis within lawful allocations. It may not repeal a sector, release an accrued covenant, expand an appropriation, or terminate a valid award without the process required by this Act and the award.
(a) EVIDENCE FILE. Each administering agency shall maintain an evidence file for each material program design, distinguishing peer-reviewed evidence, administrative findings, engineering estimates, foreign experience, stakeholder submissions, and untested policy assumptions. The file shall state uncertainty and plausible adverse effects.
(b) BENEFIT TEST. Assistance shall address a documented knowledge spillover, coordination failure, financing gap, resilience vulnerability, pollution externality, public-service gap, or other public benefit specifically authorized by this Act. An unsupported assertion that an industry is strategic is insufficient.
(c) COMPARATORS. For programs exceeding $1,000,000,000 annually, the agency shall compare grants, credit support, procurement, shared infrastructure, technical assistance, and nonfinancial regulatory coordination. It shall publish reasons for choosing the instrument and identify the distribution of benefits and compliance costs among firms, workers, consumers, and communities.
(d) NO PERFORMANCE GUARANTEE. An evidence-based expectation of benefit does not guarantee the outcome. Program evaluation shall distinguish reasonable scientific risk from preventable execution failure, misrepresentation, and unlawful conduct. No official shall represent a modeled benefit as an observed result.
(a) PANELS. Agencies may establish scientific, industrial, workforce, community, disability-access, and small-business advisory panels under chapter 10 of title 5, United States Code. Meetings and records shall be open except as lawfully closed; recommendations shall identify dissenting technical views where material.
(b) CONFLICTS. A panelist or reviewer shall disclose a financial interest, employment, consulting relationship, pending investment, or immediate-family interest that could materially affect impartial review. A person shall not review an application in which that person has such an interest or compete for a decision over which that person exercises governmental authority.
(c) NONDELEGATION. A panel may advise but may not approve awards, designate a foreign country, determine a violation, set a criminal standard, or bind the United States. Agency staff shall independently verify material conclusions.
(d) REPRESENTATION. Agencies shall seek practical expertise from smaller enterprises, research institutions, workers, affected communities, rural and territorial areas, and people with disabilities. Selection shall not turn on political affiliation, support for an administration, or endorsement of a legislative position.
(a) PLANS. Within 90 days after enactment, each administering agency shall publish a plan identifying statutory duties, personnel, procurement needs, systems, rulemaking milestones, and the portion of its allocation used for administration. Within 180 days, it shall establish named program-management and financial-control officials.
(b) PERSONNEL. Within appropriated administrative amounts, agencies may hire or detail engineers, scientists, accountants, credit specialists, procurement officers, environmental analysts, cybersecurity personnel, and investigators under otherwise applicable civil-service authorities. This Act creates no exemption from merit-system principles, conflict-of-interest law, whistleblower protections, or collective-bargaining obligations.
(c) CONTRACT SUPPORT. A support contractor shall not select awardees, decide environmental compliance, determine a tax liability, conduct a criminal prosecution, or exercise another inherently governmental function. Contracts shall contain conflict controls, data-use restrictions, ownership and exit provisions, and a right to audit charges.
(d) CAPACITY BEFORE COMMITMENT. An agency shall not award a portfolio larger than it can reasonably monitor. If capacity constrains award timing, it shall publish a remediation schedule and retain available funds within their statutory period; administrative inconvenience alone does not authorize impoundment or expenditure beyond an appropriation.
(a) AGREEMENTS. Agencies may enter voluntary cooperative agreements with governments to conduct site planning, workforce programs, permitting coordination, and shared infrastructure consistent with this Act. The agreement shall identify each party’s financial commitment and continuing responsibility.
(b) NO COMMANDEERING. A participating government may perform agreed tasks with Federal assistance but is not required to enact a law, collect a Federal tax, regulate unrelated private conduct, or waive sovereign immunity as a blanket condition. Any limited waiver necessary for an award-related contractual remedy shall be separately stated, knowing, and confined to that remedy.
(c) TRIBAL RIGHTS. Agencies shall conduct government-to-government consultation before actions materially affecting Tribal lands, treaty rights, cultural resources, or reserved resources. Consent shall be obtained where required by existing law. This Act does not authorize entry onto Tribal lands or acquisition of property without lawful permission.
(d) TECHNICAL SUPPORT. At least 10 percent of regional planning funds shall be available for application and compliance assistance to Tribal, territorial, rural, and fiscally constrained governments. Eligibility is not dependent on the ability to employ a grant consultant.
(a) ESTABLISHMENT. Within 270 days after enactment, the Secretary shall establish a publicly accessible dashboard identifying each award, ultimate corporate group, sector, location, funding instrument, maximum Federal support value, disbursements, milestones, compliance status, and known material modification.
(b) ACCURACY. Obligations, outlays, loan face exposure, subsidy cost, tax-credit allocations, certified credits, private commitments, and verified private spending shall appear in separate fields. Announced private investment shall not be presented as completed spending. Temporary construction jobs shall not be presented as permanent jobs.
(c) ACCESS. Data shall be machine-readable, downloadable without a fee, accessible to persons with disabilities, and accompanied by a data dictionary and revision history. Aggregation shall protect personal data and legitimate security interests without concealing award amounts or final enforcement dispositions.
(d) CORRECTIONS. A recipient or member of the public may request correction of a demonstrable factual error. The agency shall acknowledge a request within 15 days and resolve it, or explain a delay, within 60 days. A correction process shall not suppress an accurate unfavorable finding.
(a) EVALUATION DESIGN. Before a major solicitation, the administering agency shall establish an evaluation plan with baseline data, feasible comparison groups, outcome measures, survey burdens, and a schedule. Randomized or phased allocation may be used only when lawful, consistent with merit criteria, and disclosed in the solicitation.
(b) REVIEWS. The Comptroller General shall review implementation at years 2, 5, 10, 14, 20, and 30 after enactment, including duplication, administration, additionality, financial exposure, distributional effects, and reliability of claimed benefits. The Comptroller General shall independently determine methods and findings and shall not administer an award or issue an implementing regulation.
(c) EXTERNAL EVALUATION. Agencies shall competitively retain independent evaluators without financial interests in evaluated recipients. Evaluators shall receive secure access to necessary records, publish methods, and disclose limitations. Publication may not be conditioned on a favorable result.
(d) RESPONSE. Within 120 days after a final evaluation, the responsible agency head shall publish corrective actions, disagreements supported by reasons, and completion dates. Failure to achieve a national outcome shall trigger program review, not automatic criminal attribution to an awardee.
(a) SCHEDULE. General award rules shall be proposed within 180 days and finalized within 365 days after enactment. Technical facility rules shall follow section 502. Allocated tax-credit rules shall be finalized within 365 days. Agencies shall coordinate definitions without combining unrelated proceedings into an unreviewable instrument.
(b) PROCEDURE. Rules shall comply with chapter 5 of title 5, United States Code, applicable regulatory-flexibility and information-collection requirements, and all other applicable procedural law. A rule shall identify its precise statutory authority, regulated persons, compliance dates, methods, costs, alternatives, and response to significant comments.
(c) INTERIM IMPLEMENTATION. Before final rules, an agency may fund planning, non-facility research, technical assistance, and systems necessary for implementation under statutory conditions and published interim terms. It may not irrevocably commit a major facility award before required environmental standards, financing limits, and enforcement procedures are effective.
(d) DELAY. A missed rulemaking deadline does not automatically approve a project or suspend an existing environmental protection. The agency shall publish the cause, corrective timetable, and effect on obligations. Judicial remedies for unlawfully withheld action remain available under applicable law.
(a) ELIGIBILITY. A United States governmental body, Indian Tribe, institution of higher education, nonprofit research organization, worker cooperative, small business, other commercial enterprise, or consortium of such persons may apply for an authorized program. A domestic subsidiary of a foreign enterprise may apply for a domestic project if it accepts United States jurisdiction, satisfies security review, and supplies any required parent covenant.
(b) EXCLUSIONS. An agency shall not make an award to a person presently debarred from the relevant Federal assistance; a foreign entity of concern; a person subject to an unsatisfied final judgment for material fraud involving public funds without an approved payment or compliance arrangement; or a person that refuses the record access necessary to determine eligibility. An allegation, pending investigation, lawful foreign ownership, or prior good-faith business failure alone does not establish ineligibility.
(c) TAX AND LABOR COMPLIANCE. An applicant shall disclose delinquent Federal taxes and final material labor or environmental judgments within five years. A genuine dispute under timely administrative or judicial review shall be identified separately. An agency may require cure, security, or a monitored plan where lawful, but shall state why the condition addresses award risk.
(d) CONSORTIA. A consortium shall designate a legally accountable lead recipient, allocate duties in writing, disclose actual beneficiaries, and establish enforceable access, intellectual-property, and conflict rules. Consortium form shall not conceal a single controlling corporate beneficiary.
(a) APPLICATION. The Secretary shall operate a common portal with program-specific supplements. An application shall state the proposed activity, location, schedule, ownership, requested instrument and maximum amount, eligible costs, other public support, financing commitments, technical evidence, environmental and workforce plans, data-security arrangements, and measurable public benefits.
(b) VERIFICATION. Before an award, the agency shall verify legal existence, bank-account control, tax identification, beneficial ownership, conflicts, sanctions status, and material cost estimates. For a major recipient, an independent technical and financial review shall test demand assumptions, sensitivity to prices and interest rates, available alternatives, and the ultimate source of matching funds.
(c) PROPORTIONALITY. A small-business application requesting less than $1,000,000 shall use a simplified form. Agencies shall not require an audited financial statement where proportionate tax records, bank verification, and other reliable evidence suffice. Simplification does not waive truthful disclosure, security screening, or restrictions on improper payments.
(d) INTEGRITY OF SUBMISSIONS. An applicant shall identify material assumptions and distinguish binding financing commitments from expressions of interest. Forecasts shall include a range of outcomes. An agency may not demand a promise of scientific success or a representation that no business risk exists.
(a) COMPETITION. Awards shall be made through public competition unless the agency head makes a written determination that a sole-source award is necessary because of unique capability, an immediate documented supply interruption, or continuity of an existing competitively selected activity that cannot reasonably be recompeted. A sole-source exception shall identify alternatives and be published before obligation unless disclosure would cause a specific security harm.
(b) CRITERIA. A solicitation shall identify eligibility, technical merit, additionality, domestic capability, lifecycle environmental performance, workforce effects, consumer access, financial viability, competition effects, and monitoring costs. It shall state the relative importance of criteria before applications close. An agency shall not add an undisclosed political, geographic, or firm-specific preference during review.
(c) DECISION. A selection memorandum shall explain why the award advances a statutory purpose, why the instrument and amount are necessary, how the application satisfied threshold conditions, and why the project can reasonably be administered. Technical disagreements and material adverse findings shall remain in the record.
(d) NO ENTITLEMENT. Meeting minimum criteria does not create an entitlement to scarce funding. An agency shall not exhaust an allocation on nonqualifying proposals merely to meet an obligation target. Unawarded funds remain subject to their availability period and lawful reprogramming limits.
(a) REQUIREMENT. Before commercial scale-up or production assistance exceeding $10,000,000, the agency shall determine the difference between the proposed assisted project and a credible unassisted alternative. The analysis shall address timing, scale, domestic location, technology risk, pollution controls, and the applicant’s access to capital.
(b) AMOUNT. Assistance shall not exceed the smaller of the applicable statutory cost-share limit and the amount reasonably necessary to achieve the additional public benefit, including compensation for a verified public-service obligation or technological demonstration risk. A recipient’s assertion of a foreign subsidy offer shall be independently evaluated and shall not compel a matching award.
(c) EVIDENCE. Relevant evidence may include board-approved alternatives predating the application, financing terms, engineering studies, market forecasts, and independently estimated capital costs. Agencies shall test related-party assumptions and shall not accept an artificial hurdle rate designed to maximize a subsidy.
(d) CHANGE. If project costs fall materially before final disbursement or committed private financing increases beyond the approved plan, the agency shall reassess undisbursed assistance. It shall not punish operational efficiency by retroactively removing an earned performance payment unless the award expressly provided for a defined excess-return mechanism.
(a) COMMERCIAL PROJECTS. Except as provided in this section or title XIV, Federal support value for a commercial production project shall not exceed 40 percent of eligible project costs. For a small-business demonstration or a first-of-kind demonstration with independently verified technical risk, the agency may provide up to 60 percent after explaining why a lesser share would not secure the public benefit.
(b) PUBLIC GOODS. Basic research, open-access measurement infrastructure, emergency public-health preparedness, governmental planning, and training grants may receive up to 100 percent where charging the beneficiary would materially impair the authorized public purpose. Commercial operations within a mixed project shall be cost-allocated separately.
(c) CONTRIBUTIONS. Private matching contributions shall consist of cash or independently valued, necessary in-kind contributions actually delivered. Existing land or equipment may count only at the lesser of documented fair value and allocable value to the project. A Federal loan’s principal shall not be represented as private equity. Other Federal subsidies shall not count as non-Federal match unless expressly authorized by law.
(d) EXCLUSIONS. Award funds shall not finance political campaign activity, unrelated lobbying, fines, penalties, stock repurchases, executive compensation exceeding title VII, artificially inflated related-party charges, or costs incurred before application except documented planning costs approved in advance under a published rule.
(a) STAGES. A commercial award shall separate feasibility, design, permitting, construction, commissioning, and verified operation. A research award shall use discovery-appropriate milestones rather than a mandatory manufacturing schedule. Each stage shall identify evidence required for payment and a maximum commitment.
(b) DISBURSEMENT. No more than 20 percent of a commercial grant may be advanced before verified eligible expenditure, except a secured advance for specialized long-lead equipment approved by the agency’s chief financial officer. Later disbursements shall be tied to completed milestones, documented costs, or independently measured output. At least 10 percent shall be retained until commissioning or the final substantive deliverable, unless the agency states why that retention would defeat a small-business research purpose.
(c) FAILURE OR DELAY. Failure to meet a milestone shall trigger written review of cause, materiality, corrective measures, and public cost. The agency may revise a milestone prospectively, suspend the affected tranche, terminate unperformed work, or recover unearned funds. A revised milestone shall not erase known falsification or a legal violation.
(d) CONTINGENCIES. Awards may include a cost contingency not exceeding 15 percent of the initially approved eligible cost, within the original award ceiling. A contingency release requires documented need and does not authorize an increase in the statutory program ceiling.
(a) CORPORATE CAP. The aggregate Federal support value newly awarded to one controlled group shall not exceed 2 percent of the $500,000,000,000 annual support envelope in a fiscal year or $70,000,000,000 over the program. An agency may exceed neither limit by waiver. A greater amount requires subsequent express statutory authorization identifying the recipient or project and additional maximum support.
(b) SMALL-BUSINESS ACCESS. At least 20 percent of competitive commercial grant and demonstration obligations, measured over each three-year period, shall support small businesses directly or through independently verified subawards. Passive subcontracting by a large recipient shall not satisfy the requirement. If qualifying applications are insufficient, the agency shall reserve funds within their availability period, provide technical assistance, and report the shortfall rather than misclassify recipients.
(c) SHARED INFRASTRUCTURE. A public user facility shall not be attributed entirely to a commercial user for the corporate cap; a preferential dedicated allocation shall be attributed at its estimated subsidy value. The same benefit shall not be counted twice.
(d) REGIONAL ACCESS. At least 15 percent of the Workforce and Regional Development Account shall support distressed areas. Other accounts shall consider geographic dispersion and resilience where relevant to merit, but no jurisdiction receives an entitlement to an uneconomic facility.
(a) AGREEMENT. Before obligation, the recipient shall execute an agreement specifying permitted uses, performance obligations, applicable environmental and workforce requirements, reporting, security, audit access, recovery, disposition, and review. Statutory duties apply notwithstanding accidental omission from the instrument; the agency shall promptly correct the omission and provide reasonable prospective notice where necessary.
(b) PARENTS. A major commercial recipient shall obtain a written covenant from its ultimate controlling commercial parent accepting the financial-extraction restrictions applicable to the controlled group, ownership disclosure, no-evasion obligations, and a guarantee of award-specific repayment obligations up to the assistance received. A parent unwilling to accept those conditions may decline the award; an agency shall not deem consent from affiliation alone.
(c) SUBRECIPIENTS. A recipient shall flow down to a subrecipient only duties relevant to the subaward, including proper use, records, labor and environmental requirements for the work, whistleblower rights, and security. An ordinary supplier shall receive relevant product-origin, safety, and record requirements without becoming subject to unrelated group-wide executive compensation rules.
(d) DUE PROCESS. No instrument shall require waiver of constitutional rights, statutory judicial review, a jury right, attorney-client privilege, or a defense to a criminal charge as a condition of participation.
(a) NOTICE. A recipient shall notify the agency at least 60 days before a proposed change in control, transfer of an assisted facility, exclusive transfer of material funded technology, material reduction in domestic capacity, or change to a project’s purpose. Emergency insolvency proceedings shall be reported promptly when advance notice is impracticable.
(b) REVIEW. Within 45 days after a complete notice, the agency shall approve, condition, or deny the proposed change on stated financial, security, capacity, or compliance grounds. One extension not exceeding 45 days is permitted for specified missing evidence or a concurrent legally required review. Silence is not approval.
(c) SUCCESSOR. Approval of a transfer shall require a solvent successor to assume continuing covenants, maintain financial assurance, and permit audit of relevant historical records. The agency may release the transferor from future performance only after determining that the Federal interest remains protected. A release does not excuse prior fraud or accrued liability.
(d) BANKRUPTCY. This Act creates no automatic bankruptcy priority or exemption from the automatic stay. Agencies shall use lawful security interests, contractual covenants, and bankruptcy remedies, and shall not promise a recovery preference that applicable insolvency law does not recognize.
(a) EXPLANATION. An unsuccessful applicant may request a written explanation within 30 days after notice. The agency shall provide its principal reasons, the applicant’s own evaluation, and material procedural findings within 45 days, protecting competitors’ confidential information.
(b) RECONSIDERATION. Within 30 days after receiving an explanation, an applicant may seek reconsideration for a material factual error, undisclosed criterion, conflict of interest, or failure to follow a mandatory procedure. An official not involved in the initial decision shall resolve the request within 60 days. Reconsideration does not authorize the official to disregard statutory eligibility or funding limits.
(c) RELIEF. Available administrative relief includes correction, reevaluation, recusal, or a new competition. No administrative officer may award lost profits or compel an appropriation. Judicial review remains governed by title XVII and otherwise applicable law.
(d) PROCUREMENT. A procurement protest shall follow the procurement review regime otherwise applicable to the contract. This section creates no parallel protest forum and does not displace the Government Accountability Office or Court of Federal Claims within their lawful jurisdictions.
(a) COMMON LEDGER. Every recipient shall maintain a project-level ledger of Federal, State, local, Tribal, foreign, and private support, distinguishing grants, credits, loans, guarantees, in-kind support, and tax deductions. The administering agency shall coordinate verification with Treasury subject to tax confidentiality.
(b) COST DUPLICATION. The same expenditure may not be reimbursed twice under this Act or another Federal program. Combined Federal support value shall satisfy section 205 unless another statute expressly permits a higher share. Different stages or distinct eligible expenditures may receive different support when cost allocation is documented and no prohibited duplication results.
(c) EVASION. Common ownership, side agreements, sale-leasebacks, management fees, transfer prices, derivatives, intercompany financing, and nominal changes of legal form shall be examined according to economic substance when determining compliance with an express duty. This subsection does not authorize an agency to invent a new substantive condition not found in law or the accepted award.
(d) RULINGS. Treasury and administering agencies shall offer published procedures for prospective, fact-specific coordination rulings. A recipient that accurately discloses all material facts may rely on a final written ruling for the period stated, subject to later statutory change, without immunity for fraud or independently unlawful conduct.
(a) ESTABLISHMENT. The National Science Foundation and the specialized research agencies identified in section 102 shall establish competitive programs for fundamental and applied research in priority sectors. Awards may support personnel, equipment, data, secure compute, research infrastructure, replication, and collaboration necessary to an approved research question.
(b) PORTFOLIO. At least 40 percent of the Frontier Research and Grand Challenges Account shall support investigator-initiated basic research, enabling scientific infrastructure, or research whose primary value is public knowledge rather than an identified commercial product. An agency may not require a startup, patent, investor, or near-term revenue forecast as a condition for such awards.
(c) REVIEW. Selection shall use qualified independent peer review, documented conflicts, and criteria appropriate to the discipline. Reviewers shall consider methods, feasibility, potential knowledge value, research integrity, and responsible management of uncertainty. Scientific disagreement shall not be treated as misconduct without proof of fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or another defined violation.
(d) CONTINUITY. Awards may cover up to seven years with intermediate scientific review. An agency shall not terminate an otherwise compliant research award because its findings are politically inconvenient or disfavored. Termination for a lawful program change requires a reasoned record, notice, closeout funding within the award, and protection of participants and data.
(a) SUPPORT. Agencies may modernize national laboratories, university facilities, field stations, calibration systems, repositories, and shared instruments where a documented access or capability gap exists. A capital award shall include a lifecycle plan covering staffing, maintenance, calibration, energy, cybersecurity, accessibility, and decommissioning.
(b) ACCESS. A publicly supported facility shall publish user eligibility, fees, scheduling rules, safety requirements, and appeal procedures. A major commercial sponsor shall not reserve all effective capacity or impose exclusivity inconsistent with the public purpose. Capacity for small institutions and early-career researchers shall be considered in allocation.
(c) CAPITAL DISCIPLINE. Before construction exceeding $250,000,000, an independent review shall assess demand, existing alternatives, operating costs, siting, environmental obligations, and technical maturity. A project shall not commence if its operating model relies on an undisclosed future appropriation. Future requested appropriations shall be identified as contingent rather than committed.
(d) INVENTORY. Within one year, agencies shall publish an interoperable inventory of accessible research assets and avoid funding duplicative specialized facilities unless reliability, geographic access, security, or excess demand provides a documented justification.
(a) AUTHORITY. Agencies may conduct challenges addressing a defined technical or public-service problem under this Act and applicable prize authority. Each competition shall publish the problem, eligibility, evidence required, intellectual-property terms, judging criteria, maximum award, and dispute process before entry.
(b) FUNDING. The full maximum Federal prize liability shall be reserved from the appropriate account before announcement. Private contributions shall be disclosed and shall not confer control over public selection. A competition shall not promise a procurement contract, regulatory approval, immigration benefit, or Federal endorsement not otherwise authorized.
(c) FAIRNESS. Entrants shall retain background intellectual property unless they knowingly agree to a necessary license stated in advance. An agency shall not obtain uncompensated access to commercially valuable submissions beyond evaluation and the published public-use terms.
(d) VERIFICATION. A winning result shall be independently reproduced or validated under the announced protocol where practicable. If a claimed result depends on undisclosed conditions, manipulated benchmarks, or materially false data, payment may be withheld and remedies under title XVI pursued. Good-faith failure to win creates no repayment obligation for an otherwise lawful separate research grant.
(a) PUBLICATIONS. A recipient shall deposit the accepted manuscript of a peer-reviewed publication arising principally from an award in a public repository no later than publication, with a nonexclusive license sufficient for public reading, accessibility conversion, and preservation. An award shall reserve that license before a conflicting publication contract is signed.
(b) DATA. A research-data plan shall identify data to be shared, formats, metadata, repositories, retention periods, and legitimate limits. Data necessary to assess a published conclusion shall be made available at publication or an explained, bounded later date where validation, consent, security, or a patent filing requires delay.
(c) EXCEPTIONS. Personal data, controlled information, confidential Tribal knowledge, third-party material not lawfully licensable, and data whose release would create a specific and substantial security or safety risk shall receive appropriate protection. An exception shall be narrow, recorded, and periodically reviewed; commercial inconvenience alone is not sufficient.
(d) COSTS AND RIGHTS. Reasonable repository and accessibility costs are eligible award expenses. Nothing in this section compels an individual to surrender a preexisting copyright unrelated to the award or extinguishes a lawful fair-use, privacy, or contractual defense.
(a) EXISTING REGIME. Subject inventions arising under this Act shall remain governed by chapter 18 of title 35, United States Code, where applicable. This Act does not silently expand existing march-in grounds or extinguish the statutory rights of small businesses, nonprofit organizations, inventors, or the United States.
(b) AWARD RIGHTS. For an award not otherwise governed by that chapter, the agreement shall state ownership, disclosure, patent filing, Government-purpose licenses, commercialization milestones, and treatment of improvements before work begins. The United States shall receive a paid-up, nonexclusive license to practice or have practiced the funded invention for governmental purposes to the extent specified in the agreement.
(c) BACKGROUND RIGHTS. An applicant shall identify background intellectual property necessary for performance and demonstrate adequate access. No agency shall require assignment of unrelated background technology merely because a recipient accepts an award. A limited escrow or continuity license may be required where essential to an expressly funded public service and proportionate to the Federal contribution.
(d) DISCLOSURE. Recipients shall timely disclose funded inventions, licensees, exclusive transfers, and material commercialization failures. The agency shall provide standardized agreements and reasonable assistance so that reporting cost does not itself prevent small-business participation.
(a) DOMESTIC BENEFIT. A commercialization award shall identify a domestic manufacturing, development, employment, supplier-development, or public-access commitment appropriate to the funded technology. A production grant shall support actual productive activity in the United States rather than a paper intellectual-property holding company.
(b) STATUTORY PREFERENCE. Requirements applicable under 35 U.S.C. 204 remain in force. Requests for a waiver under that provision shall be evaluated under its terms and shall identify efforts to find a capable domestic licensee, the commercial feasibility of domestic manufacture, and available staged domestic production.
(c) NEW CONTRACTUAL DUTIES. Additional domestic-capacity commitments shall be disclosed before award and supported by the funding-gap analysis. They shall not condition a goods subsidy on export performance or the use of domestic over imported inputs contrary to section 908.
(d) NONPERFORMANCE. Where a recipient fails a material, expressly accepted commercialization commitment, the agency may require a corrective plan, prospective nonexclusive licensing on preagreed terms, or proportionate repayment after notice and review. A change in market conditions or inability to commercialize shall not alone establish fraud or authorize confiscation of unrelated intellectual property.
(a) EXPRESS AGREEMENT. A commercial award for an essential medicine, diagnostic, public infrastructure control system, or other specifically identified essential public-service technology may require a contingent continuity license to funded intellectual property and necessary technical documentation. The triggering event, license scope, compensation, duration, security controls, and challenge procedure shall be stated before acceptance.
(b) TRIGGERS. A license may be activated only upon a documented material supply failure, abandonment of a funded essential service, insolvency-related inability to perform, or a declared emergency creating a serious unmet public need that the recipient cannot timely address. The agency shall first provide a reasonable opportunity to remedy the failure unless delay would threaten life or essential infrastructure.
(c) LIMITS. A license shall extend no further than necessary to restore the specified service and shall protect background rights not included in the agreement. It shall not be used to suppress lawful expression, transfer an unrelated product line, or punish refusal to make a political statement.
(d) PROCESS. Except for temporary emergency action, the agency shall provide notice, relevant evidence, an opportunity to respond, and a written decision subject to judicial review. Emergency use shall be reviewed within 30 days and compensated as provided by the agreement or other applicable law.
(a) INTEGRITY. Agencies shall require proportionate data-management, authorship, conflict-disclosure, and reproducibility procedures. An institution shall preserve underlying records and investigate credible allegations through an impartial process with notice, access to material evidence, and an opportunity to respond.
(b) NEGATIVE RESULTS. Research awards shall permit publication of negative, null, or inconclusive findings. An agency shall not condition payment on favorable results where the award purchased the conduct of a valid study rather than a specified successful deliverable.
(c) REPLICATION. At least 3 percent of the Frontier Research and Grand Challenges Account shall support replication, benchmark validation, reference datasets, independent evaluation, or research on measurement reliability. Such funds may support cross-disciplinary work where a result affects multiple sectors.
(d) MISCONDUCT. Fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, undisclosed material conflicts, and deliberate manipulation of a benchmark shall be addressed under applicable research-integrity law and title XVI where its elements are met. A disagreement over methodology, an honest error corrected transparently, or inability to reproduce an earlier result shall not alone be treated as misconduct.
(a) REVIEW. A recipient shall disclose foreign institutional support, conflicting commitments, material technology-transfer obligations, and foreign control relevant to the funded work. Agencies shall use risk-based review focusing on access to sensitive technology, data, systems, and decision authority.
(b) LIMITS. A person shall not be excluded solely because of citizenship, ancestry, national origin, accent, family ties, or lawful academic collaboration. A security restriction shall identify the protected asset, relevant conduct or control, legal authority, and feasible mitigation.
(c) OPEN RESEARCH. Fundamental research intended for publication shall remain open to lawful collaboration except where applicable export-control, sanctions, classification, or other specific law requires restriction. This Act does not itself classify information or alter export-control jurisdiction.
(d) PROCESS. A materially adverse determination shall provide an unclassified explanation sufficient for a meaningful response to the extent compatible with lawful protection of information. The affected person may propose access controls, conflict resolution, or other mitigation. Agencies shall maintain records of errors and corrective actions to prevent recurring mistaken identity.
(a) PROGRAM. The National Science Foundation, with the Department of Energy and National Institute of Standards and Technology, shall provide competitive access to compute, research datasets, model-evaluation environments, and technical support for eligible researchers, public institutions, and small enterprises.
(b) TERMS. Access shall be allocated under transparent scientific and public-benefit criteria. Providers shall not require purchase of unrelated commercial services, exclusive use of a proprietary model, transfer of users’ research intellectual property, or permission to train on confidential user inputs as a condition of subsidized access.
(c) SECURITY AND PRIVACY. Sensitive datasets shall be accessed through controlled environments with authorization, logging, minimization, and export review where required. Users shall receive clear notice of monitoring undertaken for security. Monitoring shall not extend to unrelated private communications.
(d) COST AND ENVIRONMENT. Awards shall disclose compute pricing, utilization, portability, energy and water use, and exit costs. A provider’s donated access shall be valued at independently verified incremental public benefit rather than an inflated list price. Access programs shall comply with titles V and X where applicable and shall not create an uncapped Federal obligation to buy capacity.
(a) ESTABLISHMENT. The Secretary and specialized agencies shall provide competitive awards for prototype development, engineering validation, manufacturability, safety testing, regulatory science, and commercial-scale feasibility in priority sectors.
(b) PLAN. An award shall identify the technical uncertainty to be reduced, the evidence necessary to proceed, expected customers or public users, required permits, supply dependencies, intellectual-property access, environmental performance, and the next financing stage. A proposed sale to an affiliated entity shall not alone establish market demand.
(c) STAGES. Initial awards may support feasibility without requiring a completed factory plan. Later awards shall require progressively stronger technical and financial evidence. A failed stage shall ordinarily end further commercial commitment unless a revised path demonstrates a distinct, reasonable public benefit.
(d) TRANSITION. Agencies shall coordinate with existing small-business, laboratory-transfer, and manufacturing-extension programs. Referrals and shared due diligence may reduce duplication, but an applicant shall not be required to surrender rights or pay a broker solely to move between Federal programs.
(a) SUPPORT. Agencies may fund pilot manufacturing lines, clinical and agricultural testing platforms, advanced production studios, grid testbeds, and other shared demonstration assets. The applicant shall establish a measurable capability unavailable on reasonable terms from existing facilities.
(b) OPEN ACCESS. A publicly supported asset shall publish transparent access rules, capacity allocation, fees, safety requirements, and confidentiality terms. At least 25 percent of subsidized available user time shall be offered to unaffiliated small enterprises and research institutions at cost-based rates unless demand is insufficient after documented outreach.
(c) OPERATIONS. The award shall specify an operator, maintenance schedule, calibration and quality systems, liability allocation, cybersecurity, environmental compliance, and a financially credible operating plan. Capital support does not promise perpetual Federal operating support.
(d) IP AND DATA. Users shall retain their own confidential process data and inventions subject to preannounced Government rights in separately funded research. The operator shall not use a user’s data to compete with that user or condition access on an exclusive commercial license unrelated to the facility’s operation.
(a) ESTABLISHMENT. The Secretary may competitively establish or expand applied innovation institutes linking firms, universities, community colleges, laboratories, and workers. Each institute shall focus on a defined engineering or production problem and publish a five-year technical and financial plan.
(b) FUNDING MIX. Federal base support may finance shared capabilities and precompetitive research. Commercial contract work shall be separately accounted for and priced to avoid hidden subsidies to a dominant member. An institute shall seek a diversified revenue base without making private cofinancing a prerequisite for fundamental public-interest work.
(c) GOVERNANCE. No single commercial controlled group shall hold a majority of voting authority. Governing rules shall provide independent conflict review, meaningful small-business and workforce participation, transparent membership fees, and nonexclusive access to shared results where appropriate.
(d) RENEWAL. Federal support shall be reviewed at least every five years against utilization, technology transfer, independent customer demand, workforce training, financial integrity, and public access. Membership volume, patents, or press coverage alone shall not establish effectiveness. Nonrenewal shall include a transition plan for users and protection of public assets.
(a) AUTHORITY. The Secretary may provide grants, loans, guarantees, and performance payments for construction, modernization, or expansion of domestic productive capacity in a priority sector. Assistance shall meet the funding-gap, cost-share, environmental, corporate, and competition requirements of this Act.
(b) EVIDENCE. A final construction award shall require an independently reviewed design, credible demand evidence, site control, a permitting schedule, binding financing commitments sufficient for the approved stage, a workforce plan, and identified energy, water, and critical-input arrangements.
(c) CAPACITY. The agreement shall specify productive capability, quality, reliability, maintenance, domestic operating period, and supply-continuity obligations. A building, equipment order, or nominal nameplate rating shall not satisfy a production milestone without verified commissioning or the expressly specified deliverable.
(d) NO AUTOMATIC RESCUE. A cost overrun or threatened departure does not entitle the recipient to additional assistance. A proposed increase shall undergo a new funding-gap and public-benefit review, comply with award caps, and be financed within available amounts. Officers shall not conceal expected overruns to secure initial approval.
(a) PROGRAM. The Secretary shall support domestic capabilities for machine tools, precision components, specialty chemicals and gases, substrates, sensors, power equipment, secure firmware, and other inputs whose interruption would materially impair a priority sector.
(b) BOTTLENECK REVIEW. Awards shall identify the specific input, current dependencies, alternative suppliers, lead time, qualification requirements, and the costs of a disruption. Broad commodity production shall not qualify merely because a commodity can be used by a priority sector.
(c) REPAIR AND MAINTENANCE. Eligible projects include domestic repair, remanufacturing, spare-parts production, technician training, and secure replacement of obsolete controls. An award may require documentation and continuity licenses necessary to maintain the assisted capability.
(d) INVENTORIES. Strategic inventories shall have an identified custodian, rotation schedule, quality checks, release criteria, insurance or other loss protection, and disposal rules. Stockpiling shall not be used to manipulate private prices or give an affiliated buyer preferential access. Inventory purchase commitments shall be fully reserved within the applicable appropriation.
(a) PERIOD. A commercial production award shall require maintenance of the assisted domestic productive capability for at least fifteen years after ordinary operation begins. A demonstration award may specify a shorter useful-life period, not less than five years, where justified by the technology and disclosed before selection.
(b) CONTENT. The covenant shall identify the assets, minimum functional capability, maintenance, ordinary utilization assumptions, and reasonable downtime. It shall measure the capability purchased rather than require production of goods for which no lawful demand exists.
(c) MODIFICATION. The agency may approve a transition to a successor technology or equivalent domestic capability after public-benefit and environmental review, provided the change does not reduce the verified Federal benefit without proportionate repayment. Modification shall not permit conversion of a funded plant into a passive real-estate asset while claiming the original production commitment.
(d) REMEDIES. Voluntary closure, relocation, or material diversion inconsistent with the covenant shall permit proportionate recovery under section 1603. Recovery may extend to the full award where the recipient knowingly defeats the principal domestic-capacity purpose. A temporary shutdown caused by an event beyond reasonable control shall be handled under the published continuity and corrective-action terms.
(a) FUNDED ASSETS. A recipient shall not use assistance to construct, expand, or operate production assets outside the United States, except for the bounded joint-research activities expressly permitted by title IX. A foreign research subaward does not authorize a foreign commercial factory subsidy.
(b) SENSITIVE CAPACITY. For ten years after a production award concerning technology designated under section 905, a recipient shall not undertake a transaction materially expanding the same sensitive capability for a foreign entity of concern or transfer restricted funded know-how to such an entity. The agreement shall identify the relevant technology and expansion threshold before acceptance.
(c) ORDINARY GLOBAL ACTIVITY. This section does not prohibit lawful exports, unrelated foreign investment, purchases from a lawful nonpartner supplier, or research collaboration that does not transfer restricted technology. Compliance with export-control, sanctions, investment-screening, and other applicable law remains independently required.
(d) ADVANCE DETERMINATION. A recipient may request a binding written determination regarding a proposed transaction after complete disclosure. The Secretary shall respond within 90 days or identify the specific additional information required. Approval under this Act is not approval under another statute.
(a) ASSET REGISTER. Recipients shall maintain an inventory of assisted capital assets, location, ownership, liens, lease interests, useful life, and disposition restrictions. The agency shall perfect a security or reversionary interest where authorized, necessary, and proportionate to the form of assistance.
(b) LEASES. A lease or sale-leaseback shall identify the economic beneficiary and shall not inflate eligible cost beyond independently supported value. A lease shall preserve the recipient’s ability to comply with operating, inspection, maintenance, and environmental duties throughout the required period.
(c) DISPOSITION. A sale, abandonment, exclusive privatization, or material repurposing requires approval under section 209. The agency shall determine the remaining Federal interest, public-service continuity, successor duties, and disposition of proceeds before releasing a restriction.
(d) REAL PROPERTY. This Act grants no independent eminent-domain authority. Acquisition shall comply with otherwise applicable property, relocation, environmental, and Tribal law. A public subsidy does not establish that a taking satisfies a constitutional or statutory public-use requirement.
(a) PLAN. A major facility shall maintain a proportionate continuity plan addressing physical hazards, cyber incidents, power and water interruption, critical suppliers, extreme weather, workforce safety, and recovery of essential functions. The plan shall identify actual dependencies rather than generic assurances.
(b) EXERCISES. At least annually, the operator shall test a material component of the plan and record corrective actions. Public agencies and local responders shall receive relevant emergency information subject to security and confidentiality protections.
(c) REDUNDANCY. An agency may finance redundancy, alternative tooling, geographically separated backups, and repair capacity where the expected resilience benefit is documented. Multiple facilities under a single vulnerable control system shall not be represented as independent redundancy.
(d) INCIDENTS. A material interruption affecting an award milestone or essential public service shall be reported within 72 hours after reasonable confirmation, with an initial factual report and later updates. Reporting does not substitute for faster notification required by environmental, safety, cybersecurity, or other law.
(a) SERVICES. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, through existing lawful extension channels and competitive partners, shall offer smaller manufacturers technical assistance on process design, quality control, energy and water efficiency, cybersecurity, automation, supply qualification, and workforce training.
(b) VOUCHERS. Agencies may issue bounded vouchers for independent testing, engineering, and certification services. A voucher shall specify the service, maximum reimbursement, eligible providers, and evidence of completion. A provider may not inflate its price because the purchaser has a voucher.
(c) INDEPENDENCE. Advice shall not be conditioned on buying a particular vendor’s product. A consultant shall disclose commissions, equity, referral fees, and other material commercial relationships.
(d) EVALUATION. The program shall report verified adoption, productivity, quality, energy savings, workforce retention, and customer outcomes without treating every assisted firm’s subsequent revenue as caused by the assistance. Small-business participation shall not require surrender of confidential production data beyond what is necessary for service delivery, audit, and properly protected evaluation.
(a) BASELINE COMPLIANCE. Each covered facility shall comply with applicable Federal, State, Tribal, and local environmental, occupational-safety, land-use, and public-health law. A valid permit is necessary where required but does not replace an additional, expressly applicable condition under this title.
(b) MAJOR FACILITIES. A major covered facility shall comply with sections 503 through 511 and an enforceable facility compliance plan before receiving a construction or operating disbursement. Other covered facilities shall meet the proportionate technology- and activity-specific standards promulgated under section 502. Thresholds affect the additional program requirements, not duties under other environmental laws.
(c) BOUNDARY. The Administrator shall include assisted units, indispensable common utilities, and adjacent integrated units under common operational control in a facility boundary. Allocation to an unrelated tenant or separate university department shall be based on actual use. Moving a polluting process to a commonly controlled unit, outsourcing a process while retaining effective operational control, or relabeling a unit shall not establish an emissions reduction.
(d) DURATION. Additional facility duties shall continue for the operating-covenant period under section 406 and through required remediation and closeout. A successor that accepts an approved transfer shall assume them. Recordation and notice of continuing restrictions shall comply with applicable property law. This title does not create an unrecorded superior lien or override bankruptcy law.
(e) INDEPENDENT AUTHORITY. Congress expressly authorizes the Administrator to prescribe and enforce greenhouse-gas, electricity-accounting, air-pollution, water, hazardous-substance, waste, monitoring, and financial-assurance requirements for facilities supported under this Act within the numerical and procedural limits of this title. That authority is supplementary to, and does not enlarge by implication, the Administrator’s authority under another statute.
(a) RULES. Within 180 days after enactment, the Administrator shall propose, and within 365 days shall finalize, common accounting, monitoring, and minimum facility rules. Within 540 days, the Administrator shall finalize sector-specific standards for high-emitting, high-water-use, and high-toxicity facility classes, followed within 720 days by remaining materially distinct classes. A major award dependent on a missing sector standard shall not proceed to irreversible construction until that standard is effective.
(b) RECORD. A standard shall identify the covered process, pollutant or resource, unit of measurement, baseline, averaging period, allowable variability, test method, reporting frequency, applicable limit, compliance date, and enforcement consequence. The record shall evaluate best-performing comparable facilities, feasible controls, cross-media effects, cost, grid and water constraints, and the financing provided by this Act.
(c) RESEARCH AND SMALL FACILITIES. Requirements for experimental processes shall distinguish controlled research from ordinary commercial operation and shall include containment, exposure, and reporting safeguards. Smaller facilities may use approved simplified measurement and verification, but not an unsupported self-certification that pollution is immaterial.
(d) UPDATES. Standards shall be reviewed at least every four years. A stricter prospective standard shall ordinarily provide at least two years for capital adaptation unless an imminent threat requires earlier action under section 1605. No update shall retroactively create criminal liability or alter an already completed compliance measurement.
(e) NO PRIVATE LAWMAKING. Consensus standards may inform a rule, but private auditors, trade associations, and certificate issuers shall not determine binding legal limits or change them without agency rulemaking. Applicable requirements shall be publicly accessible without an unavoidable purchase from a private publisher.
(a) BASELINE. Before award, the Administrator shall approve a fixed baseline for the major covered facility using verified direct emissions, purchased-energy emissions, output, and capacity. For a new facility, the baseline shall use the median emissions intensity of comparable United States processes during 2023 through 2025, or the earliest reliable representative period approved by rule, multiplied by approved design output. An already near-zero process shall maintain that performance rather than receive credit for an artificial baseline.
(b) REQUIREMENTS. By the end of project year 5, the facility shall reduce gross direct and attributed purchased-energy greenhouse-gas intensity at least 40 percent below the approved baseline. By the end of project year 12, it shall reduce gross emissions at least 90 percent below the approved baseline intensity and fixed annual emissions budget, and neutralize the remaining eligible residual emissions under subsection (d). The compliance plan shall contain annual intermediate milestones.
(c) ACCOUNTING. The facility shall report direct process and combustion emissions; purchased electricity, steam, heat, and cooling; and material upstream and downstream emissions in separate accounts. The Administrator shall prevent shifting emissions to a controlled supplier, speculative avoided-emissions claims, double counting, and resetting a baseline after an acquisition. Capacity expansion may be approved only with a revised absolute emissions budget that preserves the required reduction for existing assisted capacity and applies the same standard to new assisted capacity.
(d) RESIDUALS. Removals may neutralize no more than 10 percent of the approved baseline emissions budget after direct reduction. They shall be additional, independently verified, net of lifecycle emissions, uniquely registered, retired against one claim, and supported by expected storage durability of at least 1,000 years, a reversal-replacement mechanism, and adequate monitoring and financial assurance. An avoided emission, temporary biological storage claim, or unverified land-use offset shall not qualify as a durable removal under this subsection.
(e) LIMITS. Removals do not satisfy local air-pollutant, toxic-release, water, or workplace-exposure requirements. An emission factor, baseline, or removal methodology shall not be changed after a reporting period to manufacture compliance. Technical extensions are available only under section 610 and do not excuse independently applicable law.
(a) CLEAN ELECTRICITY. For this Act, clean electricity means electricity demonstrated under an Administrator-approved lifecycle method to emit not more than 50 grams of carbon-dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour, including material fuel-cycle emissions and measured methane leakage where relevant. Eligibility shall be based on verified performance, not a fuel label. Storage shall inherit the verified attributes of charging energy after losses.
(b) SCHEDULE. A major covered facility shall obtain at least 60 percent of its annual electricity from qualifying clean sources in project year 1, at least 90 percent in year 5, and 100 percent in year 8. Beginning in year 10, at least 90 percent of its annual consumption shall be matched with qualifying generation in the same hour; by year 12, all ordinary operating consumption shall be hourly matched, subject to subsection (e).
(c) DELIVERY AND ADDITIONALITY. A clean-energy claim shall demonstrate deliverability within the relevant interconnected region, ownership and retirement of the associated attributes, and no double sale. For a materially increased industrial load, the compliance plan shall identify new generation, verified uprates, qualifying storage, or another demonstrably additional supply contribution. Existing generation may qualify only to the extent the Administrator finds that the claim does not simply displace another customer’s clean supply without replacement.
(d) DUAL REPORTING. Operators shall disclose both location-based emissions and the emissions attributed to contractual supply under the approved matching method. An annual certificate purchased from a non-deliverable region shall not be represented as hourly local clean supply. Contracts shall retain the data necessary for verification.
(e) EMERGENCIES. Essential backup operation during a declared grid emergency or an independently documented outage threatening life, safety, or critical equipment may be excluded from the matching denominator for not more than 240 hours in a year. All actual emissions remain reportable and subject to section 503 and other law. The Administrator may approve additional hours only through a public, time-limited emergency finding. Planned economic dispatch, avoidable contract failure, or ordinary price increases are not emergencies.
(a) PERFORMANCE. A major covered facility shall use best-performing technically feasible controls for particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, volatile organic compounds, hazardous air pollutants, and other material emissions from its assisted processes. The Administrator shall establish numerical or objectively measurable source-specific limits under section 502, considering comparable controlled facilities and the resources provided for compliance.
(b) PERMITS. A program compliance plan shall identify all required permits and enforceable limits. It shall not rely solely on a generalized instruction to avoid contributing to an ambient condition that the operator cannot identify or control. This Act does not replace permit procedures or the legal standards governing permits under another statute.
(c) MONITORING. Continuous monitoring shall be required where technically reliable and proportionate to risk; otherwise the rule shall prescribe validated periodic testing, process parameters, and conservative estimation. Startup, shutdown, malfunction, maintenance, and backup operation shall be separately reported and shall not create an automatic exclusion from the applicable limit.
(d) EXPOSURE. A project shall evaluate material exposure pathways to workers and nearby residents, including fugitive emissions and freight reasonably attributable to the facility. Where a model identifies an unacceptable risk under a published health-based criterion, the agency shall require redesign, additional controls, or a different location before award. A compensation payment to a community does not authorize an otherwise prohibited exposure.
(a) WATER PLAN. Before a major facility award, the applicant shall document water sources, legal rights, seasonal availability, withdrawal and consumption, recycling, discharge quality, drought contingencies, and effects on drinking-water reliability and ecosystems. Speculative future water rights or an unapproved diversion shall not satisfy the requirement.
(b) PERFORMANCE. The Administrator shall establish sector-specific water-intensity limits and reuse requirements under section 502. A high-water-use process shall employ technically feasible recirculation, leak detection, and nonpotable or reclaimed supplies where their lifecycle impacts are lower and public-health standards are met. A facility shall not claim reuse by transferring untreated waste to another entity.
(c) LOCAL CONSTRAINTS. In a basin subject to material scarcity, the agency shall require a verified water budget demonstrating that the assisted demand will not impair an existing lawful drinking-water supply or rely on depletion prohibited by applicable law. Conservation claims shall be additional, geographically relevant, enforceable, and not counted by multiple users.
(d) DISCHARGE. Effluent shall meet permit conditions and additional program limits for material pollutants. Dilution, relocation of discharge, or sale of wastewater shall not substitute for required treatment. Brine, thermal discharge, and treatment residuals shall be included in the assessment.
(e) RESILIENCE. The plan shall specify operating reductions or alternative supply during drought. Assistance does not create a priority over senior water rights, authorize interstate transfers, or displace State or Tribal water law.
(a) INVENTORY. A major facility shall maintain a verified inventory of hazardous substances, including quantities, uses, exposure pathways, releases, storage, disposal, and emergency controls. The Administrator shall specify reporting thresholds based on toxicity, persistence, bioaccumulation, and quantity rather than exempting a substance solely because it is used in a priority sector.
(b) PFAS. For this Act, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances are substances containing at least one fully fluorinated methyl or methylene carbon atom, subject to scientifically justified exclusions specified by rule for substances that do not present the relevant persistence or exposure concern. Intentional nonessential uses in assisted operations shall cease within five years after the applicable final rule.
(c) ESSENTIAL USE. A temporary essential-use authorization may be granted only where the use is necessary for health, safety, or operation of a technology with a material public benefit; no technically feasible safer substitute performs the necessary function; and the operator implements containment, monitoring, waste controls, and a funded substitution plan. An authorization shall identify the substance and use, last no more than two years, and be renewed only on fresh evidence. The total transition shall not exceed eight years without a subsequent Act of Congress.
(d) SUBSTITUTION. A replacement shall be assessed for material health and environmental risks to prevent substitution with an equally harmful chemical. A proprietary formulation may receive lawful confidentiality protection, but emergency responders, treating professionals, and regulators shall receive information necessary to protect health under controlled access.
(e) EXISTING LAW. This section does not authorize a substance prohibited under the Toxic Substances Control Act or another law, weaken a cleanup obligation, or permit intentional release merely because a use is temporarily authorized.
(a) PLAN. A covered production facility shall identify material inputs, hazardous and nonhazardous waste, prevention opportunities, reuse, remanufacturing, recovery, and final disposal. Major facilities shall report mass balance and explain significant unaccounted losses.
(b) PERFORMANCE. The Administrator shall establish sector-specific recovery and waste-intensity standards based on verified technical feasibility. Waste combustion shall not be reported as material recycling. An export shall count as recovery only if the recipient demonstrates lawful handling, actual recovery, and protection equivalent to the applicable award conditions.
(c) PRODUCTS. Where an award finances a durable product, the agreement shall require reasonable repair, parts, software-support, and end-of-life arrangements consistent with safety, cybersecurity, and intellectual-property law. A medical implant, safety-critical component, or secure system may receive a narrowly justified alternative where unrestricted repair would create a demonstrable hazard.
(d) RESPONSIBILITY. A commercial recipient shall fund collection or recovery obligations created by the award and shall not shift them to a municipality without an accepted and funded agreement. A change of brand, importer, ownership, or product-as-a-service contract shall not erase an accepted take-back obligation.
(e) METRICS. Reported circularity shall distinguish reuse, high-value material recovery, downcycling, energy recovery, and disposal. A theoretical recyclability claim is not evidence that a product is actually collected or recycled.
(a) SYSTEM. Each major facility shall implement a monitoring and verification system sufficient to establish compliance with its plan. It shall preserve raw measurements, calibration, maintenance, missing-data treatment, emission factors, invoices, certificates, and corrections for at least twelve years after the relevant report and longer while a timely investigation is pending.
(b) VERIFIERS. Annual verification shall be performed by an accredited independent verifier selected through a process that prevents compensation contingent on a favorable finding. A verifier shall not verify a control system or environmental claim it materially designed for the recipient during the preceding three years. Lead verification personnel shall rotate at least every five years.
(c) AGENCY CHECKS. The Administrator shall conduct risk-based inspections, random validation, and cross-checks against permits, energy records, water records, and procurement data. A verification opinion does not transfer the operator’s duty to comply or create immunity for facts the operator knows are false.
(d) PUBLIC DATA. Annual facility emissions, water consumption, energy matching, material waste, compliance determinations, and final enforcement outcomes shall be published in accessible form. Facility emissions and final safety findings may not be withheld solely because they are commercially unfavorable. Security-sensitive layouts and trade-secret process details shall be segregated under section 1508.
(e) CORRECTIONS. An operator shall correct a material error within 30 days after discovery and explain the reason, affected periods, and financial consequences. Prompt correction may qualify for section 1602 but does not excuse deliberate falsification, an ongoing harmful condition, or a reporting duty under another law.
(a) ASSESSMENT. Before an award for a major facility, the administering agency and the Administrator shall assess reasonably foreseeable local health, environmental, water, housing, traffic, and infrastructure effects attributable to the assisted project and functionally connected facilities. Existing cumulative pollution and vulnerability shall inform the assessment of incremental exposure and feasible mitigation.
(b) DISTINCT AUTHORITY. This assessment is an express funding condition under this Act and is separate from the scope of analysis required by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. Existing studies may be used where adequate. The agency shall not imply that another statute requires analysis beyond that statute’s actual reach.
(c) PARTICIPATION. The applicant shall publish a project summary, meaningful alternatives, proposed controls, and a draft community-benefit plan at least 60 days before final award. Agencies shall provide accessible participation, translation where reasonably necessary, and technical assistance for materially affected communities. Consultation shall occur before irreversible siting commitments financed by the award.
(d) DECISION. An award shall not be approved where the record establishes an incremental exposure exceeding a published health-based limit or a material impairment of essential drinking-water service that cannot be prevented through enforceable measures. Where cumulative burden is material, the agency shall identify additional feasible exposure reduction, alternatives, and a reasoned decision. A community payment is not a substitute for compliance.
(e) PLAN. The final award shall contain measurable mitigation, responsible parties, schedules, monitoring, public complaint channels, and remedies. Commitments to local hiring, training, transport, or housing shall be lawful and funded. No community organization receives a private veto over a Federal permit, and no agreement may require residents to waive personal injury claims or lawful criticism.
(a) ASSURANCE. Before a major facility begins operation, the operator shall provide financial assurance adequate for reasonably estimated decommissioning, hazardous-material management, required restoration, and award-specific post-closure monitoring. Estimates shall be prepared independently and updated at least every three years and after a material change.
(b) INSTRUMENTS. Acceptable instruments include a funded trust, qualified surety, irrevocable letter of credit, or other independently secured mechanism approved by rule. An unsecured parent guarantee shall not be the sole assurance. The instrument shall remain accessible for its specified purpose to the extent permitted by bankruptcy and other applicable law.
(c) REPLENISHMENT. If assurance becomes materially inadequate or a provider loses eligibility, the operator shall replace or supplement it within 60 days, subject to a narrowly tailored interim protection order. Assistance may be suspended for failure, but an agency shall account for immediate public-safety and continuity needs before stopping an essential service.
(d) CLOSURE. A closure plan shall address worker notice, community communication, contamination, data and software continuity, disposition of funded assets, and final verification. Approval of closure does not release liability under another environmental law.
(e) CARBON STORAGE. A credited removal involving geological or mineral storage shall include a long-term monitoring and reversal-response plan, financial provision for at least 100 years of post-injection stewardship where applicable, and a separately funded replacement buffer reflecting remaining risk. No Federal guarantee of perpetual storage, private solvency, or compensation is created by this Act.
(a) ESTABLISHMENT. The Secretary of Energy shall administer grants, loans, and guarantees to finance incremental investments necessary to meet or exceed title V. Eligible investments include industrial electrification, process redesign, pollution controls, heat recovery, efficient cooling, water reuse, chemical substitution, measurement systems, and verified durable-removal infrastructure.
(b) SHARE. Grants may finance up to 50 percent of verified incremental compliance cost, or 75 percent for a small business or public or Tribal facility with demonstrated financing constraints. This subsection is an express exception to section 205 only for the segregated compliance investment. Combined grants and allocated credits shall not exceed the applicable percentage or actual eligible cost.
(c) CONDITIONS. The applicant shall identify the funded control, baseline, expected performance, commissioning test, maintenance, and independent verification. A compliance grant may precede attainment of the future standard but shall not excuse a present violation of existing law. An operator under an enforceable corrective order may receive financing only where the agency finds that financing will accelerate lawful compliance and not substitute for a penalty or a responsible party’s existing cleanup liability.
(d) EXCLUSIONS. Assistance shall not pay a fine, damages award, fraudulent claim, or cost already recoverable from an obligated polluter or insurer. Funding for a control does not immunize its operator from personal or corporate liability for later misconduct.
(a) ELIGIBLE PROJECTS. The Department of Energy may support transmission, distribution, transformers, substations, advanced conductors, grid-enhancing technologies, storage, and interconnection upgrades needed for domestic innovation facilities or broader regional reliability.
(b) PLANNING. A project shall identify load forecasts, feasible alternatives, affected jurisdictions, engineering standards, land and permitting needs, reliability effects, and cost allocation. Forecasts shall distinguish contracted demand from speculative inquiries and shall be updated before major commitments.
(c) COST PROTECTION. Where an upgrade principally serves a major private load, that customer shall bear the portion of costs and abandonment risk attributable to its demand through an enforceable contribution, security, or regulator-approved tariff. Federal assistance shall not be used to conceal a transfer of speculative project costs to ordinary ratepayers.
(d) AUTHORITY. This Act does not confer general transmission siting, eminent-domain, or retail-rate authority. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and State, Tribal, and local authorities retain their statutory responsibilities. Award decisions shall not predetermine a regulator’s findings.
(e) COMPLETION. Agreements shall specify energized capacity, reliability, maintenance, open-access obligations where applicable, and verification. A signed interconnection agreement alone shall not be reported as delivered power.
(a) SUPPORT. The Secretary of Energy may finance renewable generation, geothermal, nuclear energy, qualifying low-emission firm generation, storage, and other resources meeting the performance requirements of title V. Selection shall assess lifecycle emissions, reliability value, system integration, land and water effects, safety, construction risk, and delivered cost.
(b) NO TECHNOLOGY WAIVER. A favored technology label shall not excuse emissions, waste, worker-safety, or siting requirements. Nuclear projects shall retain applicable Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing, safeguards, waste, decommissioning, and financial-assurance obligations. Assistance is not a reactor license.
(c) STORAGE. Storage claims shall account for round-trip losses, charging source, dispatch capability, degradation, recycling, and safety. A project shall not claim clean generation and clean storage credits for the same undelivered energy without the accounting required by title XIV.
(d) FINANCIAL DISCIPLINE. A construction commitment shall be staged to technical readiness and permit status. A completion guarantee, sponsor equity contribution, or other risk protection may be required. The United States shall not assume uncapped construction, fuel-price, disposal, or operational liability through an award.
(a) PROGRAM. The Secretary of Energy shall support industrial heat pumps, electrified process heat, thermal storage, advanced controls, efficient motors, heat recovery, and other technologies with independently measurable energy or emissions benefits.
(b) MEASUREMENT. An award shall specify production-normalized baseline use, operating conditions, measurement boundaries, degradation assumptions, and verification. Savings shall be measured against the approved counterfactual and shall not include reductions caused solely by lower output, offshoring, or a closure financed under another program.
(c) INTEGRATION. A retrofit plan shall address worker training, process safety, equipment interoperability, reliability, and effects on air and water pollution. A reduction in greenhouse gases shall not justify an otherwise unlawful increase in another pollutant.
(d) ACCESS. Technical assistance and standardized performance contracts may support smaller facilities. Contracts shall disclose financing charges, guaranteed and nonguaranteed savings, maintenance duties, and dispute resolution. No private contractor may bind the United States to make up a recipient’s savings shortfall without express, funded authority.
(a) LOAD PLAN. A facility designed to add at least 50 megawatts of electric demand shall submit a verified load, power-supply, interconnection, water, cooling, backup-generation, and demand-flexibility plan. The plan shall distinguish ordinary operation, peak demand, commissioning, and contingency operation.
(b) SYSTEM EFFECTS. Before award, the agency shall evaluate effects on reliability, local pollution, water availability, power prices, and stranded infrastructure. The applicant shall demonstrate enforceable arrangements for its attributable upgrade and abandonment costs under section 602.
(c) OPERATING METRICS. Data-center recipients shall report utilization, total energy, cooling energy, power-usage effectiveness, water consumption, heat reuse where feasible, and useful computing output under standardized methods. No single efficiency ratio shall substitute for absolute resource accounting.
(d) FLEXIBILITY. Awards may require technically feasible, compensated demand response, storage, or scheduling flexibility, but shall preserve essential health, safety, and critical public-service functions. Claimed flexibility shall be tested and shall not count capacity already committed elsewhere.
(e) COMMERCIAL ACCESS. Subsidized compute capacity shall comply with section 310 and title X where applicable. A facility shall not condition access to public research capacity on unrelated exclusive data or software arrangements.
(a) SUPPORT. The Administrator and Secretary of Energy, within their assigned accounts, may support reclaimed-water systems, treatment, leak reduction, industrial pretreatment, recycling infrastructure, and shared waste-management systems necessary for compliant domestic facilities.
(b) BENEFICIARY CONTRIBUTIONS. Private users shall contribute costs proportionate to their demand and pollution load, unless an independently documented public benefit justifies a stated subsidy. Agreements shall protect drinking-water customers from uncompensated industrial risk.
(c) STANDARDS. Projects shall meet applicable drinking-water, clean-water, waste, public-health, and environmental-review requirements. A shared system shall identify who is legally responsible for monitoring, releases, maintenance, and response when a user fails to comply.
(d) OPERATING PLAN. An award shall include long-term revenue, maintenance, replacement, staffing, and emergency plans. Project promoters shall disclose whether future rate increases or appropriations are necessary. A capital grant does not authorize operation of an inadequately funded utility.
(e) ACCESS. A shared public system shall use transparent connection and service terms. An anchor company shall not use a subsidized utility to exclude unrelated qualified businesses without a documented capacity or safety basis.
(a) COORDINATION. For an assisted major project requiring multiple Federal approvals, the agencies shall identify a lead coordinating agency within 30 days after a complete coordination request and establish a public, integrated review schedule within 60 days. The schedule shall identify applicant submissions, agency decisions, consultation, and dependencies.
(b) EXISTING LAW. Each agency shall comply with applicable environmental-review time limits and substantive statutes. Agencies may use joint documents, existing reliable studies, concurrent review, and common data systems where lawful. This section does not expand the geographical or causal scope of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 by implication.
(c) CAPACITY. Appropriated administrative funds may support qualified agency staff, technical assistance to Tribal governments, and independent analysis. Applicant-funded review support shall remain under agency control, with conflicts disclosed and no delegation of the decision.
(d) MISSED DEADLINE. A missed deadline requires a public explanation, corrective schedule, and notice to Congress for delays exceeding 180 days. It does not issue a permit, eliminate consultation, waive a health standard, or foreclose judicial review.
(e) DISPUTES. Interagency disputes shall be elevated to the respective agency heads and recorded. The Council may facilitate resolution but may not direct a regulator to approve a particular permit or decide a contested scientific finding.
(a) SITE READINESS. Agencies may finance site characterization, lawful brownfield assessment, infrastructure design, freight access, power and water planning, and remediation not chargeable to an identified responsible party, where the activity supports a credible cluster of eligible domestic projects.
(b) NO SPECULATIVE SUBSIDY. Land acquisition, infrastructure, or remediation shall not be funded solely on a developer’s unsupported expectation that a future tenant may qualify. A site plan shall identify potential uses, environmental constraints, ownership, valuation, disposition rules, and a realistic schedule.
(c) COMMUNITY EFFECTS. The plan shall address housing, transit, emergency services, cumulative environmental burden, and displacement. Publicly financed land-value gains shall be addressed through lease, resale, recapture, or public-service terms disclosed before award.
(d) COMPETITION. Shared infrastructure shall use transparent access terms and avoid an exclusive conveyance to an anchor tenant without fair valuation and public-benefit findings. An agency shall not require a State or municipality to offer an additional tax abatement as a condition for Federal site support.
(a) PLAN. A demonstration involving hydrogen, carbon management, advanced nuclear systems, subsurface energy, high-energy storage, or another material process hazard shall have an independently reviewed safety case, emergency plan, test protocol, monitoring, decommissioning provision, and regulator engagement appropriate to its stage.
(b) HYDROGEN. A project represented as clean hydrogen shall demonstrate lifecycle emissions not exceeding 1 kilogram of carbon-dioxide equivalent per kilogram of hydrogen under an approved method accounting for electricity sourcing, upstream fuel emissions, material leakage, and processing. A claim based solely on a theoretical capture rate is insufficient.
(c) CARBON MANAGEMENT. Captured carbon shall be credited only after measurement of net avoided or removed emissions, transport, energy use, storage, and reversal risk. Carbon used in a short-lived product shall not be represented as durable removal. Carbon-capture assistance shall not justify a local-pollution exemption.
(d) SCIENTIFIC LIMITS. Where a technology or measurement method remains uncertain, an award shall specify the uncertainty and fund validation rather than certify an unproven commercial claim. Demonstration status does not waive a required safety or environmental permit.
(a) TECHNICAL EXTENSION. The Administrator may extend a deadline under section 503 or the hourly-matching deadline under section 504 for a particular major facility for not more than 36 months in total if independent engineering evidence demonstrates a material technical or infrastructure obstacle outside the operator’s reasonable control, timely good-faith compliance work, and absence of a feasible lawful alternative despite available financing.
(b) CONDITIONS. An extension shall require all feasible interim reductions, a funded completion plan, quarterly public progress reports, restrictions on distributions under section 703, and a proportionate withholding of undisbursed assistance. It shall not reset the baseline, permit unrestricted offsets, or relieve a local health, discharge, toxic-substance, or workplace requirement.
(c) PROCESS. Except for an immediate safety event, the Administrator shall provide 30 days of public notice and respond to material comments. Findings shall identify the precise obligation, evidence, alternatives, duration, and effect on the award. Ordinary cost escalation, a higher desired profit, or failure to reserve funds is insufficient.
(d) EMERGENCY. A temporary operational adjustment necessary to prevent an imminent threat to life or essential public service may last up to 90 days, renewable once on new findings. It shall be reported to Congress within seven days and remain subject to applicable emergency powers and limits under other law.
(e) ACCOUNTABILITY. An extension or adjustment shall not extinguish liability for preexisting misconduct, concealed noncompliance, or a false request. No agency may provide a blanket sector-wide waiver of the statutory standards in this title.
(a) BASIC COVENANT. Every commercial recipient shall agree that assistance will be used only for the approved activity, that material ownership and related-party arrangements will be disclosed, and that no transaction will be structured principally to evade an express condition of this Act.
(b) MAJOR RECIPIENTS. Sections 702 through 706 shall apply to a major recipient and the commercial controlled group bound by the parent covenant under section 208. An agency shall disclose the consequence of crossing the major-recipient threshold before the award that causes the threshold to be crossed. Deliberate splitting among affiliates does not avoid aggregation.
(c) PERIOD. The restriction period begins when the relevant award is accepted and ends five years after the last grant disbursement or tax-credit benefit under the relevant awards, or upon repayment of all outstanding principal of an assisted loan, whichever is later. A qualifying ordinary procurement payment does not restart the period unless it contains a separately identified subsidy subject to this title.
(d) PREEXISTING RIGHTS. An applicant shall resolve any contractual conflict before acceptance. This Act does not retroactively confiscate compensation vested before acceptance, but no award shall reimburse a prohibited payment or fund a new arrangement designed to preserve an otherwise prohibited benefit.
(e) NO PURCHASE OF IMMUNITY. Voluntary early repayment may end future loan-related restrictions only if permitted by the accepted instrument and after satisfaction of accrued duties. Repayment shall not terminate an environmental, domestic-capacity, privacy, worker, audit, or fraud obligation that has its own duration.
(a) PROHIBITION. During the restriction period, a bound controlled group shall not directly or indirectly repurchase its equity, fund a repurchase by an affiliate, enter a derivative or accelerated arrangement with substantially the same economic effect, or make a payment principally intended to return equity capital in evasion of this prohibition.
(b) LIMITED EXCEPTIONS. The prohibition does not apply to withholding shares solely to satisfy an employee’s actual tax liability arising from vesting; acquisition of fractional shares necessary for an otherwise lawful transaction; repurchase from a deceased or disabled nonexecutive employee under a preexisting broadly available plan; or an arm’s-length payment required by a final court order. The annual aggregate of employee-plan exceptions shall not exceed 1 percent of outstanding equity value and shall not be used to finance executive cash-outs.
(c) REORGANIZATIONS. An exchange in a bona fide reorganization with no material cash extraction may be approved after full disclosure. Approval shall preserve parent covenants and shall not waive an applicable tax on repurchases.
(d) EVIDENCE. The group shall report repurchases, retirements, derivative equivalents, and claimed exceptions quarterly. An opinion from an adviser does not substitute for disclosure of the transaction’s economic substance.
(e) REMEDY. A prohibited transaction shall require restoration of the extracted amount to the recipient or repayment of an equivalent amount of assistance, subject to the aggregate recovery and proportionality rules in title XVI. Personal penalties require the elements separately stated in that title.
(a) DISTRIBUTIONS. During the restriction period, a bound controlled group shall not make an extraordinary dividend, leveraged recapitalization, or distribution funded directly or indirectly by assistance. Ordinary annual cash dividends shall not exceed 25 percent of the group’s positive consolidated net income for the preceding fiscal year and shall be prohibited while a material award repayment, environmental assurance deficiency, unpaid wage judgment, or uncured material covenant default is outstanding.
(b) PASS-THROUGH TAXES. A pass-through entity may distribute amounts reasonably necessary to meet owners’ tax liabilities attributable to the entity’s taxable income, using a uniform rate not exceeding the highest combined Federal and applicable State marginal rate actually applicable to an owner. The distribution shall be reconciled annually and shall not include a disguised discretionary return of capital.
(c) LEVERAGE. A recipient shall not pledge an assisted essential asset to secure an unrelated affiliate’s debt, incur a related-party obligation principally to strip project earnings, or undertake a transaction that materially impairs required financial assurance or operation of the assisted capability. Legitimate project financing is permitted with disclosure and agency approval where required by the award.
(d) REVIEW. Before approving a material distribution during a technical extension under section 610, the agency shall determine that the recipient has funded required corrective measures and that the payment will not increase public exposure. Approval shall state the amount and reasons.
(e) INSOLVENCY. This section supplements, and does not displace, fraudulent-transfer, corporate-distribution, and insolvency law. It creates no preference for owners over workers, creditors, or environmental obligations.
(a) CAP. During the restriction period, annual total compensation awarded to an executive officer of a bound controlled group shall not exceed the lesser of $5,000,000 and 100 times the median annualized compensation of the group’s nonexecutive employees. Beginning in 2029, the dollar amount shall be adjusted annually by the percentage change in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers from calendar year 2027; the ratio shall not be indexed.
(b) MEASUREMENT. Total compensation includes salary, bonus, grant-date fair value of equity and options, deferred compensation accrual, retention and transaction payments, personal benefits, and amounts paid through an affiliate or a service company for the executive’s work. Investment appreciation on genuinely preexisting property not awarded for services is excluded. Compensation may not be shifted to a family member or related entity to evade the cap.
(c) MEDIAN. The median shall be calculated consistently from all employees of the bound group, with part-time compensation annualized using actual working time and with a separate disclosure of geography, contractors, and workforce changes. Workers continuously providing substantially employee-equivalent services through a controlled staffing arrangement shall not be omitted solely to inflate the ratio. Treasury shall prescribe reproducible methods without altering the statutory cap.
(d) SEVERANCE. Cash and property payable because of an executive’s termination or change in control shall not exceed one year of the executive’s lawful base salary. Accrued qualified retirement benefits and earned unpaid wages are excluded; a newly accelerated benefit is not excluded.
(e) APPLICATION. The cap is an accepted assistance condition, not a general limit on compensation in the economy. Noncompliance is subject to civil award remedies; criminal liability requires a separately proven offense under title XVI.
(a) RECOVERY POLICY. A major recipient shall adopt an enforceable policy to recover incentive compensation awarded during the restriction period to the extent calculated from materially inaccurate financial, production, environmental, or compliance information. Recovery shall equal the excess over the amount justified by corrected information, without requiring proof that the officer personally created the error.
(b) MISCONDUCT. Following a final judicial determination, an officer who knowingly directed or concealed material award fraud or a knowing endangerment offense shall forfeit incentive compensation attributable to the misconduct, subject to the court’s proportionality findings and protection against duplicative recovery.
(c) PROCESS. The officer shall receive notice, the calculation, access to nonprivileged supporting evidence, and an opportunity to contest recovery before a neutral decision-maker. The policy shall preserve court access and applicable wage protections for amounts not properly recoverable.
(d) INDEMNIFICATION. A recipient shall not indemnify a person for a criminal fine, a final civil penalty based on that person’s knowing fraud, or compensation validly recovered under this section. Reasonable advancement of defense costs is permitted under a written undertaking to repay amounts that become nonindemnifiable after final disposition.
(e) INSURANCE. Insurance for defense costs, negligent acts, victim compensation, and other lawful risks is not generally prohibited. An agency shall not treat an allegation or investigation as a final finding of misconduct.
(a) COMPLIANCE COMMITTEE. A major recipient shall maintain a governing-body committee with at least two members independent of management and material project counterparties. The committee shall have direct access to the chief compliance officer, internal audit, external verifiers, and protected whistleblower reports, and authority to require corrective action concerning the assisted activity.
(b) WORKER DIRECTOR. A substantial recipient employing at least 1,000 workers in the United States shall provide for at least one full voting director elected by its United States nonexecutive workforce to the governing body of the principal United States recipient. Existing comparable worker representation satisfies this requirement. Election procedures shall ensure secret balloting, reasonable nomination access, nonretaliation, and independent administration.
(c) DUTIES. The worker director shall have the information and fiduciary obligations applicable to other directors, with appropriate training and confidentiality. The director shall not displace a bargaining representative or waive a worker’s individual rights. An employer-controlled committee may not be used to interfere with rights protected by the National Labor Relations Act.
(d) REPORT. The committee shall annually certify that it reviewed material compliance risks, financial assurance, related-party dealings, and unresolved reports. It shall disclose the existence and status of material deficiencies without publicly identifying protected reporters.
(e) STRUCTURAL DIFFERENCES. For a noncorporate commercial form, the recipient shall create equivalent governing rights in its legally authorized management body. Foreign-parent law does not excuse governance obligations of the United States recipient that voluntarily accepts the award.
(a) REQUIREMENT. A commercial grant or other noncredit assistance with Federal support value of at least $100,000,000 shall include a competitively negotiated, independently valued participation right for the United States, unless the agency finds that an equivalent measurable public-price concession or open-access benefit provides equal or greater expected value.
(b) INSTRUMENTS. A participation right may consist of a nonvoting warrant, a capped revenue royalty, a share of project distributions, or a defined excess-return payment. Treasury shall publish valuation methods and require scenario analysis, treatment of dilution and related-party transfers, and a clear exit or termination event. An unpriced promise to share success does not satisfy this section.
(c) LIMITS. The United States shall not acquire control of a recipient through this authority. A direct or warrant-derived equity interest shall not exceed 20 percent of a class or confer management voting power without a subsequent Act of Congress. No official may use a participation right to influence editorial content, political activity, unrelated employment decisions, or lawful competition.
(d) ADMINISTRATION. Treasury shall administer commercial instruments using conflict-controlled personnel and independently verified valuations. Disposition shall be transparent and commercially reasonable, with protection against preferential insider sales. Receipts shall be deposited as provided in section 1307(e) and shall not create new spending authority.
(e) ACCOUNTING. Participation receipts shall be reported separately from taxes, loan principal, interest, asset sales, and recoveries. An amount already incorporated in a Federal credit subsidy estimate shall not be claimed again as an independent fiscal gain.
(a) DISCLOSURE. A recipient shall disclose a related-party payment exceeding $250,000 annually or 1 percent of award expenditures, whichever is less, including management fees, royalties, leases, debt, procurement, and intellectual-property transfers. Disclosure shall identify the service, pricing method, owner, and effect on eligible costs.
(b) ARM’S-LENGTH TERMS. Eligible related-party charges shall not exceed the lesser of actual allocable cost and an independently supported market price, except a specifically approved reasonable service margin. A recipient shall not use transfer pricing to shift funded value outside the project or conceal a distribution prohibited by this title.
(c) TAX. A major recipient shall maintain United States tax compliance, disclose material tax disputes, and report a proposed transaction changing its tax residence or the residence of the assisted business. This Act creates no exemption from generally applicable tax law and no presumption that a disputed tax position is fraudulent.
(d) OWNERSHIP. Award-related beneficial ownership information shall be collected under section 1506 independently of whether the entity is otherwise required to report to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. The agency shall verify actual control and shall not substitute a nominee director or mailing address for the ultimate beneficiary.
(e) ADVICE. A legitimate tax or corporate reorganization may proceed if it preserves accepted covenants and satisfies applicable law. An agency shall state the concrete evasion or risk it finds rather than penalize a lawful legal form by itself.
(a) CERTIFICATION. The principal executive and financial officers of a major recipient shall certify quarterly, after reasonable inquiry, that the report fairly states in all material respects the assistance received and used; that material known noncompliance has been disclosed; and that controls reasonably designed to verify financial, production, environmental, and ownership information are operating or their deficiencies are identified.
(b) QUALIFICATIONS. A certification shall permit a truthful explanation of uncertainty, missing information, a disputed interpretation, or an ongoing corrective action. It shall not require an officer to guarantee facts beyond reasonable verification or conceal a deficiency to avoid automatically losing eligibility.
(c) FUNCTIONAL RESPONSIBILITY. An environmental or technical officer shall certify measurements within that officer’s actual authority. Delegation of preparation does not excuse an officer who knowingly signs a materially false statement, but reasonable reliance on competent personnel is relevant to knowledge and diligence.
(d) RECORDS. The recipient shall retain the inquiry record, material supporting evidence, and identified corrections for at least twelve years. Legal privilege shall be preserved; underlying business facts and ordinary compliance records do not become privileged merely by copying counsel.
(e) LIABILITY. A materially false certification may support civil or criminal action only under the standards and procedures in title XVI. The Government shall prove each required element; a failed outcome alone does not prove a knowingly false certification.
(a) EXIT PLAN. A recipient seeking to end participation shall submit an account of funds used, outstanding obligations, assets, worker commitments, environmental duties, tax credits, security obligations, and proposed disposition. The agency shall respond within 90 days after receiving a complete plan.
(b) FINANCIAL SETTLEMENT. The agency may accept early repayment or a negotiated closeout within its lawful debt-compromise authority. It shall explain the amount, valuation, effect on public benefits, and treatment of outstanding participation rights. A political commitment, anticipated future donation, or unrelated investment announcement shall not substitute for payment.
(c) SURVIVAL. Audit, fraud recovery, vested worker claims, environmental remediation, privacy, security, and other expressly continuing duties survive financial closeout for their statutory periods. A release shall specify the particular obligation released and shall not bind another agency beyond its authority.
(d) NO CONTRACTUAL AMNESTY. No official may sell a waiver of criminal liability or prevent a competent prosecutor, inspector general, court, or affected person from exercising a preserved legal right. A settlement may resolve a civil claim only within the official’s delegated authority and subject to applicable public-disclosure rules.
(a) CONSTRUCTION. Laborers and mechanics employed by contractors and subcontractors on construction financed in whole or part under this Act shall be paid not less than prevailing wages determined by the Secretary of Labor in accordance with subchapter IV of chapter 31 of title 40, United States Code. Applicable enforcement, payroll, and anti-kickback protections shall apply as conditions of assistance.
(b) OPERATIONS. An employee performing ordinary operational work at an assisted major facility shall receive at least the higher of applicable law and $20 per hour in calendar year 2027 dollars, adjusted annually thereafter by the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers. Tips, required reimbursements, and the worker’s own equipment costs shall not satisfy the minimum. Bona fide owner labor and an educational stipend not constituting employment shall be treated according to actual facts and applicable labor law.
(c) RIGHTS. Recipients shall comply with wage, hour, safety, antidiscrimination, organizing, and collective-bargaining law. Assistance shall not finance unlawful retaliation, unlawful worker misclassification, or a payment to evade wages through a labor intermediary.
(d) FLOW-DOWN. Relevant requirements shall apply to contractors performing the assisted work, with certified payroll or proportionate records. A recipient that exercises reasonable oversight shall not be strictly liable for every undisclosed act of an independent supplier, but shall take corrective action upon actual notice and shall remain responsible for duties expressly allocated to it.
(a) PROGRAM. The Secretary of Labor, with educational and sector agencies, shall fund registered apprenticeships, preapprenticeships, technician training, laboratory and manufacturing credentials, and instructor development linked to documented workforce needs.
(b) REQUIREMENTS. A funded program shall identify employer demand, transferable competencies, training hours, qualified instruction, compensation for productive work, safety protections, completion measures, and placement support. A credential shall not be advertised as professionally recognized without evidence of recognition.
(c) CONSTRUCTION PARTICIPATION. For major assisted construction, at least 15 percent of labor hours shall be performed by qualified apprentices where available under registered programs, subject to applicable ratio requirements. A documented good-faith request denied by qualified programs may support a time-limited exception, accompanied by investment in local training capacity.
(d) ACCESS. Funds may cover necessary equipment, transportation, childcare, disability accommodation, and paid training time. A provider shall not condition participation on a noncompete agreement, an excessive training-repayment obligation, or purchase of unrelated services.
(e) RESULTS. The agency shall report completion, earnings, retention, safety, and employer satisfaction with appropriate comparison and privacy safeguards. Enrollment alone is not a completed training outcome.
(a) EQUIPMENT AND CURRICULA. The Secretary of Education and sector agencies may support community colleges, technical institutions, universities, and Tribal colleges in acquiring modern equipment and developing curricula necessary for priority-sector skills.
(b) PORTABILITY. Funded credentials shall describe demonstrated competencies in interoperable, accessible formats and permit lawful verification without surrender of unrelated personal data. A provider shall not impose a proprietary platform fee as the sole means of proving a publicly funded credential.
(c) ACADEMIC INDEPENDENCE. Employers may advise on skills but shall not control academic findings, require institutional political endorsements, or obtain exclusive access to students’ inventions unrelated to sponsored work.
(d) PROFESSIONAL LICENSURE. Agencies may support voluntary interstate and reciprocal recognition efforts. This Act does not itself license a physician, engineer, nurse, pilot, or other regulated professional or require a State to lower a competency standard.
(e) AFFORDABILITY. A funded institution shall disclose net student cost, completion, placement, and transferability. Assistance shall not be used to increase a program’s price without a documented cost basis or to shift an employer’s ordinary recruitment expense to trainees through misleading educational claims.
(a) DESIGNATION. The Secretary may competitively designate regional partnerships integrating research, manufacturing, workforce, clean infrastructure, and public services. A designation shall be based on a credible regional plan and does not create a separate tax jurisdiction or waive applicable law.
(b) PLAN. The application shall identify participating governments, employers, educational institutions, workers, utilities, community representatives, and small firms; existing assets; infrastructure constraints; likely displacement; environmental conditions; and funded responsibilities. A projected anchor tenant shall disclose whether its commitment is binding.
(c) GOVERNANCE. The partnership shall publish decision rules, conflicts, spending, and access criteria. No single commercial group shall control allocation of public grants to competitors. Procurement and subawards shall be transparent and competitive unless a documented lawful exception applies.
(d) REVIEW. Designations shall be reviewed every five years. Continued support shall depend on verified progress, compliance, and a credible operating plan, not preservation of a political label. A region may retain successful public assets even if a failed individual corporate award is terminated.
(a) SUPPORT. Within the Workforce and Regional Development Account, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and Secretary of Transportation may provide grants or credit support for housing, transit, and local infrastructure necessary to address a documented capacity constraint created or materially increased by assisted development.
(b) CONDITIONS. A project shall identify beneficiaries, affordability commitments, capital and operating costs, land rights, permitting, anti-displacement measures, and a sustainable operating model. Private employers shall contribute where the benefit is substantially confined to their workforce.
(c) LOCAL AUTHORITY. Participation is voluntary. This Act does not prescribe a municipal zoning code, compel approval of a particular development, or authorize eviction. A government accepting a grant shall implement the specific lawful commitments it accepted.
(d) WORKER CHOICE. Employer-associated housing shall not make tenancy dependent on surrendering labor rights, personal privacy, or freedom to change jobs. Reasonable transition time after loss of employment shall be specified before occupancy.
(e) COORDINATION. Housing or transit support shall not be counted as a factory’s private matching contribution unless the governing program expressly permits it and the valuation reflects the distinct public benefit.
(a) PROFIT SHARE. A major commercial production recipient shall establish an annual cash profit-sharing pool equal to at least 5 percent of positive adjusted project operating income during the restriction period. The pool shall benefit nonexecutive employees substantially engaged in the assisted activity and shall supplement, not replace, wages and collectively bargained benefits.
(b) INCOME. Adjusted project operating income means attributable revenue less reasonable operating expense, allocable third-party financing expense, and economic depreciation of privately financed assets, before the profit-sharing payment and owner distributions. Federal assistance receipts, artificial related-party fees, and depreciation of the federally financed portion of assets shall not reduce or inflate the calculation. Verified project operating losses may be carried forward for no more than three years.
(c) DISTRIBUTION. The pool shall be allocated under a published formula based on hours worked, with equal treatment of comparable employees, reasonable accommodation of protected leave, and no weighting based on political activity or union support. Payments shall be made within 120 days after the annual calculation, subject to lawful withholding.
(d) OVERSIGHT. Employees shall receive a plain-language calculation and a confidential channel to challenge material errors. The agency may audit project allocation and require correction. The plan shall comply with otherwise applicable benefit and tax law and shall not be used to create an undisclosed pension obligation.
(a) PLAN. A major automation or digital-transformation award shall assess tasks affected, likely workforce changes, retraining, safety, accessibility, and the distribution of productivity gains. A recipient shall consult affected workers or their lawful representatives before implementing material workplace changes financed by the award.
(b) SUPPORT. Funds may support paid retraining, redeployment, job matching, recognized credentials, and temporary transition services. An employer shall not claim credit for training required merely to comply with an existing safety duty unless the funded activity materially exceeds that baseline.
(c) NO FALSE JOB COUNTS. Applicants shall distinguish jobs created, retained, displaced, contracted, and relocated from another domestic site. A project that reduces employment may qualify where it demonstrates other substantial statutory benefits and provides a credible transition plan; it shall not be marketed as net job creation without evidence.
(d) RIGHTS. Workplace monitoring and automated employment decisions financed under this Act shall comply with title X. A worker shall not be required to consent to unnecessary biometric or off-duty surveillance to obtain training or retain employment.
(a) SERVICES. Agencies may finance credential evaluation, language support, lawful recruitment, relocation, and integration services necessary for priority-sector work, subject to otherwise applicable eligibility law. Assistance shall not be conditioned on an unlawful preference based on nationality or ancestry.
(b) IMMIGRATION. The Department of Homeland Security and Department of State may use administrative funds allocated for their program functions to improve processing of applications connected to federally supported research and production under existing legal categories. This Act does not create a visa, increase a numerical admission limit, guarantee admission, or waive a statutory eligibility or security requirement.
(c) WORKER PROTECTION. A recipient using an employment-based immigration program shall comply with wage, recruitment, notice, and other applicable obligations and shall not charge prohibited recruitment fees, confiscate identity documents, or threaten immigration consequences to suppress lawful reporting.
(d) DOMESTIC TRAINING. International recruitment shall be integrated with domestic training and not used to avoid the workforce commitments in the award. A recipient shall disclose the relevant staffing need and the treatment of similarly situated workers without publishing personal immigration records.
(a) ACCESS PROGRAM. Agencies shall provide technical assistance, shared remote access, mobile laboratories, accessible equipment, and small-scale demonstration opportunities for communities whose participation is constrained by distance, infrastructure, institutional capacity, or disability.
(b) DESIGN. A program shall account for unreliable broadband, higher freight costs, small customer populations, energy constraints, and culturally appropriate consultation where relevant. A uniform urban cost model shall not be used without adjustment to reject a materially different public-service need.
(c) CIVIL RIGHTS. Selection and delivery shall comply with applicable civil-rights law. Need-based, geographic, Tribal-government, and disability-access provisions shall be administered according to their statutory purposes and shall not be converted into undisclosed preferences based on protected personal characteristics.
(d) MEASUREMENT. Agencies shall report access, completion, service quality, and sustained use. Counting a one-time demonstration in a community does not establish continuing access. Digital materials shall be accessible, and a reasonable non-digital application alternative shall be available where necessary.
(a) ENFORCEMENT. The Secretary of Labor shall enforce the labor conditions expressly assigned by this title through existing applicable wage and labor authorities and the supplemental award remedies in title XVI. The administering agency shall coordinate so that restitution, withheld payments, and penalties are not duplicatively collected for the same loss.
(b) NOTICE. Workers shall receive a conspicuous notice of applicable wage, training, profit-sharing, safety, and whistleblower rights in accessible language. A contractual confidentiality clause shall not prohibit lawful reporting to an agency, Congress, a court, or counsel.
(c) COMPLAINTS. Agencies shall establish a referral and tracking system that identifies the appropriate enforcer without requiring a worker to understand agency jurisdiction. Urgent safety concerns shall be referred immediately. A complaint is not a final finding, and a recipient shall have notice and an opportunity to contest liability.
(d) SAVINGS. This title does not displace collective-bargaining agreements or stronger worker protections. It does not create employer immunity, reduce a vested benefit, or condition public assistance to a worker on waiver of a wage or discrimination claim.
(a) INITIAL ELIGIBILITY. Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, and the United Kingdom are eligible to become core innovation partners under this Act. Eligibility does not itself confer funding, procurement preferences, classified access, export authorization, or a right to receive controlled technology.
(b) ACTIVATION. Benefits shall commence only after the Secretary of State, in consultation with Commerce, Treasury, Defense, Energy, and the United States Trade Representative, certifies a written arrangement satisfying section 902. An existing agreement may satisfy a requirement to the extent its enforceable terms do so.
(c) DOMESTIC PRIORITY. A partnership shall support identifiable United States research, productive capability, supply resilience, workforce development, or access to essential technology. Assistance shall not finance replacement of an assisted domestic factory with a foreign factory.
(d) NONPARTNERS. Absence of partner status is not a designation of hostility or unlawful conduct. Lawful trade, investment, travel, education, and scientific cooperation with other countries remain permitted except as restricted by applicable law or an express, accepted assistance condition.
(a) CRITERIA. A partnership arrangement shall provide enforceable intellectual-property protection; reciprocal access appropriate to the specific program; protection against forced technology transfer; effective controls on sensitive technology and investment; protection of confidential and personal data; compliance with fundamental labor protections and applicable environmental requirements; anti-corruption and audit cooperation; and reliable supply and dispute-resolution mechanisms.
(b) PROJECT STANDARDS. A foreign activity receiving assistance shall meet project-level standards equivalent to the applicable environmental, worker, data, and integrity conditions of this Act. Equivalence requires comparable protective effect and verification, not identical wording in the partner’s legal system.
(c) COMPETENCE. An arrangement involving a regional organization shall respect the legal competence of that organization and its member governments. An agency shall not demand a commitment that the signing government lacks authority to perform.
(d) LIMITS. An arrangement may coordinate existing lawful powers but may not appropriate money, amend United States law, alter a treaty, grant immigration status, waive sanctions, or commit the United States to an unfunded purchase. Any obligation requiring further legislation shall be identified as contingent.
(e) PUBLIC RECORD. The certification and principal terms shall be published, with a classified or confidential annex only where legally justified. The public record shall explain how each statutory criterion is met rather than assign an unexplained political score.
(a) AUTHORITY. Agencies may support joint research, shared testing, standards, reciprocal facility access, and limited supply-chain demonstrations with activated partners. A United States lead recipient shall remain accountable for Federal funds and enforce relevant subaward conditions.
(b) CONTRIBUTIONS. A partner shall ordinarily contribute at least an equivalent value to a jointly financed project, measured under a disclosed method. A lesser contribution may be approved for unique scientific access or a documented United States public benefit, with written reasons and no change to the aggregate ceiling.
(c) FOREIGN PERFORMANCE CAP. No more than $5,000,000,000 in Federal support value in a fiscal year, and $70,000,000,000 over the program, may finance performance physically outside the United States. Such support shall be charged to the Trusted Partners and Secure Collaboration Account. Foreign performance in an individual project shall ordinarily not exceed 30 percent of the Federal contribution; an exception up to 50 percent requires a unique-capability finding by the agency head.
(d) EXCLUSIONS. Foreign commercial plant construction, foreign political activity, and subsidies contingent on exports are ineligible. Ordinary purchases of imported equipment for a domestic project are not foreign research performance for this cap but remain subject to other applicable rules.
(e) RIGHTS. Agreements shall allocate results, publication, security, access, liability, dispute resolution, and recovery before disbursement. A foreign partner’s law preventing necessary audit or recovery shall preclude an award unless a lawful, effective alternative protects the United States.
(a) ADDITIONAL CORE PARTNER. The President may designate an additional country after the Secretary of State certifies that it has a durable security or defense-cooperation relationship with the United States authorized by law and satisfies section 902. The certification shall identify the relevant legal relationship, actual practices, unresolved risks, and enforceable mitigation.
(b) NOTICE. A designation shall take effect no earlier than 60 days after transmission of the certification and arrangement to Congress and publication of the unclassified record. Congress may alter the designation by an enacted law. Inaction by a committee or one House is not approval or a legislative veto.
(c) ASSOCIATED COOPERATION. A country not meeting all core criteria may participate in a narrowly defined, nonsensitive research or standards project if the Secretary of State documents the applicable safeguards and the project provides a specific United States benefit. Associated cooperation confers no general procurement or security privilege.
(d) REVIEW. Core and associated arrangements shall be reviewed at least every two years. A designation shall not become irrevocable through private reliance, but changes shall follow section 906 and protect lawful accrued rights to the extent consistent with security and applicable law.
(a) DESIGNATION. The Secretary, in consultation with State, Defense, Treasury, Energy, and the Attorney General, may designate a technology as sensitive for this Act only upon a written finding that access would materially enable a specified threat to national defense, critical infrastructure, protected personal data at scale, or the integrity of an essential supply system.
(b) CONDUCT. An entity may be designated as a foreign entity of concern under this Act where reliable evidence demonstrates control by a foreign government or organization materially engaged in economic espionage, forced technology transfer, sabotage, systematic sanctions evasion, or coercive disruption of essential United States supply, and the entity’s access creates a material project-specific risk.
(c) NOTICE AND REVIEW. Except for an urgent interim restriction supported by a written security finding, the affected entity shall receive notice, the unclassified basis, and at least 30 days to respond. An interim restriction shall be reviewed within 90 days. A final designation shall state scope, effective date, mitigation considered, and a process for reconsideration at least annually.
(d) PRECISION. A designation shall identify the technology or conduct with sufficient specificity for compliance. Nationality, ancestry, ordinary commercial rivalry, or criticism of the United States is not a sufficient basis.
(e) OTHER AUTHORITIES. This section does not amend export-control jurisdiction, the sanctions lists, or the authority of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. A clearance under one regime does not constitute clearance under another.
(a) GROUNDS. The Secretary of State may suspend a partner benefit upon a material breach of the arrangement or a documented security threat relevant to that benefit. The decision shall identify the breach, affected projects, evidence, available mitigation, and proposed duration.
(b) PROCESS. Except in an urgent security circumstance, the partner and materially affected recipients shall receive notice and 60 days to propose cure. An urgent suspension shall be narrowly tailored and reviewed within 90 days. Permanent revocation requires a final written determination.
(c) EXISTING PROJECTS. Agencies shall distinguish new commitments from lawful accrued obligations, protect research participants, secure data and equipment, and provide an orderly transition where possible. A suspension shall not automatically confiscate private property or cancel a payment already earned without a legal basis.
(d) REPORT. The agency shall notify Congress within seven days of an urgent suspension and publish an unclassified explanation. A confidential annex may protect sensitive evidence but shall not replace all meaningful public reasoning.
(e) RESTORATION. Benefits may be restored upon verified correction or mitigation under the same published criteria. Restoration shall not release liability for fraud or other independently unlawful conduct.
(a) AGREEMENTS. A partnership may establish reciprocal notice of material disruptions, emergency sourcing, repair support, standardized testing, and allocation of jointly supported capacity. Commitments shall state quantities or service levels, conditions, prices or pricing methods, and remedies.
(b) DOMESTIC NEED. An assisted domestic project shall maintain the supply-continuity obligations stated in its award. Priority access for a defined United States emergency may be required only through a preaccepted contract or other lawful authority, with compensation and safeguards specified in advance.
(c) NO EXPORT MANDATE. This Act does not require a recipient to export, subsidize a sale based on export volume, or violate a lawful foreign restriction. Nor does it create general authority to seize inventories, command private production, or bypass the Defense Production Act or another applicable statute.
(d) RESILIENCE. Plans shall account for transportation, energy, common upstream suppliers, and legal restrictions. Two nominal suppliers relying on the same vulnerable source shall not be reported as fully independent. Partner cooperation shall supplement, not substitute for, the domestic capability purchased by the award.
(a) SUBSIDY DESIGN. Except to the extent Congress expressly provides otherwise in a subsequent Act, assistance under this Act shall not be contingent, in law or in fact, upon export performance or the use of domestic over imported goods. A domestic production location, domestic workforce activity, or research-performance requirement shall be distinguished from an input-origin condition.
(b) PROCUREMENT. Statutory domestic preferences applicable to Federal procurement or federally assisted infrastructure shall be administered under their own terms, including applicable trade-agreement waivers. An agency shall not assume that a procurement exception authorizes an unrelated goods subsidy conditioned on local content.
(c) REVIEW. The United States Trade Representative shall review major program designs for relevant international obligations and publish an unclassified explanation of material trade exposure. A production-location subsidy may remain subject to a lawful countervailing-duty proceeding or dispute; this Act does not guarantee immunity from such action.
(d) NOTIFICATION. Agencies shall supply information necessary for lawful subsidy notification, consultation, and defense of United States measures. They shall not conceal assistance through a nominal private intermediary.
(e) DOMESTIC EFFECT. Nothing in this section gives a private person a cause of action to enforce a trade agreement where existing law does not provide one. Express domestic statutory duties remain enforceable through the remedies created by this Act.
(a) COORDINATION. The Secretary, with the Department of Homeland Security and other competent agencies, may improve verification of supplier identity, product origin where legally relevant, sanctions compliance, and conformity assessment for assisted projects.
(b) TRUSTED PROCESS. A verified supplier may receive simplified documentary processing to the extent permitted by law. Status shall be based on actual compliance, audit access, and product reliability rather than nationality alone. No status waives inspection, tariff, forced-labor restrictions, or export controls.
(c) TRACEABILITY. For a material high-risk input, recipients shall maintain records sufficient to identify the actual producer, processing location, relevant ownership, and chain of custody. Repackaging or transshipment through a partner shall not establish a false origin.
(d) ERRORS. An agency shall provide correction procedures for mistaken identity or inaccurate supplier data. Knowingly false origin or security claims may be referred under title XVI or other applicable law, but an honest, promptly corrected clerical error shall receive proportionate treatment.
(a) AUTHORITY. Within available amounts, agencies may support exchanges, common technical terminology, joint standards research, researcher mobility, and lawful cultural-technology cooperation that advance a defined program purpose.
(b) SAFEGUARDS. Exchanges shall protect participant safety, intellectual property, personal data, academic freedom, and research integrity. A participant shall not be compelled to endorse a government position or disclose unrelated political beliefs.
(c) ACCESS. Open scientific collaboration outside the core partnership remains eligible under otherwise applicable research authority. Sensitive access under this Act shall follow section 905, and monetary foreign performance shall count against section 903.
(d) TRANSPARENCY. Agreements shall disclose funding, institutional obligations, publication rights, conflicts, and restrictions before participation. A cultural or educational label shall not be used to conceal a prohibited technology transfer or a foreign commercial subsidy.
(a) SCOPE. This title applies to a digital product, service, model, or system materially developed, procured, or operated with assistance under this Act. An unrelated product of the same company is not covered solely by affiliation. Materially funded modifications and deployment environments shall be included to the extent necessary to protect the assisted system and its users.
(b) RISK. Requirements shall be proportionate to the system’s data, capabilities, public exposure, and consequences of failure. A research prototype in a controlled environment shall not be treated as a nationwide deployed service without evidence of equivalent risk.
(c) RESPONSIBILITY. The award shall identify the developer, operator, data controller, deployer, and responsible human decision-maker where relevant. Contracting out a function shall not eliminate a duty expressly accepted by the recipient.
(d) EXISTING LAW. This title supplements applicable privacy, civil-rights, consumer-protection, cybersecurity, health, education, and financial law. It does not establish a general license to practice a regulated profession, conduct surveillance, or deploy a safety-critical product.
(a) PLAN. Before collecting personal data through a covered system, the recipient shall document the purpose, necessity, legal basis, categories, recipients, retention period, security controls, and individual rights. Collection shall be limited to data reasonably necessary for the approved function or a specifically authorized research purpose.
(b) SECONDARY USE. Personal data shall not be sold, licensed for unrelated advertising, used for unrelated model training, or disclosed for an incompatible commercial purpose without a separate, informed, affirmative authorization where lawful. Access to an essential funded service shall not be conditioned on such an unrelated authorization.
(c) RIGHTS. Individuals shall receive understandable notice and reasonable means to access, correct, and obtain a portable copy of their data, and to request deletion or restriction when retention is no longer legally necessary. A request shall be resolved within 45 days, with one explained 45-day extension for complexity. Exceptions for legal retention, research integrity, safety, and others’ rights shall be narrowly documented.
(d) PROTECTION. Data retained under an exception shall not be repurposed. A recipient shall use access controls, encryption where appropriate, tested deletion, and contractual restrictions on service providers. Deidentification claims shall be tested against reasonably foreseeable linkage and reidentification risks.
(e) NO RETALIATION. A person shall not lose a funded benefit merely for exercising a privacy right unrelated to data essential to provide that benefit.
(a) SENSITIVE DATA. Collection or use of biometric identifiers, genetic information, precise location, intimate communications, or identifiable health data shall require a documented necessity and heightened safeguards. Separate affirmative consent shall be obtained unless a specific law permits the use without consent or the use is necessary for a properly reviewed, lawfully authorized research or emergency purpose.
(b) BIOMETRICS. A covered system shall not require centralized biometric storage when an equally effective less intrusive method is reasonably available. Biometric templates shall not be retained beyond the stated purpose or repurposed for unrelated identification.
(c) CHILDREN. A system used by children shall apply age-appropriate design, data minimization, and applicable parental or other lawful authorization. It shall not use publicly funded educational or health data for behavioral advertising. Age assurance shall itself minimize sensitive collection and offer reasonable alternatives.
(d) ACCESSIBILITY. Security and consent mechanisms shall accommodate disability and shall not require a person to surrender unnecessary data because an accessible alternative was omitted.
(e) RESEARCH. An approved research protocol shall specify consent, withdrawal, future use, and limits on deletion of data already incorporated into a completed lawful analysis. Withdrawal shall ordinarily stop new collection and new identifiable secondary use; it need not falsify or erase an already published scientific record.
(a) DEFINITION. A high-impact automated decision is a decision materially determining access to or terms of employment, education, housing, credit, health care, essential public benefits, or a comparably significant legal interest, where a covered automated system substantially influences the outcome.
(b) ASSESSMENT. Before deployment and after a material change, the deployer shall assess validity, error, foreseeable misuse, disparate unlawful effects, data quality, human oversight, accessibility, privacy, and feasible less harmful alternatives. Evaluation shall use relevant populations and conditions, not merely a vendor’s general benchmark.
(c) INDIVIDUAL PROCESS. A materially affected person shall receive notice that automation substantially influenced an adverse decision, a meaningful explanation of the principal reasons and relevant data, and a timely opportunity for correction and human review by a person authorized to change the decision. Trade-secret protection shall not eliminate all meaningful explanation.
(d) LIMITS. A system shall not make an adverse essential-service decision solely from an unverifiable inference where a reasonably available, more reliable method is necessary to avoid material harm. This section does not require disclosure of another person’s private information or of security details that would enable abuse.
(e) ENFORCEMENT. Duties are conditions on the covered system and are enforceable under title XVI. Existing discrimination and sector-specific rights remain available; a model’s approval under this Act is not a defense to an independently unlawful decision.
(a) EVALUATION. A recipient developing a general-purpose model with at least $50,000,000 in direct model-development assistance, or a covered system intended for a high-impact or safety-critical use, shall conduct documented capability, reliability, security, and misuse evaluations before material deployment.
(b) METHODS. The National Institute of Standards and Technology shall establish transparent evaluation methods through rulemaking where binding requirements are necessary. Methods shall identify the tested capability, deployment context, reproducibility, uncertainty, and limits. They shall not require a model to adopt a government-approved political, religious, or editorial viewpoint.
(c) INDEPENDENCE. An independent evaluator shall assess material safety claims for a major deployment. The evaluator shall disclose conflicts and shall not be compensated based on approval. Sensitive test details may be protected while public summaries disclose material limitations and safeguards.
(d) RESPONSE. Where credible evidence shows a substantial risk of serious physical harm, unauthorized compromise of critical infrastructure, or a materially unlawful high-impact decision, the recipient shall mitigate, limit, delay, or suspend the affected deployment as reasonably necessary and report its action. An agency order shall follow title XVI.
(e) LIMITS. This section does not impose a general licensing requirement on all artificial intelligence, require public release of model weights, or impose duties on an unaffiliated volunteer merely because a covered product uses open-source code.
(a) REQUIREMENTS. A covered commercial digital product shall use a documented secure-development process, threat modeling, access controls, vulnerability management, tested recovery, and an accurate inventory of material software components. Requirements shall reflect foreseeable consequences and lifecycle rather than a checklist detached from risk.
(b) SUPPORT. Before award, the recipient shall state a funded support period, ordinarily at least ten years for an essential infrastructure product and five years for another durable commercial product, unless a shorter useful life is independently justified. The period shall cover timely security updates, vulnerability communication, and an orderly end-of-support transition.
(c) DISCLOSURE. A recipient shall maintain a coordinated vulnerability-disclosure channel and shall not retaliate against good-faith, authorized security testing. This Act does not authorize unauthorized access or immunize extortion.
(d) DEPENDENCIES. A component inventory shall identify critical dependencies and licenses without requiring publication of exploit-enabling detail. The recipient shall not claim that use of open-source components transfers all security responsibility to unpaid maintainers.
(e) CONTINUITY. A critical product may require source escrow, documentation, and a limited continuity license under section 307. Such terms shall be negotiated before funding and shall protect unrelated intellectual property.
(a) INITIAL NOTICE. A recipient shall notify the designated Federal reporting channel within 72 hours after reasonably determining that a covered system experienced a material cyber incident affecting confidentiality, integrity, availability, safety, or an award obligation. An initial report may state known facts and identified uncertainty; it need not await a complete forensic investigation.
(b) COORDINATION. Agencies shall accept a single submission satisfying equivalent information requirements under another Federal reporting regime where legally possible. This section does not extend a shorter deadline or eliminate a duty under another law.
(c) INDIVIDUAL NOTICE. Where unauthorized access to personal data creates a material risk to affected individuals, the operator shall provide timely, understandable notice and reasonable protective guidance without unreasonable delay and ordinarily within 30 days after that determination. A law-enforcement delay shall be written, limited to 30 days, and renewable once on new grounds; a longer delay requires applicable judicial or statutory authority.
(d) USE. Information submitted for response shall receive lawful confidentiality and security protection. Reporting does not create immunity for underlying misconduct, but prompt, truthful cooperation shall be considered under section 1602.
(e) CORRECTIONS. Material updates shall be submitted as facts are confirmed. The duty is not satisfied by a public-relations statement omitting known facts necessary for protective action.
(a) OPEN INTERFACES. A covered public-service system shall provide documented, secure interfaces and reasonably usable data export necessary for continuity, migration, and lawful interoperability. A vendor shall not impose a technical or contractual barrier solely to prevent a public customer from changing providers.
(b) COSTS. Migration and egress charges shall reflect reasonable, disclosed cost rather than an undisclosed exit penalty. Material proprietary dependencies and expected lifecycle fees shall be disclosed before award.
(c) STANDARDS. Agencies shall prefer voluntary consensus standards where suitable and may support open standards and reference implementations. A standard shall not be selected because it secretly favors an affiliated vendor.
(d) SAFETY AND RIGHTS. Interoperability does not require disclosure of another person’s personal data, infringement of protected rights, or disabling of a necessary security control. A claimed exception shall identify the actual risk and provide a feasible alternative where available.
(e) TESTING. Portability and restoration shall be tested before acceptance and periodically during operation. A theoretical export function that cannot reconstruct usable records does not satisfy this section.
(a) PROHIBITED USES. Assistance shall not finance a system whose principal purpose is unlawful discrimination; general government social scoring based on lawful expression or unrelated private behavior; covert commercial exploitation of intimate or biometric data contrary to this title; or surveillance lacking the legal authorization independently required for that activity.
(b) PUBLIC SAFETY. A lawful, narrowly defined emergency-response or investigative use shall identify its legal authority, necessity, access controls, retention, accuracy, and oversight. This Act creates no surveillance warrant, search exception, or power to compel disclosure from a third party.
(c) EXPRESSION. No agency may condition assistance on suppression of a lawful viewpoint, endorsement of an administration, alteration of an unrelated editorial judgment, or government approval of a model’s political outputs. Safety and accuracy testing may address a specific operational risk without becoming a general speech-approval mechanism.
(d) RESEARCH EXCEPTION. Controlled research evaluating bias, manipulation, surveillance risks, or harmful capabilities is not prohibited merely because it studies the conduct addressed by this section. The research shall use appropriate safeguards and shall not deploy the prohibited conduct against unsuspecting members of the public.
(a) OFFICIAL. A major digital-system recipient shall designate a responsible privacy and security official with access to senior management and authority to escalate material risks. A small recipient may use a qualified shared service where independence and confidentiality are preserved.
(b) COMPLAINTS. Users shall have a reasonably accessible means to report a material privacy, safety, accessibility, or automated-decision problem. The recipient shall acknowledge the complaint within 15 days and provide a response or investigation status within 45 days, with urgent risks addressed promptly.
(c) AGENCY ROLE. The administering agency shall enforce award conditions and coordinate with the Federal Trade Commission and specialized regulators within their existing jurisdictions. This Act does not silently enlarge the Federal Trade Commission’s jurisdiction over an otherwise excluded entity; the awarding agency and Attorney General retain the remedies expressly provided here.
(d) ASSISTANCE. Agencies shall provide model notices, evaluation tools, secure-development guidance, and access to testing for small recipients. Compliance assistance shall not become a paid certification monopoly or excuse a material, known violation.
(a) REQUIREMENTS. Assistance involving human participants shall comply with applicable human-subject, informed-consent, institutional-review, clinical-investigation, privacy, and reporting law, including applicable requirements administered by the Department of Health and Human Services and Food and Drug Administration.
(b) PROTOCOL. A funded study shall identify the research question, endpoints, statistical plan, inclusion criteria, safety monitoring, conflicts, data custody, and reporting commitments before enrollment where appropriate to the study. Changes shall be documented rather than concealed after results are known.
(c) REPRESENTATIVENESS. Study design shall address the populations expected to use the resulting intervention, relevant biological and social variation, accessibility, and reasons for exclusions. An agency shall not infer clinical effectiveness in an unstudied population without supporting evidence.
(d) PUBLICATION. Required trial registration and results reporting shall be completed, including negative findings and material adverse events. Commercial confidentiality shall not justify withholding legally required safety information.
(e) NO APPROVAL BY FUNDING. An award is not authorization to market a drug, biologic, device, or clinical service. Promotion and regulatory review shall be institutionally separated, and regulatory personnel shall retain independent judgment.
(a) QUALITY. A recipient manufacturing a covered medical product shall maintain applicable quality systems, validated processes, traceability, adverse-event reporting, recall capacity, and supplier controls. A production milestone shall include relevant quality evidence, not merely units produced.
(b) RESILIENCE. Awards for essential medicines, active ingredients, diagnostics, or devices shall identify critical inputs, geographic dependencies, qualified alternate capacity, inventories, repair or replacement arrangements, and disruption notification.
(c) SHORTAGES. A material interruption shall be reported to the competent regulator and awarding agency under applicable deadlines. A recipient shall not conceal a shortage to protect an award milestone or price. A Government purchase commitment shall define supply obligations and remedies in advance.
(d) COUNTERFEITS. Traceability systems shall protect against counterfeit or diverted products without preventing lawful competition, repair, or authorized generic and biosimilar entry.
(e) LIMITS. This Act does not alter standards for approval, clearance, licensure, emergency use, or professional practice. A regulator may consider research funded by this Act only according to its governing evidentiary standards.
(a) ACCESS PLAN. Before commercial assistance of at least $25,000,000 for a health technology, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall approve an access plan addressing expected patient need, manufacturing scale, public purchasers, insurance and uninsured access, licensing, supply continuity, and the public contribution to development.
(b) PRICE TERMS. Where the United States makes an advance purchase or provides a commercial grant of at least $100,000,000, the award shall state a verifiable public-purchaser price or formula, volume terms, inflation adjustment, and audit rights. A promise of a reasonable price without an operative method is insufficient. The formula may use verified cost, competitive bids, comparable institutional transactions, or a negotiated fixed ceiling supported by an independent valuation.
(c) PUBLIC BENEFIT. Access concessions may satisfy section 707 only if their expected value is independently assessed and later measured without double counting. A company shall not offset the concession through hidden mandatory fees, an affiliated distributor, or an artificial change in package size.
(d) LICENSING. Any additional public-health continuity license shall be agreed under section 307. This section does not declare that existing Bayh-Dole march-in authority necessarily permits price regulation, and does not confiscate background patents.
(e) REVIEW. The agency shall review access annually and require correction of a material contractual failure. New access terms shall not be imposed retroactively on an unrelated, previously marketed product.
(a) PLAN. A funded biotechnology or biomanufacturing activity shall maintain a risk assessment, containment, personnel training, access controls, incident response, waste management, and applicable permits proportionate to the biological materials and activity.
(b) REVIEW. Research presenting material dual-use or biosafety concerns shall undergo review under applicable Federal requirements and an independent assessment appropriate to the award. A finding shall identify whether the work should proceed, be modified, be confined to a controlled stage, or not be funded.
(c) LIMITS. Assistance does not authorize possession or transfer of a regulated biological agent, evade select-agent or other security law, or permit an environmental release without required review. A safety requirement shall not be waived solely because a project is commercially important.
(d) REPORTING. A material containment failure, unauthorized access, or other reportable incident shall be promptly reported through the legally required channels. Public summaries shall inform affected communities without releasing information that would materially enable harm or expose protected personal data.
(e) ACCOUNTABILITY. An unsuccessful lawful experiment is not a biological offense. Knowing falsification, concealment, or endangerment shall be addressed under title XVI and independently applicable law.
(a) VALIDATION. Agricultural and food-system awards shall use testing appropriate to climate, soil, water, farm scale, food safety, and intended users. Claims about yield, input savings, nutrition, or resilience shall distinguish controlled trials from ordinary commercial performance.
(b) FARM DATA. A recipient collecting identifiable farm operational data shall disclose uses, access, retention, sharing, and portability. It shall not sell or use such data for unrelated insurance, credit, or competitive targeting without separate lawful authorization. A farmer shall retain reasonable access to data generated by the farmer’s operation.
(c) EQUIPMENT. Assisted agricultural equipment shall include reasonable repair information, diagnostic access, parts availability, and interoperability consistent with safety and intellectual-property law. Restrictions shall be justified by an actual risk rather than used solely to compel an exclusive service contract.
(d) FOOD SAFETY. Assistance does not replace approval, inspection, labeling, or food-safety requirements. Novel-food, crop, or biological claims shall be reviewed by the competent agencies under existing jurisdiction.
(e) ACCESS. Programs shall consider smaller farms, cooperatives, regional processors, and differing production methods. A technological label shall not substitute for measured environmental and economic performance.
(a) ELIGIBLE PURPOSE. Assistance for entertainment and creative technology shall support production tools, accessibility, preservation, virtual production, sound and image technology, lawful rights management, distribution infrastructure, and related technical innovation. Ordinary celebrity compensation, promotional campaigns, and acquisition of an existing catalog without a distinct authorized technology purpose are ineligible.
(b) DIGITAL REPLICAS. A funded production or tool developer using a performer’s captured voice, likeness, or performance to create a commercially substitutive digital replica shall obtain specific, informed written authorization identifying the permitted use, duration, compensation, and material reuse limits. A generalized employment clause shall not authorize an undisclosed perpetual substitute performance.
(c) RIGHTS SAVINGS. The contractual consent condition does not create ownership of historical facts, ideas, or public-domain material, and shall be administered consistently with lawful news reporting, criticism, commentary, parody, and other protected expression. It does not displace stronger applicable publicity, labor, or copyright protections.
(d) TRAINING MATERIAL. A recipient shall document source categories and the asserted legal basis for material training datasets, including license, permission, public domain, or a legally supportable exception. This Act neither declares all model training infringing nor creates a blanket training exemption.
(e) EDITORIAL INDEPENDENCE. No agency shall approve a funded work’s viewpoint, casting politics, lawful themes, or criticism of public officials. Selection shall turn on the authorized technical and public-access purpose, not ideological agreement.
(a) EVIDENCE. An educational technology award shall identify the learning or access problem, intended learners, evidence of effectiveness, accessibility, teacher or instructor role, privacy, and total cost. Engagement, screen time, or downloads alone shall not be represented as learning improvement.
(b) TESTING. Pilot evaluation shall use appropriate consent and safeguards, relevant comparison where feasible, and transparent reporting of negative results. A vendor shall not use school participation to collect unrelated commercial data.
(c) ACCESSIBILITY. Covered tools shall support applicable disability-access requirements, interoperable assistive technology, and reasonable non-digital alternatives where necessary. Accessibility shall be tested with affected users rather than asserted from a checklist alone.
(d) INDEPENDENCE. A public educational institution shall retain lawful control of curriculum and student decisions. A vendor shall not make proprietary automated judgments the sole unreviewable basis for discipline, admission, grading, or access to a funded benefit.
(e) EXIT. Contracts shall ensure export of usable records, continuity of essential services, and deletion or protected retention at termination. Public funding shall not create an avoidable perpetual dependency on a vendor’s closed data format.
(a) ELIGIBLE ACTIVITIES. Assistance may support secure payments, fraud prevention, accessibility, interoperable public-service identity, financial privacy, and resilience. It shall not finance speculative acquisition of a digital asset, guarantee a token’s price, or create an implied Federal guarantee of a private financial product.
(b) REGULATORY COMPLIANCE. A recipient shall obtain licenses and comply with applicable banking, securities, commodities, payments, consumer-protection, anti-money-laundering, and sanctions law. Funding does not constitute approval by a financial regulator or authorize receipt of insured deposits.
(c) IDENTITY. A funded identity system shall minimize data, support selective disclosure, provide correction and recovery procedures, and offer reasonable alternatives for persons unable to use the principal technology. No universal centralized biometric database is authorized by this Act.
(d) DECISIONS. Credit and essential financial-service decisions shall comply with section 1004 and other applicable law. A recipient shall not conceal a materially adverse reason behind an unexplained proprietary score.
(e) PUBLIC RISK. Any Federal credit, guarantee, or purchase of a financial instrument shall comply with title XIII. A demonstration label shall not be used to evade the credit subsidy, exposure, or appropriations limits.
(a) SAFETY CASE. Assistance for a transport or autonomous system shall require a documented operational domain, safety evidence, human oversight or fail-safe response, cybersecurity, maintenance, incident reporting, and relevant approval before public deployment.
(b) EVIDENCE. Simulated performance, restricted trials, and ordinary service shall be reported separately. A recipient shall not represent miles, voyages, flights, or operating hours as comparable where conditions differ materially.
(c) SPACE. Civil space awards shall include applicable launch, reentry, communications, remote-sensing, debris mitigation, collision-risk, and end-of-life requirements. Funding is not a license or a waiver of international or domestic responsibility.
(d) MARITIME. Port and vessel projects shall address worker safety, navigational risk, air and water pollution, fuel handling, shore-power integration, and emergency response. Assistance shall not eliminate applicable maritime labor or shipping requirements.
(e) LIMITS. This Act does not authorize autonomous lethal weapons, military force, or an exemption from a safety regulator’s jurisdiction. Dual-use research may proceed only under independently lawful controls and the terms of the award.
(a) DESIGN. A funded infrastructure or disaster-response technology shall address the actual hazards, service population, maintenance capacity, accessibility, cybersecurity, and conditions under which it is expected to function. A claim of resilience shall identify the hazard and tested performance.
(b) PUBLIC SAFETY. Emergency communications, warning systems, responder tools, and sensors shall be interoperable where practical and shall include backup, training, and public communication. A proprietary service interruption shall not disable an essential warning function without a funded continuity arrangement.
(c) DATA RIGHTS. Public-safety data shall be minimized, secured, and retained only for an authorized purpose. This Act does not authorize generalized monitoring of lawful assembly or association.
(d) EVALUATION. Agencies shall measure reliability, false alarms, missed events, recovery time, public access, and lifecycle cost. Vendor demonstrations shall be independently checked before broad deployment.
(e) GOVERNANCE. Local participation remains voluntary, and the agency responsible for public safety retains its lawful decision authority. A grant contractor shall not decide when the government may exercise coercive power.
(a) POLICY IMPLEMENTATION. For a procurement financed under this Act, the contracting agency shall apply statutory domestic preferences, including applicable requirements under chapter 83 of title 41, United States Code, and the Build America, Buy America provisions applicable to infrastructure assistance, subject to their lawful exceptions and trade-agreement treatment.
(b) CLEAN AND SECURE PERFORMANCE. Solicitations shall include material lifecycle environmental, cybersecurity, reliability, accessibility, and repair requirements relevant to the purchase. Equivalent evidence from qualified domestic or lawful foreign suppliers shall be evaluated under the announced standards.
(c) NO FALSE ORIGIN. A supplier shall identify actual origin or manufacturing information required by law. Repackaging, nominal assembly, or transshipment shall not satisfy a preference where the governing rule requires a different standard.
(d) WAIVERS. A waiver shall identify its statutory basis, the unavailable or unsuitable item, market research, quantity, duration, cost or delay justification where relevant, and alternatives. Waivers shall be publicly posted unless specific information is lawfully protected, and shall be no broader than necessary.
(e) DISTINCTION. Procurement preferences shall not be automatically inserted as local-input conditions in tax credits or production grants contrary to section 908.
(a) AUTHORITY. An administering agency may enter a competitively awarded advance purchase, minimum-volume, or milestone acceptance commitment for an authorized public need. The instrument shall specify the deliverable, price or formula, quantity, acceptance test, delivery period, termination, and maximum Federal liability.
(b) FUNDING. Before commitment, the agency shall reserve sufficient available budget authority for the maximum legally enforceable payment and cancellation exposure. The agency may not create an unfunded guarantee by calling it a market signal or an expression of policy.
(c) ADVANCES. Notwithstanding a general restriction on advance payment to the extent necessary for this section, a secured advance may be made under written terms approved by the chief financial officer, with refund, collateral, and verification protections. No advance shall exceed the amount necessary for the approved stage.
(d) ACCEPTANCE. Payment shall depend on the agreed evidence of performance, quality, safety, and delivery. A regulator’s independent approval remains required where applicable.
(e) COMPETITION. Commitments shall avoid unnecessary exclusivity and shall preserve lawful entry by additional qualified suppliers. An agency shall not guarantee a producer’s market share outside the funded purchase.
(a) REVIEW. Before commercial assistance exceeding $500,000,000 in Federal support value to a controlled group, the administering agency shall seek written views from the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission concerning market concentration, entry, access to critical inputs, exclusivity, and likely competition effects.
(b) TIMING. The reviewing agencies shall ordinarily respond within 90 days after complete information, identifying any additional information required. Lack of a response does not establish antitrust approval. The awarding agency shall record how it addressed material concerns before award.
(c) CONDITIONS. An award may include open-access, nonexclusivity, interoperability, or supply terms necessary to protect its public purpose. Conditions shall be related to the funded benefit, proportionate, disclosed, and reviewable.
(d) NO IMMUNITY. An award, consortium designation, or interagency approval does not exempt conduct from antitrust law. Collaboration on precompetitive research shall not authorize price fixing, market allocation, wage fixing, or exchange of competitively sensitive information unnecessary to the lawful project.
(e) SMALL FIRMS. Agencies shall assess whether an award would foreclose access to a publicly supported bottleneck needed by smaller competitors and shall consider an alternative structure that preserves the authorized benefit.
(a) NOTICE. A major recipient shall notify its administering agency at least 60 days before an acquisition or disposition materially affecting assisted assets, funded intellectual property, or performance obligations with a transaction value of at least $50,000,000. The notice is additional to, and does not replace, a filing required under antitrust or investment-screening law.
(b) REVIEW. The agency shall evaluate continuity, ownership, security, public access, and preservation of award benefits. It may require assumption of covenants, a proportionate repayment, or another necessary condition under section 209.
(c) LIMITS. This section does not authorize an agency to prohibit an otherwise lawful merger throughout the economy solely because a party once received assistance. The agency’s authority concerns the assistance and its conditions; antitrust enforcement remains with the competent agencies and courts.
(d) EVADED CAPS. Acquiring multiple subsidized entities shall not reset controlled-group caps or erase aggregation. Agencies shall disclose the aggregate Federal exposure after a proposed transaction and prevent duplicated claims for the same assets.
(a) ACCESS TERMS. A recipient operating a publicly supported essential testbed, network, laboratory, industrial utility, or other shared bottleneck shall publish capacity, eligibility, scheduling, fees, and service conditions. Comparable users shall receive comparable terms absent a documented cost, safety, security, or capacity distinction.
(b) EXCLUSIVITY. An exclusive allocation may be approved only where necessary to finance or operate the asset and where the public purpose cannot reasonably be achieved through less restrictive terms. The agreement shall limit duration and provide periodic review.
(c) CONFIDENTIALITY. An operator shall protect users’ confidential information and shall not use access data to disadvantage a competing user. Necessary safety and security monitoring shall be disclosed.
(d) DISPUTES. Users may seek prompt review of an access denial by an independent official of the operator and then the administering agency. Review shall not require disclosure of a competitor’s protected data.
(e) FUNDING. Access obligations shall be reflected in the operator’s financing and maintenance plan. The United States does not guarantee unlimited free use or reimbursement of unapproved operating losses.
(a) PROGRAM. The National Institute of Standards and Technology shall support reference materials, calibration, validation datasets, testing protocols, laboratory capacity, and conformity-assessment tools necessary for priority sectors.
(b) INDEPENDENCE. A certification program shall separate standard setting, testing, and enforcement where necessary to prevent conflicts. A fee shall reflect reasonable cost and shall not purchase a favorable result.
(c) MUTUAL RECOGNITION. Agencies may recognize equivalent partner testing where legal authority, competence, traceability, audit access, and security permit. Recognition shall not waive a substantive United States requirement or bind an independent regulator beyond its authority.
(d) TRANSPARENCY. A performance claim shall identify the version of the test, conditions, uncertainty, and limitations. A recipient shall not select a nonrepresentative benchmark and present it as universal performance.
(e) SMALL-ENTITY ACCESS. Funds may support vouchers and shared testing access for smaller firms, provided the testing remains independent and the provider does not exploit the voucher to inflate charges.
(a) PROCUREMENT TERMS. A procurement of a durable assisted product shall specify expected useful life, maintenance, repair access, replacement parts, security updates, accessible documentation, and disposition. Lifecycle cost shall include subscriptions, consumables, training, migration, energy, and decommissioning where material.
(b) REPAIR ACCESS. The supplier shall provide reasonable tools and documentation necessary for lawful maintenance by the purchaser or a qualified independent provider, except where a specific safety, security, privacy, or intellectual-property restriction justifies a narrower alternative.
(c) NO ARTIFICIAL OBSOLESCENCE. A supplier shall not remotely disable an otherwise safe public asset solely to force an unrelated subscription or premature replacement contrary to the contract. Necessary security measures shall include notice and a practicable continuity path.
(d) INTEROPERABILITY. An agency shall test material interoperability claims before acceptance. A vendor’s promise to add a necessary interface later shall be accompanied by a funded milestone and enforceable remedy.
(e) EXCEPTIONS. An exception shall identify the risk and alternatives. A generic assertion that repair is dangerous shall not justify an exclusive service monopoly where safe independent repair is reasonably available.
(a) TRANSPARENCY. A recipient selling to a public purchaser under this Act shall disclose the total mandatory price, including fees, required subscriptions, maintenance, minimum purchases, and termination or migration charges. Optional items shall require affirmative selection.
(b) CONTRACT TERMS. A negotiated price concession, ceiling, or cost-based payment shall define the relevant unit, quality, volume, adjustment index, rebates, affiliated charges, and audit rights. A recipient shall not evade the term by reducing quality, changing a unit without adjustment, or routing charges through an affiliate.
(c) COST DATA. Where a sole-source or cost-reimbursement instrument requires cost information, the recipient shall provide accurate, complete, and current material data under applicable procurement law and the accepted agreement.
(d) LIMITS. This section is not a general economy-wide price-control statute. It enforces the price and disclosure obligations attached to the public purchase or assistance. A breach shall receive remedies under the applicable contract and title XVI, with criminal liability only where a separately defined offense is proven.
(a) PAYMENT. A recipient shall pay a small-business subcontractor for accepted, undisputed work within 30 days after receiving a proper invoice or the applicable contract deadline, whichever provides the subcontractor greater protection. A recipient shall not withhold payment for an unrelated dispute or require waiver of a statutory claim to receive earned compensation.
(b) DISPUTES. The recipient shall promptly identify a good-faith dispute, pay the undisputed portion, and provide a reasonable resolution process. Interest on late payment shall be specified at the applicable Federal prompt-payment rate unless a stronger lawful term applies.
(c) FLOW-DOWN. Relevant payment, integrity, safety, and record duties shall be stated in writing. A prime recipient shall not impose an unrelated parent-level covenant on a small supplier merely to transfer its own compliance burden.
(d) OVERSIGHT. Agencies shall track material late-payment patterns and consider them in responsibility determinations. A subcontractor may report nonpayment without retaliation. This section does not create a direct payment obligation of the United States to a subcontractor absent a separate lawful undertaking.
(a) RECORDS. Agencies shall maintain an auditable record of solicitation, evaluation, negotiation, acceptance, change orders, payments, performance, and closeout. Material sole-source justifications and contract modifications shall be publicly summarized.
(b) CONFLICTS. An adviser who prepared material specifications or evaluated a procurement shall not receive an undisclosed competitive advantage. Agencies shall identify and mitigate organizational conflicts rather than rely solely on a contractor’s assertion of independence.
(c) EXIT. A material technology or shared-service procurement shall include an exit plan covering data, licenses, documentation, continuity, security, and transition assistance. The expected cost shall be included in the acquisition plan and contract ceiling.
(d) OVERSIGHT. The Inspector General and Comptroller General shall have lawful access to relevant records. Vendor claims of trade secrecy shall not bar confidential oversight access.
(e) NO PARALLEL LAW. Procurement disputes, claims, and protests shall remain subject to their otherwise applicable statutes and forums except where this Act expressly provides an additional substantive assistance condition.
(a) AUTHORITY. The Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of Energy, within their respective program assignments and the appropriations made by title XVIII, may make direct loans and guarantee a portion of loans for eligible domestic demonstration, production, clean-facility, and enabling-infrastructure projects. The Secretary of Transportation may exercise the same authority for projects within that Secretary’s assignment. An interagency credit committee shall provide technical advice but shall not substitute for a determination by the officer legally responsible for an obligation.
(b) LIMITS. The aggregate original face principal of direct loans and the aggregate guaranteed principal of guaranteed loans committed under this Act shall not exceed $3,000,000,000,000. New commitments shall not exceed $300,000,000,000 in any fiscal year. A refinancing, replacement, or modification that increases principal counts to the extent of the increase; an extinguished commitment may not be recycled to evade the aggregate original-commitment limit.
(c) PROJECT SHARE. A direct loan shall not exceed 80 percent of eligible project cost. A guarantee shall not cover more than 80 percent of outstanding principal or require payment of default interest, prepayment penalties, or a lender’s speculative lost profits. A private lender shall retain at least 20 percent of the credit risk without a separate Federal guarantee, side agreement, or economically equivalent hedge with the United States.
(d) NO ENTITLEMENT. Selection for a grant, tax credit, priority designation, or regional zone does not establish eligibility for credit or a right to a loan. All instruments supporting a project shall be evaluated together under sections 205 and 211.
(a) APPLICATION OF CREDIT REFORM. The Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990, including sections 504 and 505 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 (2 U.S.C. 661c and 661d), applies to credit assistance under this Act. The administering agency shall obtain an approved estimate of subsidy cost and obligate sufficient program-account budget authority before executing an unconditional commitment.
(b) ACCOUNTS. The agency shall establish separate program, financing, and administrative accounts as required by credit-reform law. Financing-account transactions, borrowing from the Treasury, repayments, interest, fees, and recoveries shall be recorded in the accounts prescribed by that law. Face loan principal is not interchangeable with appropriated subsidy cost.
(c) REESTIMATES. Upward and downward reestimates shall be recorded pursuant to 2 U.S.C. 661c(f). The permanent indefinite authority provided by that subsection is not repealed or capped by this Act. An upward reestimate is an additional Federal cost and shall be disclosed as such, rather than represented as included within the fixed initial assistance envelope.
(d) MODIFICATIONS. A discretionary modification increasing subsidy cost requires budget authority provided in advance. An agency may not describe a deliberate modification as a technical reestimate to avoid that requirement. A downward reestimate, negative subsidy, or financing-account collection does not increase the appropriation, award ceiling, or tax-credit allocation authority under this Act.
(e) REPORTING. Quarterly reports shall separately identify original principal, outstanding principal, unobligated subsidy appropriations, obligated subsidy cost, reestimates, administrative costs, cash financing transactions, expected recoveries, and concentration risks.
(a) REQUIRED DETERMINATION. Before commitment, the responsible Secretary shall determine, on a documented underwriting record, that the project has a reasonable prospect of repayment from identified operating revenues or other enforceable sources. Strategic importance alone is insufficient. For a public-good project without a repayment source, the agency shall consider an expressly authorized grant rather than disguise the project as a loan.
(b) ANALYSIS. The record shall include construction and commissioning risk; technology readiness; independent engineering; demand and price sensitivity; operating and maintenance expense; compliance and closure costs; insurance; sponsor equity; contract enforceability; refinancing exposure; supply concentration; and downside cases involving delay, lower utilization, higher interest, and lower sale value.
(c) INDEPENDENCE. An underwriter, engineer, or valuation adviser shall disclose compensation and relationships with sponsors, lenders, vendors, and prospective buyers. A person paid a success fee contingent on approval may not deliver the independent credit recommendation.
(d) SPONSOR CONTRIBUTION. The sponsor shall contribute and place at risk a documented non-Federal contribution consistent with section 205. An equity contribution funded by an undisclosed Federal loan, an inflated related-party invoice, or a circular transaction does not satisfy that requirement.
(e) PUBLIC RECORD. The agency shall publish a summary of its determination, material assumptions, subsidy estimate, and statutory terms, excluding specifically protected information. Publication of a summary does not require disclosure of confidential underwriting models, bank information, or protected commercial details.
(a) MATURITY AND PRICING. A loan shall mature not later than 30 years after its initial disbursement or the independently estimated useful life of the financed assets, whichever occurs first. Pricing shall reflect Treasury financing cost, credit risk, administrative costs, and any expressly budgeted interest subsidy. An interest subsidy shall be scored and funded, not concealed through an implausible repayment assumption.
(b) DISBURSEMENT. Disbursement shall follow verified construction, procurement, or operating milestones. The agency shall require evidence that the borrower’s agreed equity contribution has been supplied proportionately or earlier. Funds shall pass through controlled accounts subject to audit and shall not finance prohibited distributions, acquisitions unrelated to the project, or repayment of insider debt except a documented, preapproved eligible project cost.
(c) SECURITY. The agreement shall identify collateral, lien priority, insurance, financial covenants, reserve accounts, restrictions on additional debt, and reporting. The agency may accept a subordinate position only on a written finding that the incremental public benefit and recoverable value justify the additional risk and that the increased subsidy cost is funded.
(d) LAW GOVERNING PRIORITY. This Act creates no automatic lien, secret priority, or exception to the Bankruptcy Code. Security interests shall be perfected under applicable law. Employees, communities, and unsecured suppliers shall not be told that a Federal loan independently guarantees payment of their claims.
(a) PORTFOLIO REVIEW. The administering agencies, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, shall conduct an annual portfolio stress test. The test shall evaluate correlated exposure to a technology, energy source, industrial customer, geographic hazard, commodity, construction contractor, and financing market.
(b) CONCENTRATION. In addition to section 207, no controlled group may account for more than 10 percent of aggregate outstanding face credit exposure under this title after the portfolio exceeds $100,000,000,000. A commitment that would breach this limit shall not be made without a subsequent Act of Congress authorizing that commitment. The agency shall not divide an economically unified enterprise into nominally independent borrowers.
(c) RESPONSE. A stress finding shall lead to a written management response addressing prospective commitment pace, collateral, technical review, or a request for appropriations. It does not authorize repudiation of a lawful existing guarantee, unilateral impairment of accrued rights, or transfer of program money between accounts without authority.
(d) TRANSPARENCY. Public summaries shall distinguish expected loss, severe stress loss, financing-account cash needs, and appropriated subsidy cost. A severe scenario is not a prediction. Commercially sensitive exposure may be aggregated, but material portfolio risk shall not be withheld merely because disclosure could invite criticism.
(a) SERVICING. Each agency shall establish payment monitoring, covenant testing, inspection, borrower-risk ratings, delinquency escalation, and servicing responsibilities before initial disbursement. Contracts for servicing shall preserve governmental authority over material modifications and enforcement.
(b) EARLY REMEDIATION. On material deterioration, the agency shall require a corrective plan addressing liquidity, construction, management, safety, and financing. A workout may adjust timing, require new private equity, replace a contractor, or restructure collateral if lawful and supported by an updated recovery analysis.
(c) PUBLIC-INTEREST LIMITS. A workout shall not forgive environmental remediation, release an individual from criminal liability, waive a tax liability outside lawful settlement authority, or restore a prohibited distribution. Continued operating payments necessary to prevent immediate danger may be approved only from available authority and with written controls.
(d) FORECLOSURE AND DISPOSITION. Before disposing of a major assisted asset, the agency shall consider safety, continuity of essential supply, competition, existing worker rights, and expected recovery. Asset sale shall ordinarily be competitive. A below-market transfer requires a separately funded public purpose and explicit legal authority; a loan workout is not an unappropriated grant program.
(e) LOSS RECOGNITION. An agency shall recognize deterioration and expected loss promptly. Renewal, forbearance, or reclassification may not be used to conceal delinquency or maintain an unsupported asset value.
(a) AUTHORITY. To implement section 707, the Secretary of the Treasury may accept nonvoting warrants, royalty agreements, contingent-payment rights, and other contractual participation instruments as consideration for assistance. The Secretary may hold, exercise, sell, or settle those instruments in accordance with this section. This authority does not establish a general fund to purchase publicly traded securities or controlling interests.
(b) VALUATION. The agency shall obtain an independent valuation or competitive market evidence appropriate to the instrument. The record shall address dilution, liquidation preferences, transfer restrictions, related-party transactions, expected duration, valuation uncertainty, and the public benefit for which consideration is exchanged.
(c) LIMITS ON CONTROL. The United States shall not acquire voting control or an ownership interest exceeding the limitation in section 707. No Federal officer may use an instrument to direct editorial content, lawful political activity, unrelated employment decisions, or other management matters not necessary to enforce its terms.
(d) DISPOSITION. Sales shall use a competitive process or a documented market execution procedure. A sale to an insider shall receive independent conflict review and public disclosure of its valuation basis. The Secretary shall maintain records permitting comparison of realized receipts with the original assistance and obligations.
(e) DEPOSIT. Net receipts shall be deposited in the general fund of the Treasury unless credit-reform law requires a financing-account entry. Such receipts do not replenish award authority. Ordinary management expenses shall be paid from appropriated administrative amounts, not netted in a manner that conceals gross receipts.
(a) FEES. An agency may charge a reasonable application or servicing fee expressly stated before application. A fee shall not exceed the allocable cost of the service and may be reduced or waived for a small business, public entity, or nonprofit applicant under published criteria. Collected fees shall be deposited as required by applicable receipts law and do not augment appropriations absent express authority.
(b) INTERMEDIARIES. An agency may work with regulated lenders, community development financial institutions, and other qualified intermediaries. Each intermediary shall disclose its ownership, compensation, conflicts, underwriting procedures, and ultimate beneficiaries; maintain auditable accounts; and accept enforcement and record-access provisions appropriate to its role.
(c) NO AUTOMATIC PASS-THROUGH. An intermediary’s eligibility does not make every ultimate borrower eligible. The agency shall require verification of the funded project, applicable corporate conditions, environmental duties, aggregate assistance, and beneficial ownership.
(d) SMALL ENTERPRISE ACCESS. Agencies shall provide standardized applications, technical assistance, and appropriately scaled underwriting for smaller projects. Proportional procedures shall not waive repayment analysis, environmental law, security screening, or disclosure of related parties.
(e) PROHIBITED CHARGES. No person may charge a borrower a commission for access to a Federal official, obtain an undisclosed success fee through a subcontract, or represent that payment to the intermediary guarantees Federal approval.
(a) STATEMENTS. Each credit and participation portfolio shall prepare annual financial statements and a reconciliation among award systems, Treasury accounts, servicing records, and financial statements. The agency Inspector General shall audit, or supervise an independent audit of, the statements under applicable Federal standards.
(b) MINIMUM DISCLOSURES. Statements shall disclose changes in principal, subsidy cost, arrears, guarantees called, write-offs, recoveries, participation instruments, valuation methods, administrative cost, and reestimates. A loan commitment not yet disbursed shall not be presented as completed private investment or operating production capacity.
(c) CORRECTIONS. Material errors shall be corrected publicly within 90 days after confirmation, with an explanation of affected periods and controls. A correction is not by itself an admission of fraud. Concealment of a known material error is subject to title XVI where its elements are established.
(d) NO DOUBLE COUNTING. A repayment included in the expected cash flows used to calculate a loan’s subsidy cost shall not also be represented as a new fiscal offset against the full face value of the program appropriation. Reconciliation shall separately identify unexpected recoveries, legally collectible fees, and participation receipts not already included in credit scoring.
(e) RETENTION. Servicing and security records shall be retained through final discharge and for at least seven years thereafter, or longer during an investigation, litigation hold, or unresolved environmental obligation.
(a) NEW COMMITMENTS. No new loan, guarantee, or participation commitment may be made after September 30, 2044, except a modification of an existing obligation lawfully funded under section 1302. A modification shall not finance an unrelated new project or extend maturity beyond the maximum permitted by section 1304.
(b) CONTINUING FUNCTIONS. Expiration of new-commitment authority does not terminate servicing, collection, enforcement, environmental oversight, financial reporting, records custody, or lawful disposition of assets. Before an office closes, its Secretary shall assign those functions and transfer records to a continuing responsible office.
(c) FUNDING. The post-award reserve under section 1805 shall support eligible continuing administrative functions. If projected costs exceed available amounts, the President’s budget shall identify the shortfall and request specific appropriations. No agency may create an indefinite administrative appropriation by calling an ordinary operating expense a credit reestimate.
(d) ANNUAL CLOSEOUT PLAN. Beginning in fiscal year 2038, each agency shall publish an annual closeout plan identifying outstanding commitments, anticipated maturities, staffing, disputed claims, credit exposures, monitoring obligations, and resources required after 2040. The plan shall distinguish an asset’s contractual lifetime from the appropriation window and shall identify any responsibility expected to continue beyond fiscal year 2075.
(a) CREDIT ALLOWED. In the case of an eligible person holding a valid allocation certificate issued under this title, there shall be allowed as a credit against the tax imposed by chapter 1 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 for the taxable year in which certified qualified property is placed in service an amount equal to the applicable percentage of the qualified investment, not exceeding the remaining amount of the certificate.
(b) RATE. The applicable percentage shall be 30 percent. It shall be 40 percent for a project located in a distressed area that supplies the worker and community commitments required by this Act, or for publicly or cooperatively owned shared infrastructure providing enforceable nondiscriminatory access. Location alone does not excuse failure to satisfy eligibility or permit requirements.
(c) REFUNDABILITY. The credit shall be treated as a credit allowed under subpart C of part IV of subchapter A of chapter 1 of that Code. Any amount exceeding the tax otherwise due shall be treated as an overpayment subject to refund under the Code. The same amount may not be credited, refunded, carried, transferred, or otherwise paid more than once.
(d) PUBLIC AND TAX-EXEMPT PERSONS. An Indian Tribe, State, political subdivision, territorial government, organization exempt under section 501(a) of the Code, rural electric cooperative, or instrumentality thereof that owns qualified property may make an irrevocable election on a return prescribed by the Secretary of the Treasury to be treated as a taxpayer for this title, notwithstanding exemption from chapter 1 tax. This election does not subject its otherwise exempt income to tax.
(e) CAP. A credit exists only to the extent of an allocation made within section 1801. The Secretary may not issue an uncapped entitlement by regulation or payment guidance.
(a) QUALIFIED INVESTMENT. Qualified investment is the adjusted tax basis, or equivalent documented cost for an exempt person, of new tangible depreciable property constructed, reconstructed, or acquired for original use by the claimant in an approved domestic project. The basis shall exclude land, goodwill, ordinary working capital, financing charges, stock acquisition, fossil-fuel feedstock, and property not placed in service.
(b) PROPERTY. Property qualifies only if directly used for clean generation meeting section 504; storage supporting qualifying electricity; transmission or distribution upgrades; verified industrial electrification or efficiency; pollution prevention and control; water reuse and treatment; materials recovery; or manufacture of equipment primarily designed for those functions. General office buildings, ordinary replacement without a documented performance improvement, and speculative capacity without an approved use do not qualify.
(c) RECONSTRUCTION. For an existing facility, only separately documented new equipment and reconstruction expenditures that materially improve eligible performance may be counted. A sale and leaseback, internal sale, or change in tax ownership does not convert previously used property into new qualifying property.
(d) MIXED USE. Basis shall be apportioned by independently supportable engineering or use records. Property primarily used for an ineligible activity does not qualify merely because it also supplies a nominal qualifying service.
(e) OWNERSHIP. The claimant shall own the property for Federal tax purposes or under an equivalent beneficial-ownership rule for an exempt person. A lessee and lessor may not both claim credit on the same property. Treasury shall establish a single-claim rule for partnerships, co-ownership, and disregarded entities without expanding aggregate credit.
(a) COMPETITIVE ALLOCATION. Treasury, in consultation with Energy and the Administrator, shall allocate certificates through published solicitations evaluating verified pollution reduction, additionality, energy and water demand, domestic productive capacity, readiness, labor and community commitments, public benefit per Federal dollar, and fiscal risk. An applicant shall execute applicable covenants before certification.
(b) CERTIFICATE. A certificate shall identify the owner, controlled group, location, property categories, maximum credit dollars, performance commitments, qualification milestones, and an outside placed-in-service date. It is a reservation of limited credit authority, not a permit or a payment before performance.
(c) AVAILABILITY. New allocation authority shall become available in the amounts stated in section 1801. Unallocated authority may carry forward through September 30, 2044. No certificate may be issued thereafter. Certified property shall be placed in service not later than December 31, 2048.
(d) MILESTONES. A recipient shall demonstrate financing and material project advancement within two years after allocation. Treasury may allow one extension of not more than two years for circumstances beyond the recipient’s reasonable control, within the outside date. After notice and opportunity to respond, an unused allocation may be revoked and reallocated before September 30, 2044.
(e) ACCOUNTING. A cancelled, unused reservation may be reallocated only if the old certificate is extinguished in the registry. Recapture of a credit already claimed does not create new allocation authority. A provisional selection shall not encumber more than the unallocated statutory balance.
(a) PREREQUISITES. A claimant shall satisfy title II; obtain required permits; comply with applicable facility standards and approved transition provisions; maintain wage and apprenticeship commitments; disclose aggregate assistance and ownership; and establish that the expenditure would produce the additional benefit stated in its allocation application.
(b) DOMESTIC PERFORMANCE. Qualified property shall be located and operated in the United States. Except for a separate procurement rule lawfully applicable to the transaction, qualification shall not depend on using domestic rather than imported inputs or on export performance. Foreign ownership is governed by the security and control rules of this Act, not a categorical bar against qualified allied investors.
(c) CONTINUING COVENANTS. A certificate shall state continuing environmental, reporting, domestic-operation, corporate, and asset-transfer covenants. For a project otherwise subject to a fifteen-year operating commitment, the five-year tax recapture schedule does not extinguish that separate commitment.
(d) EXCLUSION OF PROHIBITED TRANSACTIONS. No credit shall be allowed for property or a transaction prohibited by sanctions, forced-labor import law, applicable export controls, or another Federal statute. Treasury may require traceability sufficient to establish compliance; it may not substitute an unpublished list or an ancestry-based presumption for a legally applicable restriction.
(e) EXISTING CREDITS. A finding that a claimant is eligible under this title is not a determination of eligibility under sections 45X, 45Y, 48C, or 48E of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 or any other credit. Each such credit retains its own effective dates, restrictions, and administration.
(a) SAME INVESTMENT. Qualified investment shall be reduced by the portion of cost paid by a Federal grant, reimbursed under another Federal program, recovered through insurance, or already used as investment basis for another Federal credit. A claimant shall make an irrevocable project-level election between this credit and another Federal investment credit for the same property.
(b) PRODUCTION BENEFITS. A claimant receiving another Federal production subsidy attributable to the same property shall disclose that subsidy. Treasury shall reduce the allocation or exclude overlapping supported cost so that the same incremental cost or emissions reduction is not compensated twice. A rule under this subsection may coordinate benefits but shall not repeal another credit or increase this title’s allocation ceiling.
(c) BASIS. The basis of property shall be reduced by the full amount of credit allowed under this title. Upon recapture under section 1407, basis shall be increased by the recaptured amount to the extent necessary to avoid a double tax burden. For a tax-exempt person, equivalent cost records shall be maintained.
(d) SUPPORT LIMIT. Sections 205, 211, and 601 apply to aggregate support. The 40-percent credit rate is not authority to exceed an otherwise applicable aggregate cost-share limit. Amounts above a statutory cost-share limit shall reduce the certificate before the credit is claimed.
(e) ATTRIBUTION. Property transferred within a controlled group retains its original eligible-cost history. Inflated intercompany prices, fragmented ownership, credits claimed by nominees, and circular financing shall be disregarded to the extent necessary to enforce this section. An anti-abuse determination shall identify the transaction and statutory duplication, not rely solely on a conclusion that a lawful business structure is undesirable.
(a) CLAIM. The claimant shall file a return identifying its allocation certificate, property, placed-in-service date, qualified basis, applicable percentage, beneficial ownership, and independent engineering certification. Records shall substantiate actual expenditure, operation, and satisfaction of conditions. Treasury shall provide a filing mechanism for exempt persons and protect return information under section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986.
(b) CODE PROCEDURES. Except as expressly provided in this title, subtitle F of that Code applies to this credit as to a refundable chapter 1 credit, including examination, assessment, deficiency procedures where applicable, collection, refund claims, interest, penalties, administrative appeals, and judicial review. A tax-credit denial is not subject to the non-tax administrative review process of section 210.
(c) OVERPAYMENT ADJUSTMENT. An excessive credit or refund shall be assessable and collectible as a tax. Innocent arithmetic or eligibility error shall be addressed under applicable civil tax procedures; criminal liability requires the elements of an applicable criminal statute. A registry discrepancy alone does not establish fraud.
(d) REFUND APPROPRIATION. Section 1324(b) of title 31, United States Code, is amended by striking “and” at the end of paragraph (1), striking the period at the end of paragraph (2) and inserting “; and”, and adding at the end the following:
“(3) refunds due from the credit established by section 1401 of The American Innovation Act, subject to the allocation limits of that Act.”
(e) SINGLE FUNDING SOURCE. Refunds under subsection (d) shall not also be paid as grants from the Fund. Statutory refund interest shall be separately reported and is not additional credit allocation authority.
(a) RECAPTURE EVENT. If, within five years after property is placed in service, the claimant disposes of it, removes it from the United States, converts it to an ineligible use, or materially ceases to satisfy a condition essential to credit eligibility, its chapter 1 tax shall be increased by the unvested credit amount. An exempt claimant shall owe the same amount as a tax for purposes of subtitle F.
(b) SCHEDULE. The unvested percentage shall be 100 percent before the first anniversary, 80 percent from the first to the second, 60 percent from the second to the third, 40 percent from the third to the fourth, and 20 percent from the fourth to the fifth. Fraudulent initial qualification permits recovery of the entire improperly allowed credit under applicable assessment and limitation rules; the vesting schedule does not protect fraud.
(c) CONTINUITY TRANSFER. A transfer shall not trigger recapture if Treasury approves a qualified successor that assumes all remaining obligations, preserves the property’s use and location, and accepts joint and several liability with the transferor for pre-transfer credit defects, limited to the credit at issue. A bona fide successor may not be made liable for unrelated conduct by the transferor.
(d) CASUALTY. Treasury may permit restoration following a casualty beyond the claimant’s control for not more than 24 months. Insurance proceeds and replacement expenditures shall be reconciled, and no duplicate credit may be claimed. Intentional destruction or avoidable abandonment is not a qualifying casualty.
(e) COORDINATION. Recovery of the same credit principal under a tax assessment and an award action shall be credited against both. Separate compensation for proven injury, lawful penalties, or continuing operating covenants is not extinguished by payment of recapture.
(a) REGISTRY. Treasury shall maintain a secure certificate registry recording allocation, amendment, revocation, placed-in-service verification, claims, recapture, and unused authority. Public records shall identify recipient, project, maximum allocation, and aggregate credit realized without disclosing protected tax-return information beyond what this Act expressly requires.
(b) NONTRANSFERABILITY. A certificate or credit may not be sold or transferred apart from a Treasury-approved transfer of the qualified project under section 1407. Ordinary secured financing may take a security interest in project assets and expected cash receipts but shall not make the lender the claimant or enlarge the credit.
(c) NOTICE. Before revoking an unused certificate for nonfraudulent nonperformance, Treasury shall provide written reasons, at least 30 days to respond, and review by an official not responsible for the original adverse determination. A certificate may be frozen during a documented fraud investigation, with a status determination within 90 days and access to judicial relief otherwise available.
(d) RELIANCE. A taxpayer may rely on a final certificate for its allocated ceiling but remains responsible for factual eligibility and actual expenditure. Treasury may not retroactively change a substantive eligibility rule after expenditure in reasonable reliance on the final rule, except to enforce a statute or correct fraud or a material misrepresentation.
(e) TAXPAYER RIGHTS. Nothing in this title diminishes applicable Taxpayer Advocate, administrative appeal, refund, deficiency, or judicial-review rights. Government access to credit records does not waive attorney-client privilege or authorize disclosure of unrelated returns.
(a) RESPONSIBILITY. Treasury shall administer tax determinations and payments. Energy and EPA shall provide technical certifications within their expertise. A technical agency may issue an environmental compliance finding but shall not assess an income tax or disclose tax-return information without lawful authority.
(b) COORDINATED EXAMINATION. Agencies shall use a common project identifier and avoid duplicative document demands. Treasury may verify a technical certification, refer false information for investigation, and suspend a disputed payment consistent with tax law. The same examination record shall not be altered to give contradictory accounts to different agencies.
(c) ANNUAL REPORT. Treasury shall report allocations, claims, payments, reductions of tax liability, recaptures, average verification time, geographic distribution, technology categories, and compliance results. Refund outlays and reductions in receipts shall be distinguished. Allocated amounts shall not be reported as completed investment.
(d) EVALUATION. At least every three years, Treasury and Energy shall evaluate additionality, cost per verified unit of pollution reduction, project completion, concentration, and interaction with other incentives. The evaluation shall identify uncertainty and compare projects with relevant unsuccessful or nonparticipating applicants where lawful and methodologically supportable.
(e) FUNDING. Administration shall be paid from the Oversight, Integrity, and Data Systems Account. No percentage of denied claims, penalties, or taxpayer refunds may be retained by an examiner or private technical verifier.
(a) REGULATIONS. Treasury shall propose implementing regulations within 180 days after enactment and finalize them within 365 days. Rules shall address allocation, exempt claimants, basis, accounting periods, partnerships, recapture, records, examination, and coordination with other credits. An allocation may be issued only after applicable eligibility and verification rules are effective.
(b) EXPENDITURES. Except for approved planning and engineering expenditures incurred after enactment and capitalized into qualifying property, credit shall apply only to property whose construction or binding acquisition begins after the allocation certificate is issued. An agency may not retroactively subsidize a substantially completed project by changing its project name or owner.
(c) FINAL DATES. The outside dates in section 1403 govern allocation and placed-in-service eligibility. Claims may be filed within the otherwise applicable limitation period for the taxable year of placement in service. Valid late-filed claims within that period do not authorize new allocations.
(d) SURVIVAL. Record retention, recapture, tax administration, lawful collection, and continuing covenants survive expiration of allocation authority. A certificate does not promise renewal of this credit or a successor incentive.
(e) NO IMPLIED AMENDMENT. Except for the expressly stated treatment of the credit, procedures, and amendment to title 31, this title does not amend the rate, availability, or foreign-entity conditions of an existing Internal Revenue Code credit. Treasury shall publish a coordination table identifying applicable provisions and effective dates without replacing enacted text with guidance.
(a) ESTABLISHMENT. There is established within the Department of Commerce an Innovation Integrity Coordination Office. Its Director shall be appointed by the Secretary as a career Senior Executive Service official under applicable merit-system requirements and shall be subject to the Secretary’s supervision. The Office is not an independent commission and has no authority to prosecute, adjudicate penalties, direct an Inspector General, or overturn a regulator.
(b) FUNCTIONS. The Office shall maintain common risk indicators, coordinate referrals and duplicate-award detection, support training, reconcile public records, and identify systemic control weaknesses. It may request information from administering agencies consistent with governing disclosure restrictions.
(c) SEPARATION. Award selection, regulatory enforcement, criminal prosecution, and independent audit shall remain with their statutorily responsible officers. A favorable Office risk rating is not a safe harbor against a material misrepresentation, environmental violation, or breach of an express covenant.
(d) REFERRALS. Credible evidence of a criminal offense shall be referred promptly to the Department of Justice or appropriate Inspector General. The Office shall not require political approval of a referral or delay it to protect a program’s reported success rate.
(e) PUBLIC REPORT. The Director shall publish an annual account of systemic risks, referrals in aggregate, corrected data errors, and unresolved control recommendations. Information identifying an uncharged subject shall be protected consistently with law. An annual report shall distinguish an allegation, an open investigation, a settlement, and an adjudicated violation.
(a) PRESERVATION OF AUTHORITY. Nothing in this Act diminishes the jurisdiction, independence, access, reporting, or subpoena authority of an Inspector General under chapter 4 of title 5, United States Code, or the Comptroller General’s authority under title 31. The Council and Coordination Office shall not approve an Inspector General’s findings before publication.
(b) ACCESS. Award instruments shall provide the responsible Inspector General and Comptroller General access to records directly pertinent to expenditure, performance, ownership, credit risk, environmental compliance, and representations made under this Act. Access shall extend to material subrecipients and the relevant records of a parent that accepts a group-wide covenant, not to unrelated records without a legal basis.
(c) PRIVILEGE AND SECURITY. Classified information, trade secrets, personal information, and privileged materials shall be handled under applicable law. A lawful privilege claim shall be described sufficiently to permit adjudication; mere designation as confidential does not defeat statutory audit access.
(d) RECOMMENDATIONS. An administering agency shall respond to a final audit recommendation within 60 days, identify corrective action and responsible officials, and publish the response subject to lawful redactions. Disagreement shall be explained. GAO recommendations do not themselves create binding executive regulations or adjudicate recipient liability.
(e) RESOURCES. The oversight allocation shall provide resources for independent audit, including technical and credit specialists. Agencies may not charge an investigated recipient for an investigator’s compensation or make an auditor’s payment contingent on a recovery.
(a) PLAN. Before first disbursement, the agency shall assign each award a monitoring plan proportional to financial exposure, technical novelty, public-health risk, prior performance, ownership complexity, and data sensitivity. A small award may receive simplified financial reporting but remains subject to applicable safety and anti-fraud law.
(b) MINIMUM ACTIVITY. Major facility and substantial commercial awards shall receive annual compliance reviews, periodic site verification, and reconciliation of financial and physical progress. Sampling may be used for low-risk transactions if the method, coverage, and exceptions are documented.
(c) VERIFIER INDEPENDENCE. An independent verifier shall not verify its own design or implementation work, receive a contingent fee, hold a material financial interest in the recipient, or accept employment negotiations with the recipient during the review. Conflicts shall be disclosed and resolved before assignment.
(d) QUALITY CONTROL. Agencies shall inspect a risk-based sample of verification work, maintain accreditation and disciplinary procedures, and permit a recipient to contest a verifier’s factual findings. An agency may not delegate its final legal compliance determination to a private verifier.
(e) NO COMPLIANCE THEATER. A certification shall identify evidence examined, limitations, exceptions, and the period covered. Purchasing a certificate without competent verification does not satisfy a duty. A recipient’s own compliance program is relevant evidence but not conclusive proof that a violation did not occur.
(a) INSPECTIONS. Authorized agency personnel may conduct reasonable inspections of covered facilities and pertinent records pursuant to valid consent, an administrative warrant, or another lawful basis. An award’s acceptance does not constitute a blanket waiver of the Fourth Amendment. Inspection shall be limited to the statutory purpose, reasonably scheduled unless an emergency or evidence-preservation risk requires otherwise, and documented.
(b) SUBPOENAS. The Secretary, the Administrator, or another administering agency head may issue an administrative subpoena for documentary material reasonably relevant to a suspected material violation of this Act. The subpoena shall describe the material with reasonable specificity, allow a reasonable response period, and identify a procedure to object or seek modification.
(c) ENFORCEMENT. An agency shall seek enforcement of a contested subpoena in a United States district court having jurisdiction over the person or records. No person shall be criminally punished under this Act solely for declining to comply with an unenforced subpoena while timely seeking judicial review.
(d) PROTECTIONS. Privilege, work-product protection, applicable confidentiality law, and rights against compelled self-incrimination are preserved. An agency shall use protective orders and minimization procedures where appropriate. It may not demand unrelated personal devices or accounts merely because an employee works at an assisted facility.
(e) OBSTRUCTION. This section does not protect intentional destruction of records subject to a known lawful preservation duty, witness intimidation, or knowing concealment of material evidence when the elements of an offense are established.
(a) REQUIRED RECORDS. Recipients shall maintain source documents substantiating eligible costs, labor standards, material environmental measurements, ownership disclosures, related-party transactions, project milestones, and certifications. Records shall identify who made a material entry and preserve subsequent corrections.
(b) PERIOD. General award records shall be retained for seven years after final closeout; records supporting executive certifications and major facility environmental measurements for not less than twelve years after the relevant submission; and credit, long-term stewardship, and property records for the longer period specifically required by this Act. A litigation hold or pending audit extends retention for the affected records.
(c) PROPORTIONALITY. Agencies shall accept commonly used accessible electronic formats and avoid requiring duplicative proprietary systems. A small recipient may use a shared compliance service, but remains responsible for truthful records and access.
(d) CORRECTION. A recipient discovering a material reporting error shall notify the agency within 30 days after confirming the error, preserve the original entry, and submit a correction and explanation. Prompt correction may support mitigation; it does not erase an earlier knowing false statement.
(e) DATA INTEGRITY. Records shall be protected against unauthorized alteration and loss through access controls, backups, and auditable change histories proportionate to risk. The Act does not require permanent retention of unrelated personal information, and record duties shall be harmonized with title X.
(a) DUTY. As a condition of assistance, an applicant shall disclose its legal identity, ultimate controlling entities, each natural person owning or controlling at least 25 percent of its ownership interests, each person exercising control as defined in section 4, and any foreign government with a material ownership or control interest. The disclosure shall trace intermediate entities sufficiently to verify control and shall identify nominees and relevant contractual control rights.
(b) INDEPENDENT AUTHORITY. This duty is imposed by this Act regardless of whether the applicant must submit a beneficial-ownership report under another Federal law. An exemption from a general corporate-reporting law is not an exemption from this award-specific disclosure requirement.
(c) UPDATES. Material changes shall be reported within 30 days after the recipient knows or reasonably should know of them, and before a change in control when advance notice is required by section 209. Annual confirmation shall identify any unresolved ownership uncertainty.
(d) PUBLIC AND NONPUBLIC FIELDS. Legal recipients, controlling business entities, and aggregate public assistance shall be public. Personal residential addresses, identification numbers, full birth dates, and nonpublic ownership details shall be held securely and disclosed only for lawful administration, oversight, enforcement, or judicial process. An agency may publish a natural person’s name only where required by law or necessary to explain an adjudicated conflict or violation after appropriate process.
(e) VERIFICATION. Agencies shall use reliable records and requests for clarification. Inability to resolve a material control question may justify withholding a new award; it does not establish that the applicant committed a crime.
(a) OFFICIAL CONFLICTS. Federal officers, employees, advisers, and support contractors shall disclose financial, employment, familial, and other interests that applicable ethics law requires. An official with a disqualifying conflict shall recuse from award selection, valuation, enforcement disposition, or other affected matter.
(b) APPLICANT REPRESENTATIONS. Applicants shall identify paid intermediaries and compensation for preparation, advocacy, technical advice, and financing. An applicant shall not offer a thing of value to influence a Federal decision unlawfully or charge the award for political campaign contributions, lobbying prohibited by law, or access payments.
(c) LAWFUL SPEECH. A recipient may engage in lawful political speech, petition the government, and retain counsel using non-award resources consistent with otherwise applicable law. No award may be conditioned on supporting an administration, party, elected official, or political position.
(d) CONTACT RECORD. Agencies shall record substantive off-record contacts seeking to alter a competitive award or enforcement decision, identifying participants, subject matter, and disposition, subject to legitimate security and investigatory exclusions. Routine technical assistance shall be recorded through ordinary program systems rather than treated as improper influence.
(e) REMEDIES. Conflicts shall be addressed through recusal, independent review, correction of a tainted process, or lawful enforcement. Mere contact with an elected representative is not a ground for disqualification, and a recipient shall not be penalized for protected petitioning.
(a) PUBLICATION. Agencies shall publish, within 30 days after execution or material amendment, the recipient, project location, instrument, maximum Federal support value, face loan exposure where applicable, milestones, domestic-operation period, applicable public-interest covenants, and actual disbursements. Reports shall distinguish committed, obligated, disbursed, recaptured, and cancelled amounts.
(b) CONFIDENTIALITY CLAIM. A person seeking protection of commercial information shall identify the particular information, legal basis, duration, and foreseeable harm. A blanket confidentiality marking does not establish an exemption. The agency shall make the disclosure determination under the Freedom of Information Act, the Trade Secrets Act, tax-confidentiality law, and other applicable statutes.
(c) NOTICE AND REVIEW. Where required by law, an agency shall notify a submitter before releasing information claimed to be protected and allow an opportunity to object. This Act does not authorize disclosure of classified material, protected personal information, or tax returns in violation of law.
(d) ACCESSIBILITY. Public records shall be searchable, downloadable, accessible to persons with disabilities, and accompanied by data definitions. A machine-readable total shall reconcile to published financial statements.
(e) DISPUTES. A recipient or member of the public may request correction of a factual dashboard error. The agency shall acknowledge the request within fifteen days and decide it within 45 days or explain a necessary extension. Disagreement with a lawful enforcement finding is not a right to remove it from the public record.
(a) EVALUATION DESIGN. Before a major program begins, the administering agency shall specify its objectives, baseline, comparison methods, data sources, timing, and limitations. Evaluation shall measure additional domestic capability, productivity, public health or service outcomes, verified environmental performance, private investment genuinely additional to Federal assistance, and distributional effects.
(b) COUNTERFACTUAL. An evaluator shall consider what would likely have occurred without assistance, including displaced activity, relocation within the United States, private investment that would have occurred anyway, alternative public uses of funds, and compliance costs. Where causal identification is not feasible, the report shall describe associations without representing them as proven program effects.
(c) NEGATIVE RESULTS. Agencies shall publish material negative, null, and inconclusive findings. Honest scientific failure and discovery that an intervention is ineffective are not grounds to suppress a report or retaliate against an evaluator.
(d) METHODS. Reproducible methods, assumptions, and appropriately deidentified data shall be made available when lawful. Proprietary information shall be protected without preventing an independent reviewer from examining the basis for a material conclusion.
(e) BUDGET CLAIMS. Added gross domestic product, private profits, gross loan repayments, tax receipts, public health benefits, and avoided emissions are distinct measures. A report shall not add them together as though each were revenue to the Treasury. An expected social return is not an enacted funding source.
(a) REMEDIATION PLANS. A material weakness identified by an Inspector General, financial auditor, or agency control review shall receive a written remediation plan within 90 days. The plan shall assign responsible officials, deadlines, interim controls, and verification of completion.
(b) AWARD PACE. An agency may defer new awards affected by a documented control failure while establishing a time-bounded remediation plan, provided that it complies with appropriations and impoundment law. It shall not delay an unrelated valid payment solely to improve a program’s cash balance or conceal an administrative shortfall.
(c) CONTINUITY. Records and unresolved findings shall transfer to a successor office before reorganization or closure. An acting appointment or lapse in an advisory body does not extinguish an Inspector General’s access or a statutory reporting duty.
(d) CONGRESSIONAL NOTICE. A material weakness unresolved after one year shall be identified in the annual report with the agency’s explanation, estimated exposure, and corrective measures. Congress shall receive notice of any inability to perform essential monitoring because of insufficient resources.
(e) NO IMMUNITY THROUGH AUDIT. An audit finding that sampled transactions complied is not a guarantee that all transactions complied. Conversely, an unproven allegation or audit recommendation is not a criminal conviction, automatic debarment, or basis to recover unrelated awards.
(a) ADMINISTRATION. Each administering agency shall enforce the conditions of its awards, including corrective plans, suspension of unearned payments, proportionate recovery, and prospective eligibility decisions, subject to this title. EPA shall administer the environmental duties and protective orders expressly assigned to it. Treasury shall administer tax liabilities under title XIV and the Internal Revenue Code of 1986.
(b) COURT ACTIONS. The Attorney General may bring a civil action in an appropriate United States district court for an injunction, recovery authorized by this Act, or a punitive civil monetary penalty. A punitive civil penalty newly created by this Act shall be imposed by a court, not by the Council, a private verifier, or an administrative tribunal. The right to jury trial shall be preserved to the extent provided by the Constitution or statute.
(c) STANDARDS. Unless a different standard is expressly provided, the United States shall establish a civil violation by a preponderance of the evidence. Criminal elements shall be established beyond a reasonable doubt. A rule may prescribe measurement methods but may not alter a statutory mental state, shift the criminal burden of proof, or create a new offense.
(d) FINDINGS. A final adverse administrative action shall identify the duty, relevant facts, evidence, response to material objections, remedy, and review rights. A guidance document, press release, or informal statement does not independently create an enforceable duty.
(e) COORDINATION. Agencies shall coordinate overlapping matters without preventing independent exercise of an existing statutory authority. No award official may promise immunity from a tax, criminal, environmental, labor, or competition law administered by another authority.
(a) MINOR NONCOMPLIANCE. For a first, nonfraudulent failure involving no material misuse of money, significant threat to health or safety, intentional concealment, or repeated disregard of a prior requirement, the administering agency shall ordinarily issue a notice describing the defect and allow at least 30 days to respond and 90 days to complete correction.
(b) EXTENSION. The agency may extend correction to not more than 180 days where a documented capital or systems change is necessary and interim measures protect the public and Federal funds. A shorter period may be required for an immediate operational risk, with written reasons and access to prompt review.
(c) ASSISTANCE. The agency shall identify available technical assistance and may permit correction of forms, reporting methods, or an inadvertent calculation without a punitive penalty. A recipient remains liable to return an actual overpayment even where the error was innocent.
(d) EXCLUSIONS. Cure does not legalize a prohibited release, suspend an existing environmental or labor deadline, erase a knowingly false certification, or require the government to continue a dangerous activity. Repeated nominally distinct failures sharing the same knowingly uncorrected control defect may be treated as repeated noncompliance on specific findings.
(e) MITIGATION. Prompt self-disclosure before discovery, preservation of evidence, meaningful cooperation without compelled privilege waiver, restitution, protection of affected persons, and verified correction shall be considered in remedy selection. A recipient is not entitled to mitigation for stopping misconduct only after knowingly concealing it during an investigation.
(a) RECOVERY. After notice and an opportunity to respond, an agency may recover assistance to the extent it was unearned, misused, obtained through a material misrepresentation, or paid for a materially unperformed commitment. The agency shall identify the causal relationship between the violation and the amount recovered.
(b) TOTAL RECOVERY. Recovery of an entire award is authorized where a material fraud induced the award, the recipient deliberately defeats its principal funded purpose, or the agreement expressly provides a proportionate full-recovery remedy for a specified fundamental breach. A minor reporting defect does not justify recovering unrelated, satisfactorily performed work.
(c) CALCULATION. Recovery shall credit value lawfully delivered and amounts already repaid to the extent appropriate to the breached obligation. For a domestic-operation covenant, the agreement shall specify a declining unperformed-service formula, without limiting recovery for fraud, prohibited asset transfer, or intentionally defeated project purpose.
(d) INTEREST. Interest and collection charges shall be assessed under 31 U.S.C. 3717 where applicable. Tax interest shall be governed by the Internal Revenue Code. No agency may invent an unannounced punitive interest rate in an award amendment.
(e) PROCEDURE. The recipient shall receive the proposed calculation and at least 30 days to contest material facts. The agency shall issue a reasoned final decision by an official not responsible for the disputed initial calculation. Contract Disputes Act, tax, bankruptcy, and other specially applicable review procedures are preserved.
(f) DUPLICATION. Recovery of the same loss under an award, tax recapture, the False Claims Act, or another statute shall be reconciled. This subsection does not extinguish distinct remedial obligations, lawful penalties, or compensation for a separate injury.
(a) CONTINUING VIOLATIONS. In a civil action brought by the Attorney General, a court may impose a penalty not exceeding $50,000 for each day of a material continuing violation of an express facility, reporting, financial-extraction, or data-protection duty under this Act. For a knowing continuing violation, the maximum is $250,000 per day.
(b) NONCONTINUING MISREPRESENTATION. A material false certification or material concealment that is not a continuing violation may result in a penalty not exceeding $500,000 for each distinct fraudulent scheme. Separate entries implementing one scheme shall not be multiplied into separate maximum penalties merely because they occupy separate data fields.
(c) AGGREGATE LIMIT. Penalties under subsections (a) and (b) arising from the same facility and same day shall not exceed $1,000,000 for that day. This cap does not limit restitution, remediation, recovery of assistance, or a penalty independently authorized by another statute. Courts shall consider overlap and constitutional proportionality when imposing multiple sanctions.
(d) FACTORS. The court shall consider seriousness, duration, actual and threatened harm, culpability, economic benefit, prior final violations, ability to pay without defeating essential remediation, self-disclosure, cooperation, and corrective action. Insolvency engineered through prohibited distributions shall not require reduction of liability.
(e) ADJUSTMENT. Beginning in 2029, the dollar maxima shall be adjusted annually for inflation using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, United States city average, rounded to the nearest $1,000. An increase applies only to conduct occurring after publication of the adjusted maximum.
(f) FALSE CLAIMS. Sections 3729 through 3733 of title 31 remain applicable according to their terms, including their exclusion for claims, records, and statements made under the Internal Revenue Code. This Act does not extend the False Claims Act to tax claims by implication.
(a) ENVIRONMENTAL ORDER. On a supported finding that conduct at a covered facility presents an imminent and substantial danger to health or the environment, the Administrator may order the person controlling the activity to cease or limit the dangerous conduct and take specifically identified protective measures. The order shall be no broader than reasonably necessary to address the danger.
(b) NOTICE. The Administrator shall provide a written statement of facts, required action, duration, and review procedure as promptly as circumstances permit and not later than 24 hours after an oral emergency direction. Affected persons shall receive an opportunity for an agency hearing within five business days.
(c) JUDICIAL CONTROL. Unless the recipient consents to a continued order, the Attorney General shall seek judicial confirmation within fourteen days. Failure to do so terminates the emergency order under this section, without limiting authority under another statute. A person may seek immediate judicial relief for lack of jurisdiction, unsupported findings, or disproportionate restrictions.
(d) PAYMENT HOLD. An administering agency may temporarily withhold an unearned payment on documented evidence of material diversion, imminent asset dissipation, or a serious compliance breach. It shall provide notice promptly and a determination within 30 days, subject to a reasoned extension not exceeding 60 additional days and judicial review otherwise available.
(e) ESSENTIAL CONTINUITY. Within available appropriations and lawful authority, the agency may finance narrowly necessary stabilization, worker safety, pollution containment, or secure custody of funded assets. Such payment does not excuse misconduct or provide an unlimited operating bailout.
(a) ASSISTANCE FRAUD. Whoever knowingly makes or submits a materially false statement, certification, or concealed material fact that the person has an express duty to disclose under this Act, with intent to obtain or retain assistance not lawfully due, shall be fined under title 18, United States Code, imprisoned for not more than five years, or both.
(b) MONITORING AND EVIDENCE TAMPERING. Whoever knowingly disables, falsifies, or materially alters a required environmental or financial monitoring record, or destroys a record subject to a known preservation duty, with intent to conceal a material violation of this Act or obstruct a pending or reasonably foreseeable authorized investigation, shall be fined under title 18, imprisoned for not more than five years, or both. Authorized maintenance, correction preserving the original record, or a good-faith measurement dispute does not constitute this offense.
(c) KNOWING ENDANGERMENT. Whoever knowingly violates a specific applicable environmental duty imposed by this Act, while actually aware that the violation places another person in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury, shall be fined under title 18, imprisoned for not more than fifteen years, or both. If the offense proximately causes death, the maximum term shall be twenty years.
(d) CORPORATIONS. An organization convicted under this section is subject to the fines and other organizational sanctions authorized by law. Imprisonment applies only to a natural person whose own criminal responsibility is established.
(e) ELEMENTS. The government shall prove the particular duty, its lawful applicability, the defendant’s conduct, required mental state, materiality where required, and causation where required. No regulation may increase a maximum term, replace actual awareness with a job title, or create criminal liability for failure to achieve a general policy aspiration.
(f) OTHER LAW. Existing criminal statutes remain available according to their terms. Conviction under this section does not require conviction under a separate fraud statute, and this section does not authorize duplicate punishment prohibited by the Constitution.
(a) INDIVIDUAL CONDUCT. An executive may be held personally liable under this Act only upon proof that the individual committed, directed, knowingly authorized, or knowingly participated in the conduct constituting the violation, or intentionally or recklessly failed to perform a specific nondelegable duty expressly imposed on that individual where the relevant civil provision permits that mental state.
(b) CRIMINAL OMISSION. Criminal liability for an omission requires proof of an express applicable duty, actual authority and practical ability to take the required action, knowledge of the facts creating that duty, and the mental state required by section 1606. An executive’s nominal position or association with a company is not sufficient. A civil negligence standard may not be substituted for criminal knowledge.
(c) DEFENSE EVIDENCE. Reasonable delegation, competent independent advice, an effective compliance system, timely escalation, accurate disclosure, and actual corrective action are relevant evidence. Reliance on advice is not conclusive when the executive withheld material facts, selected an adviser to conceal a known violation, or knowingly ignored contrary evidence.
(d) ORGANIZATION. Organizational liability shall be determined under otherwise applicable Federal principles of attribution and the express duties of this Act. Aggregation of innocent knowledge held by different employees shall not by itself establish the actual awareness required for an individual’s knowing-endangerment conviction.
(e) AFFILIATES. A parent or affiliate is liable for its own undertaking, participation, control-based duty expressly accepted under this Act, or liability established under another applicable legal doctrine. Common ownership alone is not a criminal conviction or an automatic piercing of corporate separateness.
(f) INSURANCE. Section 705 governs prohibited indemnification. Nothing prevents lawful insurance for remediation or defense expenses, provided that insurance does not reimburse a knowing offender for a nonindemnifiable fine, forfeiture, or required compensation clawback.
(a) PURPOSE. Suspension and debarment shall protect the government against an identified present responsibility risk, not impose additional criminal punishment. Agencies shall use applicable government-wide procurement and nonprocurement procedures, supplemented by the protections in this section.
(b) NOTICE AND RESPONSE. A proposed debarment shall identify its grounds, affected persons, proposed scope, and duration. The person shall have at least 30 days to respond and an opportunity to contest genuinely disputed material facts before a neutral official. Emergency suspension may precede full process where lawful, but shall receive prompt review.
(c) SCOPE. Exclusion shall be limited to the responsible person and affiliates whose participation, control, or present responsibility risk is specifically established. An employee, unrelated product line, or newly independent successor shall not be excluded solely by association.
(d) DURATION. Debarment under this Act shall ordinarily not exceed three years. A period up to five years requires findings of severe fraud, repeated deliberate violations, or an unremedied material threat. A longer exclusion requires separate statutory authority or a new proceeding based on current facts; it shall not arise automatically from this Act.
(e) REVIEW. A debarred person may request annual reconsideration based on restitution, changed ownership, removal of responsible officers, verified compliance reforms, or other material changes. Reinstatement shall be reasoned and public, with protection for legitimately confidential information.
(f) EXISTING OBLIGATIONS. Exclusion from new assistance does not automatically terminate a valid existing contract or interrupt essential public services. Continuation, termination, or protective transfer shall be separately determined under the governing instrument and law.
(a) COVERAGE. The protections, procedures, remedies, judicial-review rights, nonwaiver rule, and limitation periods of 41 U.S.C. 4712 shall apply to an employee of a recipient, subrecipient, contractor, subcontractor, or tax-credit claimant under this Act as though that employer were a contractor or grantee covered by that section. A report concerning a substantial and specific danger, gross mismanagement, gross waste, abuse of authority, or a violation relating to assistance is covered according to those standards.
(b) RESPONSIBLE OFFICES. For assistance without an existing contract or grant agency, the Inspector General of the administering agency shall receive the complaint and its agency head shall perform the functions assigned by 41 U.S.C. 4712. For an allocated tax credit, these functions shall be performed by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and the Secretary of the Treasury, subject to lawful tax-information safeguards.
(c) PROTECTED CONDUCT. Protection includes a lawful report to an Inspector General, the Government Accountability Office, Congress, a law-enforcement officer, an authorized regulator, a court, or a supervisor responsible for investigating misconduct. A person need not prove the underlying violation to be protected where the statutory reasonable-belief standard is satisfied. Knowingly fabricated evidence is not protected.
(d) CONTRACT TERMS. A recipient may not use a nondisclosure, severance, repayment, arbitration, or other agreement to prohibit a protected disclosure or waive a remedy made nonwaivable by 41 U.S.C. 4712. Notice of reporting channels shall be provided in accessible form to affected workers.
(e) AWARDS. Eligibility for awards under the False Claims Act, tax-whistleblower law, or another existing reward statute is preserved according to that statute. This Act creates no duplicative bounty on the same recovery and no entitlement to a percentage of an environmental fine. Appropriated integrity funds may support secure reporting and witness protection but may not purchase false testimony.
(a) ACTION. A person suffering an actual or threatened concrete injury from an ongoing or imminent violation of an express environmental duty under title V, a personal-data right under sections 1002 through 1004, or the wage and profit-sharing duties under sections 801 and 806 may bring a civil action in an appropriate United States district court against the responsible recipient for declaratory or injunctive relief. The plaintiff shall satisfy constitutional standing requirements.
(b) NOTICE. Except where an imminent threat of serious harm makes delay unreasonable, the plaintiff shall provide the recipient and responsible agency sixty days’ notice identifying the duty and relevant conduct. Notice shall not require disclosure of a whistleblower’s identity where protected by law.
(c) DILIGENT PROSECUTION. An action for the same prospective relief shall be barred while the United States or a State is diligently prosecuting a judicial action to obtain that relief, provided that the injured person may seek intervention under applicable rules. A private settlement not binding the government or affected persons does not establish diligent public prosecution.
(d) REMEDIES. This section does not create a private right to collect Federal civil penalties, obtain assistance for oneself, challenge a competing applicant’s selection, or recover generalized economic damages. Wage restitution and other remedies available under existing labor law remain available. A prevailing plaintiff may recover reasonable attorney fees and costs; a prevailing defendant may recover such fees only for a frivolous, unreasonable, or groundless claim.
(e) NO PROSPECTIVE WAIVER. Notwithstanding chapter 1 of title 9, United States Code, a predispute agreement entered after enactment may not require arbitration or waive a judicial remedy for a claim created solely by this section. Postdispute voluntary settlement remains permissible.
(f) OTHER RIGHTS. Existing causes of action, public-interest enforcement statutes, and remedies are neither displaced nor enlarged except as expressly stated.
(a) CIVIL PERIOD. An action by the United States for a new civil monetary penalty or recovery under this title shall be commenced within six years after the violation, or, for a knowing material concealment, within three years after the responsible Federal official knew or reasonably should have known the material facts, but not later than ten years after the violation. A continuing violation accrues for each day it continues; later discovery does not convert an ended violation into a continuing one.
(b) OTHER PERIODS. The Internal Revenue Code, False Claims Act, Contract Disputes Act, whistleblower statutes, environmental statutes, and criminal limitation statutes retain their own periods. A private action under section 1610 shall be filed within four years after the plaintiff knew or reasonably should have known the facts, and shall concern an ongoing or imminent violation when prospective relief is sought.
(c) COORDINATION. Agencies shall identify parallel proceedings and share information lawfully. A respondent may request a reconciliation of amounts sought for the same loss. Coordination shall not confer immunity or permit an agency to bargain away a private person’s independent claim without that person’s lawful consent.
(d) JUDGMENTS. A final judgment, settlement, or restitution payment shall be credited against another demand for the same principal loss. Courts retain authority to impose separate lawful sanctions for distinct wrongs, subject to constitutional limitations and the text of the applicable statutes.
(e) EFFECTIVE DATE. New offenses and new punitive liabilities under this Act apply only to conduct occurring after the relevant duty becomes effective. A later rule may not retroactively criminalize earlier lawful conduct.
(a) SETTLEMENT AUTHORITY. An authorized Federal officer may settle a civil claim within that officer’s existing or expressly conferred authority. Settlement shall identify the legal basis, material facts admitted or contested, monetary terms, compliance commitments, and enforcement of future breach.
(b) PRIORITIES. In structuring lawful recoveries, the government shall consider immediate protection of health and safety, restoration of diverted public money, compensation required by applicable law, and long-term remediation. This subsection does not change bankruptcy priority, criminal restitution statutes, the Crime Victims Fund, or a court’s authority.
(c) NO PURCHASE OF IMPUNITY. A settlement shall not authorize future pollution, waive an unrelated criminal offense, bind a nonconsenting third party, or confer immunity from law administered by another sovereign. A confidentiality term may protect legally sensitive information but shall not conceal the amount of a public recovery or an enforceable ongoing public-health obligation.
(d) COMPLIANCE MONITORS. A monitor shall be selected through a conflict-screened process, have a defined scope and duration, receive reasonable noncontingent compensation, and report to the legally responsible authority. The monitor may not exercise governmental prosecution or penalty powers.
(e) EVALUATION. Agencies shall report aggregate enforcement outcomes, correction times, sustained findings, reversed decisions, recoveries, and recurrence. The number or value of penalties alone is not a measure of program success. Enforcement shall not be driven by a revenue quota or a requirement to obtain a predetermined number of executive prosecutions.
(a) GENERAL RULE. Except where this Act or another statute provides a specific review procedure, final agency action under this Act shall be reviewable under chapter 7 of title 5, United States Code. Venue and jurisdiction shall be determined by otherwise applicable law. An agency may not determine judicial venue by regulation.
(b) QUESTIONS OF LAW. A reviewing court shall exercise its independent judgment on questions of law in accordance with 5 U.S.C. 706. A delegation to establish technical standards does not authorize an agency to exceed the boundaries prescribed by Congress. Factual findings, discretionary choices, and procedures shall be reviewed under the applicable statutory standard.
(c) RECORD. The agency shall maintain the materials considered, public comments, technical evidence, material objections, conflict disclosures, and reasons for the decision. Classified or protected material may be submitted under lawful protective procedures; a public explanation shall be provided to the greatest extent consistent with law.
(d) EXHAUSTION. No additional exhaustion requirement is created beyond an administrative step expressly required by statute or a valid rule consistent with the Administrative Procedure Act. Emergency relief and challenges to action alleged to exceed statutory authority remain governed by applicable law.
(e) SPECIAL PROCEEDINGS. Tax Court, refund, contract-dispute, bid-protest, labor, whistleblower, bankruptcy, and environmental review provisions applicable to a particular claim are preserved. This section does not create an alternative forum to evade those requirements or a general right to damages against the United States.
(a) MINIMUM PROCESS. Before a final nonemergency adverse determination affecting an award, the responsible agency shall provide notice of its factual and legal basis, access to nonprivileged evidence relied upon subject to lawful protection, a meaningful opportunity to respond, and a reasoned decision by an authorized official. A material factual dispute shall receive the hearing or other process required by the governing statute and the Constitution.
(b) AGREEMENTS. An award may specify measurable duties, agreed accounting methods, and lawful contractual remedies. It may not require a blanket waiver of due process, judicial review, jury trial where constitutionally required, attorney-client privilege, or protected whistleblower rights as the price of receiving assistance.
(c) REPRESENTATION. A recipient or affected individual may retain counsel and submit contrary technical evidence. An agency shall not treat the exercise of those rights as obstruction or lack of cooperation. Refusal to provide nonprivileged information lawfully required may have the consequences prescribed by law.
(d) ACCESSIBILITY. Notices and hearings shall be reasonably accessible to persons with disabilities and, where necessary for meaningful participation, to persons with limited English proficiency, consistent with applicable law.
(e) ERROR CORRECTION. An agency shall provide a procedure to correct clerical errors and reconsider a final decision on newly discovered material evidence. Reconsideration does not automatically suspend a judicial filing deadline; every notice shall accurately identify that limitation.
(a) PRESERVATION. Except for an express amendment or preemption provision in this Act, Federal, State, Tribal, territorial, and local laws concerning environmental protection, labor, civil rights, privacy, health, safety, consumer protection, land use, and professional regulation remain applicable according to their terms.
(b) FEDERAL FLOOR. Compliance with an award condition is not a defense to a more protective independently applicable requirement. No provision generally preempts a State privacy or environmental standard merely because a recipient receives Federal assistance.
(c) LIMITS. This savings provision does not revive a law preempted by a different Federal statute, alter exclusive Federal jurisdiction expressly established elsewhere, or authorize a State to interfere with a constitutionally protected Federal function. Particular conflicts shall be resolved under the applicable law.
(d) SOVEREIGNTY. This Act does not abrogate Tribal sovereign immunity or State sovereign immunity by implication. A government may enter a limited, express agreement concerning award-related remedies within lawful authority. Federal enforcement authority otherwise existing is preserved.
(e) PROPERTY AND PERMITS. No appropriation, priority designation, partnership status, or emergency finding under this Act conveys land, mineral rights, water rights, a construction permit, or a license. Acquisition and use require the independently applicable legal authority and process.
(a) EQUAL ACCESS. Assistance shall be administered without unlawful discrimination. Eligibility, security screening, and compliance decisions shall rest on documented statutory criteria and individual or entity conduct, not ancestry, national origin, religion, protected expression, or an assumed political viewpoint.
(b) EXPRESSION. No recipient shall be required to endorse a governmental position, alter lawful artistic or editorial content, suppress a lawful scientific conclusion, or relinquish protected activity outside the assisted program. Factual disclosure and safety requirements shall be confined to their statutory purposes.
(c) RESEARCH. Publication and research restrictions shall be limited to lawfully protected information, valid intellectual-property arrangements, human-subject protections, and specific national-security requirements. A general concern that findings may embarrass the government or a commercial sponsor is insufficient.
(d) RELIGION AND ASSOCIATION. This Act shall be administered consistently with constitutional religious-exercise, establishment, and associational protections and applicable Federal statutes. An award shall not finance religious coercion or require abandonment of protected beliefs.
(e) DATA AND SURVEILLANCE. No provision authorizes a new surveillance power, compulsory biometric database, compelled disclosure of unrelated personal communications, or government access to private data without a lawful basis. A national-security label does not eliminate judicial or statutory safeguards.
(a) PROCEDURE. Rules imposing a binding duty shall be promulgated by the statutorily responsible agency under applicable notice-and-comment procedures. A public technical standard incorporated by reference shall be identified by version, accessible for meaningful review, and accompanied by the agency’s explanation of its relevance.
(b) NO AUTOMATIC PRIVATE LEGISLATION. A later amendment issued by a private standards body shall not automatically change a legal duty. The agency shall adopt any binding update through the procedure required by law, with an appropriate transition and public record.
(c) GUIDANCE. Guidance may explain an existing requirement but shall identify that it does not create an independent binding obligation. Agencies shall not enforce an unpublished eligibility condition or convert an informal frequently asked question into a criminal prohibition.
(d) TRANSITION. Unless an imminent danger or another law requires otherwise, a material new capital requirement shall allow the transition prescribed by title V. An agency shall consider reliance interests without waiving statutory minima or promising that environmental standards will never change.
(e) PETITIONS. A person may petition for a rule, amendment, or repeal under 5 U.S.C. 553(e). The agency shall acknowledge the petition within 30 days and provide a reasoned disposition or status report within 180 days. A petition does not stay an existing duty.
(a) FIRST NINETY DAYS. Within 90 days after enactment, responsible agencies shall designate implementation officials, identify appropriations and accounts, publish staffing and systems plans, establish ethics controls, and begin consultation concerning technical standards and implementation barriers.
(b) FIRST SIX MONTHS. Within 180 days, the Council shall publish the initial strategy; agencies shall issue proposed general rules; Treasury shall establish the allocation-accounting architecture; and agencies may issue planning, basic-research, workforce-design, and technical-assistance awards whose enforceable conditions are complete.
(c) FIRST YEAR. Within 365 days, agencies shall finalize general award, credit, tax-allocation, integrity, and digital-protection rules, subject to specific dates elsewhere in this Act. Agency readiness and applicable technical standards shall be prerequisites to irreversible major facility commitments.
(d) TECHNICAL STANDARDS. The 540-day and 720-day environmental schedules in section 502 control the affected sector-specific standards. Until the applicable standard is effective, assistance may support planning, characterization, and nonirreversible preparatory research, but not construction commitments that defeat later compliance.
(e) YEARS TWO THROUGH FIVE. Agencies shall implement staged awards, independent verification, functioning appeals, workforce programs, partner agreements, and annual reporting. At the fifth-year review, they shall identify performance gaps and submit changes requiring legislation to Congress.
(f) MISSED DEADLINE. An agency missing a deadline shall publish the cause, interim protections, responsible official, and a revised completion schedule. Failure to act does not grant a permit, approve an allocation, waive a standard, or create authority to obligate money without completed legal prerequisites.
(a) FIVE-YEAR REVIEW. At five-year intervals after enactment, the Council shall submit an integrated assessment of program outcomes, legal implementation, fiscal exposure, workforce effects, environmental performance, partner compliance, and duplication with other programs. The assessment shall include separate agency views where material disagreement exists.
(b) INDEPENDENT EVALUATION. GAO reviews required by section 109 shall inform but not replace executive reporting. The Council shall not direct GAO’s conclusions or characterize an unresolved GAO recommendation as implemented.
(c) LEGISLATIVE CHANGES. A proposal to enlarge the assistance envelope, change a tax rate, renew expired award authority, eliminate a statutory standard, add a sector beyond title XX, or authorize a new international obligation shall be submitted as a request for legislation where the existing statute does not provide authority.
(d) NO AUTOMATIC RENEWAL. A favorable evaluation, remaining need, or Presidential declaration does not extend the appropriations, credit allocations, or new-award window. An unfavorable evaluation does not authorize an executive officer to repeal an enacted appropriation or repudiate a binding contract.
(e) CORRECTIVE MANAGEMENT. Within existing authority, agencies may change prospective solicitations, improve controls, enforce covenants, suspend unsafe activities, or redirect an unobligated amount as expressly permitted by title XVIII. Such action shall be explained in the public record.
(a) GENERAL SEVERABILITY. If a provision of this Act, or its application to a person or circumstance, is held invalid, the remaining provisions and applications shall remain effective to the extent they can operate according to their terms.
(b) CRIMINAL PROVISIONS. Invalidity of a criminal penalty shall not by itself invalidate an independently applicable civil duty or remedy. A court shall not reconstruct a broader criminal offense by replacing an invalid element with an agency-created standard.
(c) AWARD CONDITIONS. If a material condition of a particular award is held invalid, the agency shall determine, after notice and an opportunity to respond, whether the lawful remainder supplies substantially the public benefit for which the award was made. It may negotiate a lawful substitute, adjust future unearned payments, or terminate future performance under the agreement. It may not retroactively impose a new obligation or recover earned payment solely because the recipient successfully challenged an unlawful condition.
(d) FUNDING AND CREDITS. Invalidity of a revenue provision does not create new authority to borrow or spend beyond law. Invalidity of a credit provision does not convert unused allocation authority into a grant appropriation. Congress shall receive an estimate of the fiscal consequence and any proposed corrective legislation.
(e) RIGHTS. This section does not limit a court’s power to grant an appropriate remedy in the case before it or deprive a party of an independently established claim.
(a) GENERAL EFFECTIVE DATE. Except as specifically provided, this Act takes effect on enactment. New substantive recipient duties apply to assistance accepted after the governing duty is legally effective and stated in the award. Tax amendments and allocation dates are governed by titles XIV and XIX.
(b) EXISTING AWARDS. This Act does not automatically amend an existing award made under another statute. A recipient accepting supplemental assistance may agree prospectively to applicable conditions for the supplemented activity, without surrendering an accrued right unrelated to the new assistance.
(c) CONTINUING OBLIGATIONS. Expiration of an appropriation, new-award authority, a tax-credit allocation window, or an administrative office does not terminate a valid debt, environmental remediation requirement, domestic-operation covenant, data-protection duty, record obligation, or pending enforcement matter that by its terms continues.
(d) FUNDING LIMIT. Survival of a duty does not create an unstated permanent appropriation. Agencies shall plan and request the resources necessary to discharge continuing Federal responsibilities and shall report any unfunded stewardship obligation.
(e) PUBLIC NOTICE. Within 60 days after enactment, the Secretary shall publish an implementation index identifying the effective date, responsible agency, and rulemaking deadline for each title. The index is explanatory and shall not alter the statute.
(a) DIRECT APPROPRIATIONS. Out of money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, there is appropriated for each of fiscal years 2027 through 2040 $450,000,000,000 to carry out this Act, for an aggregate of $6,300,000,000,000. Each annual amount shall become available on October 1 of the applicable fiscal year and shall not be obligated before that date.
(b) CREDIT ALLOCATION AUTHORITY. For each of fiscal years 2027 through 2040, Treasury may allocate not more than $50,000,000,000 of face credit amount under title XIV, for an aggregate allocation ceiling of $700,000,000,000. Carryforward and reallocation are governed by section 1403. This authority is not a second appropriation to the grant accounts.
(c) COMBINED ENVELOPE. The initial statutory support envelope is $7,000,000,000,000, consisting of subsection (a) appropriations and subsection (b) face credit authority. It shall not be represented as an all-in limit on Federal debt service, legally required credit reestimates, refund interest, judgments otherwise payable by law, or future appropriations enacted by Congress.
(d) NO ENTITLEMENT TO EXPENDITURE. An annual amount establishes available authority, not a requirement to fund an unqualified project or expend money merely to meet a target. Agencies shall use the availability period for lawful selection and performance while complying with appropriations and impoundment law.
(e) NOMINAL AMOUNTS. The amounts in this section are nominal dollars and are not automatically indexed. Inflation adjustment of a wage or penalty elsewhere in this Act does not increase the assistance envelope.
(a) ESTABLISHMENT. There is established in the Treasury the American Innovation Fund, consisting of separate accounts for the direct appropriations under section 1801(a). Amounts shall be apportioned and executed through the agencies assigned responsibility by this Act.
(b) ANNUAL ALLOCATION. Of each $450,000,000,000 annual direct appropriation, the following amounts shall be available:
(1) $175,000,000,000 for the Frontier Research and Grand Challenges Account, totaling $2,450,000,000,000 over fourteen fiscal years.
(2) $100,000,000,000 for the Translational Research and Scale-Up Account, totaling $1,400,000,000,000.
(3) $75,000,000,000 for the Strategic Manufacturing and Supply Chain Account, totaling $1,050,000,000,000.
(4) $50,000,000,000 for the Clean Facilities and Green Infrastructure Account, totaling $700,000,000,000. Together with the separate $700,000,000,000 credit allocation ceiling, clean facilities and infrastructure receive a $1,400,000,000,000 combined envelope.
(5) $35,000,000,000 for the Workforce and Regional Development Account, totaling $490,000,000,000.
(6) $10,000,000,000 for the Trusted Partners and Secure Collaboration Account, totaling $140,000,000,000.
(7) $5,000,000,000 for the Oversight, Integrity, and Data Systems Account, totaling $70,000,000,000, including the reserve in section 1805.
(c) ATTRIBUTION. Each obligation shall have one primary account and a documented purpose. A cross-cutting project may receive support from more than one account only for separately identified eligible costs; the same expenditure shall not be counted twice.
(d) AGENCY TRANSFERS. OMB may apportion, and an agency may transfer, amounts to another administering agency solely to execute the same account purpose expressly assigned by this Act. Such a transfer does not authorize movement between the seven account totals or enlargement of a program’s legal scope.
(a) STRATEGIC DISTRIBUTION. The national strategy shall allocate program effort across the forty sectors in title XX according to documented need, additionality, readiness, research opportunity, public benefit, and implementation capacity. Each sector shall receive an annual assessment and an eligible pathway; no sector is entitled to an equal share regardless of evidence.
(b) INTRACCOUNT FLEXIBILITY. Within an account, the administering agency may revise prospective allocations among eligible programs after publishing the reasons and notifying Congress at least 30 days before a material reprogramming exceeding 5 percent of the account’s annual appropriation. Notification is not a legislative veto and does not require approval by a committee officer.
(c) LIMITS. Reprogramming may not breach a statutory floor, recipient cap, foreign-performance ceiling, basic-research minimum, reserve requirement, or credit allocation limit. Amounts may not be transferred between the seven account totals except by a subsequent Act of Congress.
(d) DIVERSIFICATION. The controlled-group limits and small-business requirements in section 207 apply. At least 15 percent of the Workforce and Regional Development Account shall support qualifying distressed areas over each rolling three-year period, with separate reporting on rural, Tribal, territorial, and transition needs. Overlapping qualifications shall not multiply the dollar counted.
(e) NONDUPLICATION. Agencies shall identify related assistance under other statutes and document why an award fills a remaining need. This Act does not rescind or silently replace another appropriation. A proposed consolidation requiring amendment of another statute shall be submitted to Congress.
(a) OBLIGATION PERIOD. Except for the reserve under section 1805 and credit financing accounts governed by title XIII, each annual direct appropriation shall be available for new obligations during its fiscal year and the four succeeding fiscal years. No new award may be made after September 30, 2044.
(b) LIQUIDATION. After its obligation period expires, an amount shall remain available solely to liquidate or adjust valid obligations incurred during that period through September 30, 2055. This subsection supersedes a conflicting earlier cancellation date under chapter 15 of title 31 for those accounts, but does not authorize a new obligation or increase the original award ceiling. At the end of that liquidation period, remaining balances shall be cancelled; valid claims shall thereafter be addressed under otherwise applicable law and available appropriations.
(c) DOCUMENTATION. An obligation shall satisfy 31 U.S.C. 1501 and other applicable fiscal law. A memorandum of intent, press announcement, unapproved project list, or unsupported reservation is not an obligation.
(d) MULTIYEAR INSTRUMENTS. An agency may enter an authorized multiyear instrument only to the extent its maximum Federal liability is fully funded or otherwise lawfully covered. A cancellation clause shall identify the government’s financial exposure; it shall not conceal an unlimited commitment.
(e) RETURNS AND RECOVERIES. Returned unexpended award funds may be reused only where applicable appropriations law permits and within the original amount and availability period. Penalties, royalties, investment returns, and recoveries shall not become a revolving source of new assistance unless Congress expressly provides such authority.
(f) REPORT. Annual reports shall reconcile unobligated, obligated, disbursed, expired, cancelled, and legally retained balances.
(a) RESERVATION. Of the $5,000,000,000 made available annually to the Oversight, Integrity, and Data Systems Account, $1,000,000,000 shall be reserved, for an aggregate reserve of $14,000,000,000. This amount is included in, not additional to, section 1801(a).
(b) SCHEDULE. The reserve shall become available for obligation in annual tranches of $400,000,000 for fiscal years 2041 through 2075. Each tranche shall remain available for its fiscal year and the following two fiscal years, solely for the functions in subsection (c). No reserve amount may be borrowed for a new award before its scheduled availability.
(c) USES. Reserve amounts may support servicing, collection, credit-risk assessment, environmental and property monitoring, tax-credit administration, records custody, independent audit, data security, and enforcement of continuing obligations. They may not finance new production subsidies, new credit allocations, additional grants, or ordinary unrelated agency operations.
(d) DISTRIBUTION. OMB shall distribute the annual tranche among responsible agencies on documented workload and risk, including independent oversight needs. An allocation shall not permit the Council to direct an Inspector General’s findings.
(e) SUFFICIENCY. Beginning in 2035, agencies shall reassess the adequacy of the reserve at least every two years and report projected needs after 2075. The reserve is a finite appropriation, not a finding that all future stewardship costs are fully funded. An identified shortfall requires a request for additional appropriations rather than an unstated right to use credit reestimate authority for administration.
(a) ADMINISTRATION. The Oversight, Integrity, and Data Systems Account shall finance central administration, independent oversight, tax-credit administration, common data systems, credit servicing, and enforcement attributable to this Act. Direct program delivery, research at Federal facilities, and technical services purchased as an award output shall be charged to the appropriate program account with a documented distinction from general overhead.
(b) COST ALLOCATION. OMB shall publish a consistent allocation method within 180 days. An agency may not disguise routine administration as a research grant or charge an unrelated agency operating deficit to this Act.
(c) BONA FIDE NEED AND ANTIDEFICIENCY. The Antideficiency Act and applicable purpose, time, and amount restrictions apply. No officer may promise a tax benefit beyond allocation authority, a guarantee beyond title XIII, or a future purchase without legal budget authority.
(d) MAINTENANCE. A major project shall identify credible funding for operating, maintenance, cybersecurity, replacement, and decommissioning needs over its useful life. An agency shall disclose when the project depends on future discretionary appropriations that are not enacted.
(e) NO AUTOMATIC SUPPLEMENT. Cost overruns, higher construction prices, private financing failure, or weaker-than-projected receipts do not automatically enlarge assistance. An agency may use an expressly funded contingency within the existing award or seek new legislation.
(a) ANNUAL FISCAL STATEMENT. Treasury and OMB shall submit an annual statement covering one-, five-, ten-, fourteen-, and thirty-year windows from the current budget year and a lifetime view of outstanding obligations. The statement shall identify assumptions and distinguish nominal, constant-dollar, and present-value estimates.
(b) COMPONENTS. The statement shall separately show direct budget authority; scheduled allocation authority; grant and administrative outlays; tax-liability reductions; refundable credit payments; loan subsidy costs; loan principal; credit reestimates; participation receipts; recoveries; estimated incremental tax receipts; debt-service effects; and remaining contingent or stewardship liabilities.
(c) REVENUE. Estimates of title XIX receipts shall account for interactions among corporate income tax, minimum tax, repurchase tax, credits, deductions, taxpayer behavior, and macroeconomic changes. A simple multiplication of a statutory rate increase by the entire tax base shall not be represented as an official revenue score.
(d) ECONOMIC BENEFITS. Added output, productivity, health benefits, resilience, reduced pollution, and consumer savings shall be reported separately from Treasury receipts. A gross loan repayment already reflected in subsidy accounting shall not be counted again as a new offset.
(e) INDEPENDENCE. Nothing in this Act directs CBO, the Joint Committee on Taxation, or GAO to adopt executive estimates. Agencies shall provide requested information for independent legislative analysis. Public communications shall identify whether a figure is an official score, an agency estimate, or an illustrative scenario.
(a) REVIEW TRIGGERS. Treasury and OMB shall notify Congress within 90 days after identifying a material likelihood that credit losses, administrative needs, or other legally required costs will exceed the most recent published estimate by more than 10 percent, or that receipts attributed to title XIX will fall more than 10 percent below that estimate over the remaining ten-year window.
(b) REPORT. Notice shall state the evidence, uncertainty, effect on one-, ten-, and thirty-year fiscal measures, and lawful management responses. It shall distinguish a timing shift from a permanent loss and shall identify whether additional appropriations or statutory amendments are necessary.
(c) NO AUTOMATIC TAX OR SPENDING CHANGE. A shortfall does not authorize an executive officer to change a tax rate, cancel an enacted tax credit, reduce earned compensation, repudiate a guarantee, or impose a new fee. Changes requiring legislative authority shall be submitted to Congress.
(d) MANAGEMENT WITHIN LAW. Agencies may improve underwriting, correct improper payments, adjust prospective solicitations within authorized purposes, enforce conditions, and refrain from making an unqualified new award. They shall not use a fiscal report to evade statutory duties or lawful payment obligations.
(e) NO CLAIM OF GUARANTEED SELF-FINANCING. No report issued under this Act shall state that the Act necessarily pays for itself. Any projected net fiscal balance shall identify the assumed receipts, timing, interest, credit performance, and estimation uncertainty.
(a) AMENDMENT. Section 11(b) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 is amended by striking “21 percent” and inserting “28 percent”.
(b) EFFECTIVE DATE. The amendment applies to taxable years beginning after December 31, 2027. Section 15 of that Code shall apply only to the extent applicable under its terms, and Treasury shall provide guidance concerning fiscal-year taxpayers and estimated payments without accelerating the statutory effective date.
(c) SCOPE. The rate applies to corporations otherwise subject to section 11, whether or not they receive assistance under this Act. Existing rules determining taxable income, exemptions, consolidated returns, losses, credits, and foreign-corporation liability remain applicable except as otherwise amended by law.
(d) IMPLEMENTATION. Treasury shall update forms, instructions, and estimated-payment information before the first affected taxable year. Taxpayers shall receive clear notice of the effective date and the interaction with the corporate alternative minimum tax and available credits.
(e) NO EARMARKED ENTITLEMENT. Receipts shall be deposited under ordinary Federal revenue law. They do not automatically increase appropriations or credit allocations under title XVIII and shall not be credited as a recipient’s required private contribution.
(a) AMENDMENT. Section 55(b)(2)(A)(i) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 is amended by striking “15 percent” and inserting “18 percent”.
(b) EFFECTIVE DATE. The amendment applies to taxable years beginning after December 31, 2027.
(c) PRESERVATION OF STRUCTURE. Except for the rate amendment, the statutory rules governing an applicable corporation, adjusted financial statement income, foreign tax credits, minimum-tax credits, and coordination with regular tax remain applicable. This section does not impose an alternative minimum tax on every small business or every recipient merely because it accepts assistance.
(d) INTERACTION. Revenue estimates shall account for the increase in regular corporate income tax under section 1901. The same dollar of income shall not be counted as independently producing the full increase in both regular tax and minimum tax where the Code’s coordination rules prevent that result.
(e) ADMINISTRATION. Treasury may issue regulations necessary to implement the rate change under its existing authority, but may not expand the class of applicable corporations or alter the statutory income thresholds solely to meet a projected funding target. Changes to those substantive rules require otherwise applicable statutory authority.
(a) AMENDMENT. Section 4501(a) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 is amended by striking “1 percent” and inserting “4 percent”.
(b) EFFECTIVE DATE. The amendment applies to repurchases occurring after December 31, 2027. Treasury shall prescribe a method for applying the changed rate to a taxable year that includes transactions before and after that date, allocating the existing statutory netting adjustment consistently and without counting the same issuance twice.
(c) EXISTING RULES. Definitions of covered corporation, repurchase, specified affiliate, applicable foreign transaction, exceptions, netting, and assessment remain governed by section 4501 and implementing law. This section changes the rate and does not create a separate excise tax on ordinary dividends or private-company transactions outside that statute.
(d) RECIPIENT RESTRICTIONS. Payment of the excise tax does not authorize a repurchase prohibited by section 702. A recipient that undertakes a prohibited repurchase may owe the tax and face an independently established award remedy.
(e) ESTIMATION. Treasury shall identify behavioral substitution between repurchases, dividends, retained earnings, and other transactions when estimating receipts. Gross repurchase value multiplied by the rate increase is not, without those adjustments, an adequate revenue estimate.
(a) ADMINISTRATION. Treasury shall administer this title through existing Internal Revenue Code assessment, collection, examination, appeal, and judicial-review procedures. This Act does not create a parallel corporate-tax tribunal within the Council or Commerce.
(b) RESOURCES. Administration attributable to the new rates and the credit under title XIV may be financed from the Oversight, Integrity, and Data Systems Account within its fixed total. Agencies shall separately identify these costs and shall not assume enforcement can occur without personnel, systems, and taxpayer assistance.
(c) TAXPAYER RIGHTS. Confidentiality, privilege, limitation periods, administrative appeal, deficiency proceedings, refund actions, and lawful Taxpayer Advocate assistance remain available. No enforcement quota, minimum recovery target for an individual examiner, or presumption of evasion based solely on sector participation is authorized.
(d) ANTI-ABUSE. Treasury may use otherwise applicable statutory authority to address transactions designed to evade a tax actually imposed. This section does not authorize a new tax base, denial of an expressly allowed deduction, or disregard of a genuine transaction merely because a company did not apply for innovation assistance.
(e) RECEIPTS. Collections shall enter ordinary Treasury accounts. A recovery shall not be counted both as a tax receipt and as a separately additive program return unless the two are legally distinct amounts.
(a) EXECUTIVE ESTIMATE. Within 180 days after enactment, Treasury shall publish an estimate of the incremental receipts attributable to this title over one-, five-, ten-, fourteen-, and thirty-year windows, with the interaction assumptions and uncertainty necessary to interpret it. The estimate shall be updated with the President’s annual budget.
(b) LEGISLATIVE SUPPORT. Treasury and administering agencies shall furnish requested data and technical assistance to CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation. Nothing in this section directs either institution’s methods or conclusions, conditions an enacted tax on an estimate, or deems an estimate to be an appropriation.
(c) COMPONENTS. The assessment shall distinguish rate-change receipts, credit costs, administrative costs, behavioral responses, macroeconomic feedback, debt-service effects, and program-specific non-tax receipts. It shall state whether a reported number is gross or net of interactions.
(d) REMAINING GAP. If estimated receipts do not offset the program’s estimated costs, the assessment shall state the remaining gap rather than fill it with an unvalidated productivity assumption. If projected receipts exceed costs, the assessment shall not imply that the excess is available for new awards without legislation.
(e) DURATION. The tax amendments do not sunset with the fourteen-year assistance window. The assessment shall explicitly identify that difference and the receipts attributed to years after fiscal year 2040.
(a) NO GUARANTEE. Nothing in this title constitutes a finding that a specified sum will be collected, that the assistance envelope will be fully financed, or that economic benefits will equal a particular multiple of public investment.
(b) CONGRESSIONAL AUTHORITY. Congress retains authority to amend tax rates, appropriations, program duration, and fiscal controls through subsequent law. Neither a favorable investment return nor an adverse economic scenario delegates that authority to an agency.
(c) BORROWING AND DEBT LIMIT. This Act does not amend the statutory debt limit, authorize borrowing outside existing Treasury authority, or exempt obligations from applicable budget-enforcement statutes. The executive branch shall identify any budget-enforcement or debt-management consequence requiring separate legislation.
(d) ACCOUNTABILITY. The annual fiscal statement shall permit reconciliation of the Act’s initial support envelope, actual expenditure, realized receipts, changes in liabilities, and debt-service effects. Fiscal evaluation shall continue after the last new award while material Federal assets, liabilities, or stewardship duties remain.
(e) SEVERABILITY. The revenue provisions are subject to section 1708. A judicial or legislative change affecting revenue does not silently enlarge spending, and expiration of a spending program does not silently repeal a tax.
(a) PROGRAM. The National Science Foundation and the Secretary, acting through NIST for measurement functions, shall support fundamental algorithms, efficient and reliable model development, evaluation tools, accessible research computing, and applications producing independently testable public benefits. Awards may support smaller research institutions and enterprises that lack access to proprietary computing infrastructure.
(b) ELIGIBLE WORK. Projects may include data-efficient methods, interpretability, robustness, privacy-preserving learning, multilingual accessibility, scientific discovery, and assurance of high-impact systems. A commercial award shall identify the funded model or application and shall not finance unrestricted acquisition of unrelated businesses or speculative compute reservations.
(c) MEASURES. The agency shall evaluate reproducible task performance, reliability under distribution changes, security, energy and water demand, access costs, and performance for affected populations. Model parameter count, publicity, or computing expenditure alone is not evidence of benefit.
(d) CONDITIONS. Title X applies. Funding shall not establish a government-approved political viewpoint or a blanket license to acquire personal or copyrighted material. Independent evaluation shall distinguish laboratory benchmarks from demonstrated performance in the intended setting.
(e) COMMON SECTOR RULE. Every program in sections 2001 through 2040 shall operate within the accounts and limits in title XVIII and the common requirements of this Act. Its lead agency shall publish an initial implementation plan within one year, include measurable milestones in awards, report annually, and evaluate the program at least every five years. A sector designation creates no additional appropriation, exemption, or entitlement.
(a) PROGRAM. The Secretary shall support domestic capability in semiconductor fabrication, mature and specialized nodes, advanced packaging, substrates, power electronics, memory, testing, and essential production equipment. NIST shall lead metrology and interoperability work; Energy and NSF may support research within their assignments.
(b) CAPACITY PLAN. A major award shall identify the technological capability, credible customers or public need, production ramp, yield assumptions, equipment delivery, workforce, energy, water, chemicals, and waste-treatment capacity. The agency shall examine overlap with existing Federal semiconductor support and document the remaining funding gap.
(c) SHARED FACILITIES. Assistance may finance pilot lines, packaging prototyping, and testing access for unaffiliated firms and researchers. Access terms shall protect customer designs while preventing discriminatory foreclosure by an operator that also competes with its users.
(d) MEASURES. Performance shall include qualified output, yield at the stated specification, utilization, time to qualification, input bottlenecks, workforce completion, and verified environmental performance. An announced fabrication facility or installed tool shall not be reported as qualified commercial output.
(e) SAFEGUARDS. Awards shall address fluorinated process gases, toxic chemicals, PFAS, water scarcity, sensitive process information, and security controls under the relevant titles. A funded capacity commitment does not authorize an export or investment prohibited by another law.
(a) PROGRAM. NSF, Energy, and NIST shall support quantum computing, simulation, sensing, communication research, error correction, cryogenics, control electronics, and fabrication or measurement tools needed to test proposed capabilities.
(b) EVIDENCE. Awards shall distinguish scientific exploration from a claimed commercially useful advantage. A milestone asserting such advantage shall identify the task, classical comparison, error rate, resources, reproducibility, and assumptions that determine the comparison.
(c) INFRASTRUCTURE. Shared test facilities and training may be funded where independent demand and an operating plan are demonstrated. Vendor-neutral access shall be required where practicable, with protection for legitimate confidential designs.
(d) MEASURES. Reports shall include stability, fidelity, calibration burden, reproducible sensing or computation performance, total operating cost, and the contribution of enabling components. Counting nominal qubits or patent filings alone does not satisfy an outcome milestone.
(e) SECURITY AND TRANSITION. Projects shall coordinate with lawful export and research-security requirements and with post-quantum security work under section 2004. An uncertain technology timeline shall be disclosed; it shall not justify premature retirement of an essential working system or an unsupported claim that all existing encryption has become ineffective.
(a) PROGRAM. NIST and the Secretary, in consultation with the Department of Homeland Security, shall support secure software engineering, memory safety, identity and access protection, supply-chain assurance, vulnerability research, and migration of funded systems to appropriately validated cryptographic standards.
(b) ELIGIBLE PROJECTS. Assistance may support security tools for smaller enterprises and public institutions, reproducible testing, secure update mechanisms, cryptographic inventory, and transition planning for long-lived sensitive data. An award shall identify the systems protected, intended users, and maintenance responsibilities.
(c) RESEARCH PROTECTIONS. Testing shall occur with lawful authorization and safe disclosure procedures. This section does not authorize unauthorized access, interception, credential theft, or offensive action against a third party. A funding agency may not require researchers to conceal a vulnerability merely to avoid embarrassment.
(d) MEASURES. Evaluation shall include independently verified reduction of exploitability, remediation time, support life, recovery testing, and usability that affects actual adoption. A larger volume of alerts without demonstrated accuracy or response capability is not itself a public benefit.
(e) PROCUREMENT. Federally supported security infrastructure shall avoid unnecessary exclusive dependencies and shall include an exit and continuity plan. Sensitive findings shall be disclosed through coordinated procedures without granting permanent secrecy to a known public safety risk.
(a) PROGRAM. The Secretary, in consultation with Energy and NSF, shall support efficient, resilient computing infrastructure that addresses a documented research, public-service, or industrial bottleneck. Assistance shall not merely subsidize a commercial provider’s ordinary replacement cycle or land accumulation.
(b) RESOURCE PLAN. A major project shall demonstrate reliable electricity, deliverable clean supply, water availability, backup requirements, interconnection cost allocation, heat-management capability, and credible demand. A memorandum from a speculative customer is not equivalent to an enforceable load commitment.
(c) ACCESS. Shared research or public-service infrastructure shall offer transparent prices, portability, service-level terms, and access for eligible unaffiliated users. Project data shall not be used for unrelated advertising or model training without the authorization required by title X.
(d) MEASURES. Awards shall measure useful work delivered, actual utilization, total energy and water demand, energy per appropriate workload, reliability, cooling performance, and cost of migration. An efficiency ratio shall not conceal rising absolute consumption or offsite burdens.
(e) LOCAL PROTECTION. A recipient shall fund its attributable interconnection and abandonment risk and comply with noise, emissions, water, and land-use law. A facility’s importance to computing does not exempt it from the clean-facility schedule or public participation.
(a) PROGRAM. Commerce, through its telecommunications responsibilities and in consultation with the Federal Communications Commission, shall support secure network equipment, interoperable architectures, rural and remote connectivity, resilient backhaul, next-generation wireless research, and accessibility.
(b) GAP ANALYSIS. Deployment assistance shall identify unserved or underserved needs using reliable information and shall coordinate with existing Federal and State broadband programs. Duplicating an adequately served network requires a documented competition, resilience, or capacity benefit, not merely a second subsidy claim.
(c) OPERATING TERMS. Awards for service infrastructure shall specify coverage, verified performance, affordability obligations appropriate to the award, maintenance, outage restoration, and consumer disclosures. A recipient shall not count a household as connected solely because a cable passes nearby.
(d) MEASURES. Reporting shall include actual service availability, adoption, price, latency, reliability, accessibility, and restoration time, with distinctions between advertised and independently measured performance.
(e) AUTHORITY. Spectrum licensing, radio interference, communications privacy, and equipment authorization remain governed by applicable law. This section creates no spectrum license, surveillance authority, or exemption from lawful security restrictions. Interoperability requirements shall preserve legitimate network security rather than require disclosure of protected customer traffic.
(a) PROGRAM. Energy, NSF, and NIST shall support high-performance computing, scientific software, advanced simulation, imaging, analytical instruments, and specialized systems serving multiple research and industrial communities.
(b) FACILITY JUSTIFICATION. A major capital project shall identify user demand, performance requirements, software and data support, staffing, energy, replacement cycles, and the cost of maintaining reproducible access. A procurement shall assess alternatives, including shared access and modernization of an existing facility.
(c) USER ACCESS. Allocation of publicly supported time shall use transparent technical criteria, conflict controls, and accessible applications. Legitimate proprietary or controlled work may be accommodated under stated terms without displacing the public mission through undisclosed preference.
(d) MEASURES. The agency shall evaluate completed scientific or engineering work, time to solution, validated accuracy, software portability, utilization, user diversity, and lifecycle cost. A peak hardware rating alone does not establish productive value.
(e) STEWARDSHIP. Awards shall include data management, instrument calibration, reproducible software environments, security updates, and an exit or migration plan. Decommissioning shall address data protection, critical-material recovery, and transfer of usable equipment where lawful and economically justified.
(a) PROGRAM. Commerce, NSF, and NIST shall support industrial robots, assistive robotics, agricultural automation, inspection systems, machine perception, control systems, and tooling that improves independently measured productivity, safety, or accessibility.
(b) DEPLOYMENT. A demonstration shall identify its real operating environment, human interaction, failure modes, maintenance, emergency stop functions, and worker training. A laboratory result shall not be represented as safe autonomous performance in an untested setting.
(c) SMALL ENTERPRISE ACCESS. Shared demonstrations, leasing models, and extension services may assist smaller manufacturers and farms, subject to transparent total cost, repair access, cybersecurity, and contractual freedom to change suppliers.
(d) MEASURES. Awards shall measure task quality, safe uptime, net throughput, injury exposure, energy demand, maintenance cost, and effects on workers. Reported labor savings shall distinguish genuine productivity from shifted unpaid work, unsafe staffing, or activity moved to an unmeasured contractor.
(e) SAFEGUARDS. The workforce and digital titles apply. Assistance shall not support autonomous lethal targeting or create authority to use force. Safety-critical deployment shall remain subject to the regulator and law governing the activity.
(a) PROGRAM. Commerce and NIST shall support additive manufacturing, precision machining, digital process control, advanced joining, industrial simulation, inspection, and production methods with a documented capability or cost advantage.
(b) VALIDATION. Projects shall establish material properties, repeatability, tolerances, durability, defect detection, process qualification, and appropriate quality assurance. A prototype’s successful fabrication does not establish qualification for medical, aviation, structural, or other safety-critical use.
(c) TRANSFER. Assistance may support common test artifacts, qualification data, training, and integration services for small and medium-sized manufacturers. Shared facilities shall permit legitimate competition among materials, tools, and software providers rather than require a proprietary closed chain without justification.
(d) MEASURES. Milestones shall address qualified parts produced, first-pass yield, scrap, lead time, resource intensity, unit economics at realistic utilization, and independently verified reliability.
(e) CONDITIONS. Awards shall address worker exposure to powders, particles, solvents, and machine hazards; cybersecurity of production files; and lawful intellectual-property rights. Digital manufacturing support does not authorize reproduction of protected designs or controlled articles without legal permission.
(a) PROGRAM. NSF, Energy, NIST, and Commerce shall support materials discovery, photonics, coatings, composites, ceramics, superconducting and magnetic materials, and nanoscale technologies with a defined research or productive purpose.
(b) SCALE-UP. A project moving toward production shall evaluate feedstock availability, reproducibility, processing energy, toxicology, durability, recyclability, and the performance of substitutes. A laboratory material shall not receive a commercial capacity award without a credible manufacturing and qualification pathway.
(c) SAFETY. Research shall characterize relevant exposure routes and uncertainties, including worker and environmental exposure to novel particles and persistent substances. Lack of complete hazard data is a reason for proportionate testing and containment, not a categorical representation of safety.
(d) MEASURES. Evaluation shall use reproducible physical performance, yield, lifetime, cost at the proposed scale, input dependence, and lifecycle environmental effects. Material strength or efficiency improvements shall be assessed in the intended system rather than isolated from other costs.
(e) ACCESS. Publicly funded reference materials, testing methods, and nonconfidential measurement results shall be disseminated under title III. Exclusive rights shall not prevent use of a publicly funded measurement standard where the award reserved access.
(a) PROGRAM. Commerce, Energy, and the Department of the Interior, within their respective authorities, shall support separation, refining, processing, substitution, recovery from waste streams, and efficient use of materials necessary for strategic technologies.
(b) PROJECT EVIDENCE. A project shall establish feedstock quality, lawful access, processing recovery, waste and tailings management, water requirements, energy, customers, financial assurance, and closure responsibility. A mineral resource estimate is not a proven economically recoverable reserve or an operating supply source.
(c) ALTERNATIVES. Review shall compare primary extraction with recycling, substitution, recovery from existing waste, and reduced material intensity where those alternatives can meet the stated need. Assistance shall not excuse an applicant from obtaining mining, water, land-use, or environmental authorization.
(d) MEASURES. Milestones shall include qualified material output, recovery rate, purity, actual domestic processing capability, reduction of single-source dependence, waste generation, and cost under commodity-price sensitivity cases.
(e) COMMUNITY AND TRIBAL RIGHTS. Title V and section 107 apply. Public assistance shall not substitute for lawful access to Tribal land, extinguish treaty rights, or shift unfunded cleanup to a community. Financial assurance shall be established before a material closure liability is created.
(a) PROGRAM. Energy and Commerce shall support batteries, long-duration storage, power conversion, grid-forming equipment, storage management, and the components and recycling systems necessary for reliable operation.
(b) EVIDENCE. A demonstration shall test duty cycles, degradation, thermal behavior, safety, round-trip efficiency, usable capacity, supply dependence, and end-of-life management. Nameplate capacity shall be distinguished from reliably deliverable energy and power over the claimed lifetime.
(c) SAFETY AND RECOVERY. Awards shall include fire and emergency planning appropriate to the technology, traceable materials, repair or replacement procedures, and a funded take-back or recovery arrangement where applicable. A recipient shall not export a waste burden under the label of recycling without verifying lawful handling.
(d) MEASURES. Performance shall include cost per delivered service, availability, cycling or calendar life, critical-material intensity, recovered material actually reused, and independently tested safety results.
(e) MARKET DESIGN. A project relying on multiple revenue streams shall demonstrate that those services can be provided without double-committing the same capacity. A Federal award is not a guarantee of utility cost recovery, market access, or a future purchase price.
(a) PROGRAM. Energy shall support grid planning tools, transformers, switchgear, conductors, sensors, grid-enhancing technologies, distribution automation, resilience, and interconnection improvements needed for verified public and industrial demand.
(b) NEED. A major project shall identify the reliability, congestion, connection, or resilience problem; alternatives; beneficiaries; expected load; and allocation of costs. Speculative demand shall be separately identified and shall not be treated as a binding customer obligation.
(c) CAPACITY. Assistance may support domestic manufacturing of long-lead equipment, qualification of alternative designs, workforce training, and strategic replacement inventories, with controls against duplicate procurement and unnecessary stock accumulation.
(d) MEASURES. Awards shall measure delivered capacity, outage reduction, connection time, equipment delivery, reliability under credible hazards, and lifecycle costs. Installed equipment shall not be counted as an operational improvement before testing and integration.
(e) REGULATORY BOUNDARIES. FERC, State commissions, and other competent authorities retain their jurisdiction. This section does not approve a rate, condemn property, waive a siting requirement, or shift a private customer’s attributable costs to households contrary to law or the award.
(a) PROGRAM. Energy shall support research, demonstration, manufacturing capability, safety instrumentation, qualified components, fuels lawfully available, and waste-management technologies for nuclear energy, subject to applicable nuclear law.
(b) DECISION STAGES. A project shall separately demonstrate design maturity, licensing pathway, supply assurance, construction controls, operational capability, security, waste disposition, and financial responsibility. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission shall retain independent licensing and safety decisions.
(c) COST AND RISK. Major awards shall include independent cost and schedule reviews, construction contingencies within the funded ceiling, decommissioning provisions, and sensitivity to first-of-a-kind delays. A demonstration award shall not imply that later commercial units will achieve an unverified cost reduction.
(d) MEASURES. Evaluation shall include qualified component delivery, tested safety performance, construction progress, reliable output where licensed, lifecycle emissions, fuel availability, and waste and closure obligations.
(e) LIMITS. This section authorizes no possession of nuclear material, reactor operation, security exemption, liability exemption, or waste disposal outside existing law. Federal assistance does not remove an operator’s responsibility for license compliance or make the innovation program an unlimited insurer.
(a) PROGRAM. Energy shall support geothermal resource characterization, enhanced and closed-loop systems, drilling technologies, heat networks, and other firm energy systems that independently meet the clean-electricity standard in section 504.
(b) CHARACTERIZATION. A project shall evaluate resource quality, geological uncertainty, induced seismicity, water use, subsurface containment, surface impacts, and long-term productivity. An exploration result shall be identified as preliminary until sustained performance is demonstrated.
(c) COMMUNITY PROTECTION. Awards shall include monitoring, emergency procedures, complaint response, and a plan to address material unexpected effects. Subsurface access and water rights shall be obtained under applicable law.
(d) MEASURES. Milestones shall include verified temperature or resource performance, drilling success, sustained useful energy, availability, cost, water balance, and lifecycle emissions. The agency shall distinguish exploration risk from operating risk when selecting a grant or credit instrument.
(e) INFRASTRUCTURE. Shared drilling data, testing facilities, district-energy integration, and training may be funded where public benefit and access are established. Commercially confidential information shall be protected while retaining sufficient data for independent verification of publicly supported results.
(a) PROGRAM. Energy shall support improvements in solar, wind, marine renewable technologies, renewable thermal systems, industrial heat pumps, and enabling equipment that address a documented performance, production, integration, or supply bottleneck.
(b) SYSTEM VALUE. A project shall assess delivered energy, grid integration, storage or flexibility needs, land and habitat effects, maintenance, materials, and retirement obligations. Low equipment cost alone is not proof of low total system cost.
(c) INNOVATION AND DEPLOYMENT. Research and demonstration may support emerging technologies with substantial uncertainty. Commercial deployment assistance shall require additionality and coordination with existing incentives so that ordinary investment is not subsidized twice.
(d) MEASURES. Awards shall use actual energy or useful heat delivered, verified availability, installation and operating cost, manufacturing yield, resource intensity, and end-of-life recovery. Avoided-emissions claims shall identify their baseline and shall not be added to clean-electricity certificates as though they were separate physical reductions.
(e) SAFEGUARDS. Wildlife, coastal, maritime, land-use, worker-safety, and environmental law remain applicable. A designation under this section creates no lease, right-of-way, or authorization to bypass consultation.
(a) PROGRAM. Energy shall support research, demonstration, production equipment, storage, transport, and industrial uses of hydrogen or related feedstocks where a lifecycle analysis establishes a material emissions reduction and a credible use case.
(b) ELIGIBILITY. A project claiming clean-hydrogen support shall satisfy the lifecycle threshold and verification requirements in section 609. Electricity inputs, methane leakage, process emissions, water use, transport, and conversion losses shall be included where material. An accounting label does not replace a physical emissions assessment.
(c) DEMAND. Commercial awards shall identify enforceable demand or a competitively justified public purpose and compare feasible direct electrification, efficiency, and alternative feedstocks. A subsidy shall not be awarded merely to create a product without a useful customer or application.
(d) MEASURES. Performance shall include verified lifecycle emissions per unit, actual delivered product, energy and water requirements, leakage, safety, and cost at realistic utilization. Production and downstream use shall not both claim the same reduction without a consistent attribution method.
(e) SAFETY. Applicable process, pipeline, transport, occupational, and environmental requirements remain in force. Assistance does not authorize a storage site or transport facility without the requisite approvals.
(a) PROGRAM. Energy and the Administrator shall support measurement, capture, transport, storage, mineralization, and removal research or demonstration where net climate benefit is independently evaluated and local environmental risks are controlled.
(b) ACCOUNTING. Awards shall distinguish avoided emissions, captured emissions, temporary utilization, and removal from the atmosphere. Energy use, upstream and downstream emissions, leakage, permanence, and displacement effects shall be included in a published methodology. A short-lived product is not durable storage solely because it contains carbon.
(c) STEWARDSHIP. A storage project shall establish lawful pore-space access, permit compliance, monitoring, corrective action, financial assurance, and a legally responsible steward. A corporate reorganization shall not leave the storage obligation without a responsible funded entity.
(d) MEASURES. Milestones shall include independently verified net tonnes, measurement uncertainty, storage integrity, cost, energy demand, and continuing liability. Contracted future removals shall not be counted as completed removals.
(e) LIMITS. A Federal award does not automatically transfer long-term liability to the United States. The limited use of removals for facility compliance remains subject to section 503; funding carbon management does not waive local air, water, or hazardous-substance standards.
(a) PROGRAM. Transportation and Energy shall support charging equipment, power management, fleet integration, electric drivetrains, batteries in transportation applications, accessibility, and grid coordination.
(b) DEPLOYMENT. Projects shall identify real travel or fleet needs, utility readiness, interoperability, maintenance, pricing disclosure, payment access, and geographic coverage. Equipment installed without dependable power or maintenance shall not be reported as an available charging service.
(c) ACCESS. Publicly supported charging shall provide transparent total prices, accessible operation, nondiscriminatory payment options, and interoperability consistent with safety. A user shall not be required to disclose unrelated personal information to obtain an ordinary charging service.
(d) MEASURES. Awards shall evaluate verified uptime, successful sessions, delivered energy, reliability in different conditions, accessibility, utilization, and total lifecycle cost. Vehicle or charger counts shall be reported separately from demonstrated service outcomes.
(e) SAFETY AND GRID COST. Applicable vehicle, electrical, fire, labor, and utility requirements remain in force. Projects shall identify attributable grid costs and shall not rely on an undisclosed household subsidy for a private fleet’s dedicated infrastructure.
(a) PROGRAM. Transportation shall support rail equipment, signaling, transit reliability, accessibility, traffic safety tools, freight coordination, and resilient transportation infrastructure with a documented service or productivity need.
(b) PROJECT PLAN. A deployment award shall identify users, service frequency or throughput, integration with existing systems, operating finance, maintenance, accessibility, and the relevant safety regulator. A capital award shall not assume that a local operator has committed operating funds when it has not.
(c) DIGITAL SYSTEMS. Intelligent transportation systems shall minimize personal data, provide appropriate human oversight, and use interoperable standards. Assistance shall not create a general location-tracking system unrelated to the transport function.
(d) MEASURES. Milestones shall include reliable service delivered, travel time, safety outcomes, accessibility, equipment availability, and operating cost. Forecast ridership shall be separately identified from actual ridership, and a shorter trip for one group shall not conceal a material new burden on another.
(e) AUTHORITY. Safety certification, rights-of-way, labor protections, environmental review, and local service decisions remain governed by applicable law. This section does not compel a State or locality to operate a new service without accepting a funded agreement.
(a) PROGRAM. Transportation, NASA, Energy, and Commerce shall support efficient aircraft systems, propulsion research, manufacturing, materials, aviation infrastructure technology, and fuels with independently established lifecycle benefits.
(b) CERTIFICATION PATH. A safety-critical project shall identify the applicable certification pathway, testing, quality system, maintenance, human factors, and responsible regulator. Federal research support is not airworthiness approval or authorization for passenger service.
(c) FUELS. A fuel project shall substantiate feedstock origin, land-use effects where material, processing energy, transport, lifecycle emissions, and competition with essential food or resource needs. A blend label or purchase commitment alone does not establish a reduction.
(d) MEASURES. Awards shall evaluate independently tested efficiency, reliability, noise, emissions, manufacturing quality, certification progress, and cost. Simulated or projected performance shall be clearly distinguished from validated flight or production results.
(e) SUPPLY AND RIGHTS. Domestic manufacturing commitments, allied collaboration, intellectual-property protection, and controlled-technology rules apply. Assistance shall not finance export transactions prohibited by law or require transfer of unrelated proprietary technology without a lawful agreed basis.
(a) PROGRAM. NASA, with Commerce for civil commercial coordination, shall support civil space science, satellite components, launch enabling technologies, communications and navigation resilience, Earth observation, and services addressing a documented public or research need.
(b) PROJECT CONDITIONS. An award shall identify mission objectives, test evidence, launch and operating authorizations, collision avoidance, spectrum coordination, cybersecurity, end-of-life disposal, and financial responsibility where applicable.
(c) PUBLIC DATA. Data purchased for a public scientific purpose shall be made available under the negotiated rights and title III, with lawful exceptions for privacy, security, and commercial restrictions expressly justified before award. A vendor may not impose new restrictions after publicly funded collection contrary to the agreement.
(d) MEASURES. Performance shall include validated mission capability, service reliability, data quality, latency where relevant, actual useful lifetime, cost, and compliance with debris-mitigation commitments. A launch announcement is not a completed mission.
(e) LIMITS. This section creates no military mission, weapon authority, spectrum right, launch license, or exemption from export law. Private observation systems funded under this Act remain subject to applicable privacy, remote-sensing, and data-use restrictions.
(a) PROGRAM. Transportation and Commerce shall support shipyard production technology, maritime components, port reliability, cargo handling, clean propulsion research, worker safety, and resilient domestic repair capability.
(b) NEED. A major award shall identify vessel or port requirements, customers, workforce, berth or yard capacity, equipment, energy, environmental controls, and operating finance. Infrastructure expansion shall be tied to credible demand rather than an unsupported throughput claim.
(c) INTEROPERABILITY. Publicly supported logistics systems shall permit lawful exchange of necessary information without requiring carriers or shippers to surrender unrelated competitively sensitive data to a competing operator.
(d) MEASURES. Awards shall evaluate build or repair time, qualified output, vessel availability, cargo reliability, worker safety, emissions, and total operating cost. Faster cargo movement shall not be counted as a benefit without accounting for material congestion, pollution, or safety effects shifted to neighboring communities.
(e) LAW. Maritime safety, customs, environmental, labor, cabotage, procurement, and national-security laws remain applicable. A priority designation does not create an exemption from an existing shipping requirement or authorize dredging or construction without approval.
(a) PROGRAM. HHS, NSF, and Agriculture within their respective missions shall support biological measurement, platform research, tools, therapies, diagnostics, and other beneficial applications with appropriate scientific, ethical, and safety review.
(b) OVERSIGHT. Awards shall identify applicable biosafety, biosecurity, human-subject, animal-welfare, and dual-use review requirements before research begins. The responsible institution shall maintain competent oversight and a reporting channel independent of commercial pressure.
(c) RESEARCH QUALITY. Protocols shall address reproducibility, appropriate controls, validation, data integrity, and disclosure of material limitations. A discovery in a model system shall not be represented as an established human benefit without supporting evidence.
(d) MEASURES. Milestones shall use validated capability, reproducibility, safety, translation readiness, and the public-health or scientific question answered. Patent counts and private valuation shall not replace scientific outcomes.
(e) LIMITS. This section authorizes no otherwise prohibited biological work, clinical use, release, or acquisition of controlled material. Assistance shall not be conditioned on suppressing negative results or on transferring sensitive biological information to an unqualified partner.
(a) PROGRAM. HHS, Agriculture, Energy, and Commerce shall support biomanufacturing processes, fermentation, downstream purification, process control, shared pilot capacity, and production of useful chemicals, materials, food ingredients, or medical inputs.
(b) SCALE EVIDENCE. A project shall demonstrate feedstock availability, yield, contamination control, purification, waste and wastewater management, energy demand, product qualification, and a credible customer. Laboratory yield shall not be assumed to persist at commercial scale without a documented basis.
(c) CONTAINMENT. Awards shall require containment, traceability, emergency response, and regulatory review appropriate to the organism, process, and product. A closed-system label shall not substitute for verified controls and monitoring.
(d) MEASURES. Evaluation shall include qualified output, batch consistency, yield, resource use, lifecycle emissions, waste burden, and unit cost at realistic capacity utilization.
(e) SHARED ACCESS. Publicly supported pilot facilities shall establish transparent access, confidentiality, scheduling, and contamination-control terms. Public support shall not be used to obtain a competitor’s proprietary strain, process, or customer information outside the agreed lawful purpose.
(a) PROGRAM. HHS shall support domestic capability for active pharmaceutical ingredients, essential medicines, advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing, quality testing, and resilient supply of products with a documented public-health need.
(b) ADDITIONALITY. A commercial award shall identify the supply vulnerability, qualification pathway, manufacturing capacity, quality system, workforce, demand, and access commitment. Domestic location alone does not establish that a proposed product will address a shortage or remain available at a useful price.
(c) CONDITIONS. Section 1103 applies to public access. The award shall identify production and supply commitments, notification of interruption, inventory policy where appropriate, and contingency arrangements. HHS shall coordinate without replacing FDA’s independent approval and inspection responsibilities.
(d) MEASURES. Milestones shall include qualified batches, release quality, actual supply availability, time to recovery after disruption, patient or purchaser access, and production cost. Unapproved output shall not be counted as medicine available to patients.
(e) INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY. Patent, exclusivity, licensing, and competition law remain applicable except for express prospective agreement terms authorized by this Act. An agency shall not invoke an undefined public-interest power to confiscate unrelated intellectual property.
(a) PROGRAM. HHS shall support medical devices, diagnostics, imaging, laboratory instruments, manufacturing, and repair capability that address a documented clinical, access, or supply need.
(b) VALIDATION. A project shall identify its intended use, population, clinical evidence, safety risks, regulatory pathway, cybersecurity, human factors, and postmarket support. A diagnostic performance claim shall distinguish analytical validity from clinical usefulness in the intended setting.
(c) ACCESS AND SERVICE. Major awards shall include maintenance, spare parts, necessary software support, training, and a credible affordability or public-access commitment under section 1103. An essential device shall not become unusable solely because a vendor discontinues an avoidable proprietary service contrary to the award.
(d) MEASURES. Evaluation shall include validated accuracy where relevant, patient outcomes where established, failure rates, usability, availability, total lifecycle cost, and access for underserved settings. An installed device count is not equivalent to effective treatment.
(e) REGULATION. FDA and other competent regulators retain authority. Procurement or research funding is not product clearance, approval, clinical certification, or a finding that an autonomous diagnostic system may replace required professional judgment.
(a) PROGRAM. HHS shall support interoperable health information systems, telehealth infrastructure, secure clinical communication, decision support, remote monitoring, and accessibility where a project addresses a demonstrated care or administrative need.
(b) EVIDENCE. An award shall identify intended users, workflow, clinical validation where needed, data sources, privacy, cybersecurity, accessibility, reimbursement assumptions, and integration with existing systems. A reduction in administrative effort shall not be achieved by shifting unacknowledged work to patients or clinicians.
(c) DATA RIGHTS. Title X and applicable health-information law apply. A recipient shall not sell or use patient information for unrelated advertising or model development merely because a platform was publicly funded. Interoperability shall protect appropriate consent, access controls, and clinical context.
(d) MEASURES. Awards shall evaluate actual care access, validated outcomes, reliability, burden reduction, successful exchange, security, and total cost. App downloads, engagement time, and data volume alone do not establish a health benefit.
(e) PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY. The award shall identify meaningful human review where a system materially affects care. This section does not expand a professional license, authorize practice across jurisdictions contrary to law, or displace product and clinical regulation.
(a) PROGRAM. HHS shall support detection, laboratory capacity, protective equipment, essential consumables, supply-chain visibility, stockpile management technology, and surge manufacturing for defined public-health threats.
(b) READINESS. A project shall establish storage conditions, expiration management, rotation, qualification, distribution, maintenance, and the time needed to activate production. A dormant production line shall not be counted as immediately available surge capacity without a verified readiness test.
(c) DATA. Public-health systems shall minimize identifiable information, apply appropriate authorization and security, and avoid creation of unrelated population-surveillance infrastructure. Aggregated reporting shall preserve useful epidemiological information without unnecessary individual exposure.
(d) MEASURES. Evaluation shall include validated detection performance, qualified supply availability, exercise results, activation time, wastage, and access to essential products. A theoretical production maximum shall be distinguished from demonstrated sustained output.
(e) AUTHORITY AND ACCESS. Emergency public-health powers remain governed by their own statutes. An innovation award does not authorize compulsory treatment, quarantine, or emergency product use. Publicly supported preparedness products shall carry the supply and access obligations stated before award.
(a) PROGRAM. Agriculture shall support sensors, farm equipment, decision tools, irrigation technology, soil and crop measurement, livestock monitoring, and practical extension services that improve verified agricultural performance or reduce resource burdens.
(b) FIELD VALIDATION. Projects shall test under relevant soils, climates, farm sizes, and production systems. A result from one controlled field shall not be represented as universally applicable without evidence. Farmers participating in trials shall receive clear risk, cost, data, and termination terms.
(c) FARMER CONTROL. Section 1105 applies to data access, portability, repair, and contractual fairness. Assistance shall not require farmers to purchase unrelated inputs or permanently surrender independently generated farm data to one vendor.
(d) MEASURES. Milestones shall include net farm income or documented cost reduction, yield and quality where relevant, water and chemical use, soil effects, reliability, repair time, and adoption without coercive lock-in. Sales of a tool shall be distinguished from a verified agronomic benefit.
(e) ACCESS. Extension and demonstration programs shall include smaller and remote producers, accessible training, and alternatives for limited connectivity. Existing food, animal-health, environmental, and worker-protection requirements remain applicable.
(a) PROGRAM. Agriculture and NSF shall support crop science, breeding, plant health, soil biology, conservation tools, and agricultural biotechnology directed to resilience, nutrition, resource efficiency, and reliable production.
(b) EVIDENCE. Awards shall specify target conditions and assess yield stability, nutritional or functional characteristics, ecological effects, pest and disease response, and performance across relevant environments. A climate-resilience claim shall identify the stress tested and tradeoffs observed.
(c) RIGHTS AND ACCESS. Agreements shall state intellectual-property and seed-access terms before participation. Publicly funded public-good germplasm and nonconfidential research results shall be available under title III and applicable law, with lawful protections for proprietary contributions and Tribal knowledge.
(d) SAFETY. Field release, food use, environmental review, and plant-health requirements remain governed by competent authorities. Funding shall not be represented as approval of a genetically engineered product or a finding that all possible uses are safe.
(e) MEASURES. Programs shall evaluate reproducible field performance, resilience under specified conditions, resource demand, agronomic practicality, and access by intended producers. Patent activity or a single season’s result shall not alone establish long-term success.
(a) PROGRAM. Agriculture and HHS shall support safe food processing, cold chains, waste reduction, traceability, fermentation-derived foods, alternative proteins, and technologies that improve nutrition, affordability, reliability, or resource performance.
(b) VALIDATION. A project shall establish safety, nutritional characteristics, shelf life, process consistency, consumer information, resource demand, and a credible market or public-service need. Environmental comparisons shall use consistent functional units and disclose material assumptions.
(c) REGULATION. FDA, Agriculture, and other competent authorities retain their food-safety, labeling, inspection, and approval responsibilities. An award does not authorize a product’s sale or make a nutrition or health claim lawful.
(d) MEASURES. Evaluation shall include safe qualified output, loss reduction, affordability, nutritional performance where relevant, resource intensity, and distribution reliability. Production capacity shall not be equated with consumer adoption or a proven health outcome.
(e) COMPETITION AND ACCESS. Shared processing and storage infrastructure shall offer transparent terms to eligible unaffiliated users. A dominant buyer shall not use an assisted facility to compel exclusive supplier relationships unrelated to necessary quality or capacity commitments.
(a) PROGRAM. EPA, Energy, and Commerce shall support drinking-water treatment, wastewater technology, reuse, desalination where appropriate, leak reduction, sensing, and efficient industrial water systems.
(b) SYSTEM ANALYSIS. A project shall evaluate source availability, water quality, energy, treatment residuals, discharge, maintenance, operator capacity, affordability, and alternatives including conservation. A proposed supply shall not be considered available without lawful rights and a reliable source assessment.
(c) PUBLIC PROTECTION. Treatment claims shall be independently validated for the relevant contaminants and conditions. Projects shall identify residual and concentrate handling and shall not solve one water problem by creating an undisclosed downstream burden.
(d) MEASURES. Milestones shall include safe water delivered, verified contaminant removal, leakage reduction, reuse actually achieved, energy per useful service, operating cost, and reliability. A plant’s rated capacity shall be distinguished from compliant output.
(e) UTILITIES AND COMMUNITIES. Public-system awards shall include trained operation, maintenance finance, emergency response, and appropriate affordability protections. Existing water rights, drinking-water standards, discharge permits, and Tribal rights remain in force.
(a) PROGRAM. Commerce, Energy, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development shall support industrialized construction, building components, design and inspection tools, efficiency, accessibility, and resilient materials or methods.
(b) VALIDATION. A project shall establish structural, fire, moisture, durability, energy, accessibility, and repair performance appropriate to its intended use. A factory-produced component shall not bypass the building code or inspection requirements applicable to the completed structure.
(c) COST AND DELIVERY. Awards shall identify land and permitting assumptions, transport, installation, financing, workforce, maintenance, and the intended affordability or productivity benefit. Lower factory cost alone shall not be reported as lower occupied-building cost.
(d) MEASURES. Evaluation shall include completed compliant structures or components, construction time, total cost, defect rates, energy use, hazard performance, and maintenance. Housing-related outcomes shall distinguish units announced, started, completed, occupied, and affordable under the stated definition.
(e) LOCAL AUTHORITY. This section creates no Federal zoning mandate or permit. State and local participation is voluntary, and relocation or displacement caused by a funded project shall be addressed under applicable law and the award’s community plan.
(a) PROGRAM. The Department of Education and NSF, with Commerce for eligible commercialization, shall support accessible instructional tools, learning research, assistive interfaces, teacher support, and secure educational infrastructure.
(b) EVIDENCE. An award shall specify the educational objective, learner population, comparison method, accessibility, teacher involvement, privacy, and evaluation plan. A product claiming to improve learning shall be evaluated on learning or other independently justified educational outcomes, not solely usage or engagement.
(c) CHILDREN AND SCHOOLS. Title X and applicable student-privacy law govern. Participation shall not require unrelated advertising profiles, commercial exploitation of student information, or automated high-impact decisions without the safeguards in section 1004.
(d) MEASURES. Programs shall assess learning outcomes where measurable, accessibility, teacher and student burden, reliability, cost, and effects across relevant settings. An effective result in one setting shall not be represented as universal proof.
(e) GOVERNANCE. Educational institutions retain lawful curriculum and academic responsibilities. Funding shall not require endorsement of a political viewpoint or substitute a vendor’s proprietary system for a school’s legally required accountability and professional judgment.
(a) PROGRAM. Labor and Education, in coordination with Commerce and sector agencies, shall support paid training tools, simulation, portable credentials, skills assessment, accessibility, and transition assistance linked to demonstrated employment or professional needs.
(b) PROVIDER TERMS. A provider shall disclose cost, prerequisites, completion, independent assessment, employer recognition, and the evidence behind placement claims. Assistance shall not support misleading guarantees of employment or credentials that lack a credible use.
(c) WORKER RIGHTS. Training shall be accessible and shall not impose an unreasonable debt or repayment penalty on a worker who leaves employment. Existing lawful wage, apprenticeship, collective-bargaining, and licensing requirements remain applicable.
(d) MEASURES. Awards shall evaluate verified completion, skill attainment, recognized credentials, actual employment where relevant, wage progression, retention, and participant experience, while distinguishing selection effects from training effects.
(e) PORTABILITY. Publicly funded credentials and records shall be available to the worker in an accessible portable form. A worker shall not lose proof of completed training solely because an employer changes vendors, terminates a contract, or closes an assisted facility.
(a) PROGRAM. Commerce and NIST, in consultation with Treasury and competent financial regulators, shall support secure payment infrastructure, fraud prevention, accessible financial tools, privacy-preserving identity verification, and interoperability serving a documented public or productive need.
(b) CONDITIONS. Awards shall identify the legal and regulatory status of the proposed service, custody and settlement arrangements, consumer protections, cyber resilience, fraud response, and accessibility. Funding is not a banking charter, securities exemption, deposit insurance, or a government endorsement of a financial product.
(c) IDENTITY. Identity systems shall minimize collected information, provide alternatives where practicable, support correction, and avoid a mandatory centralized biometric identifier. A recipient shall not use verification data for unrelated commercial profiling.
(d) MEASURES. Evaluation shall address actual fraud reduction, false rejections, accessibility, transaction reliability, cost, privacy, and recovery from error. Transaction volume alone is not evidence of consumer benefit.
(e) EXCLUSIONS. Assistance shall not finance speculative purchases of digital assets, support a promised token price, reimburse investor losses, or fund a scheme primarily intended to evade financial regulation. Research concerning distributed systems may qualify on its technical merits without those prohibited uses.
(a) PROGRAM. Commerce and NSF, in consultation with relevant cultural institutions, shall support audio and video production tools, accessible performance technology, virtual and interactive production, digital preservation, rights administration, and tools used by independent creators and smaller production enterprises.
(b) ELIGIBLE COST. Assistance shall support research, equipment, software, shared facilities, training, or a validated production innovation. Ordinary celebrity compensation, acquisition of a catalog solely for investment, political advertising, and financing a finished entertainment work without a qualifying technological purpose are not eligible under this section.
(c) CREATOR RIGHTS. Section 1106 governs digital replicas, contractual consent, and rights records. Awards shall preserve lawful copyright, fair use, publicity, labor, and expressive rights; a recipient shall not present public funding as authorization to copy or impersonate a person without the required legal basis.
(d) MEASURES. Evaluation shall include creator access, workflow efficiency, accessibility, interoperability, quality, cost, and adoption by intended users. Popularity or agreement with a work’s message shall not be an award criterion.
(e) ACCESS. Shared facilities shall provide transparent booking, pricing, intellectual-property terms, and data export. An independent artist shall not be required to transfer unrelated creative rights as the price of using publicly supported equipment.
(a) PROGRAM. Homeland Security, Commerce, Transportation, and relevant scientific agencies shall support warning systems, resilient communications, disaster modeling, protective equipment, emergency logistics, and tools that improve lawful response and recovery.
(b) VALIDATION. A project shall identify the hazard, intended users, false-alarm and missed-event risks, accessible warnings, operating responsibility, maintenance, and testing under realistic conditions. A model shall disclose uncertainty and shall not be represented as a guarantee that an event will or will not occur.
(c) CIVIL LIBERTIES. Assistance shall not create a general surveillance or predictive-policing mandate, authorize force, or permit discriminatory decision-making. Personal information shall be limited to the lawful response purpose and subject to title X.
(d) MEASURES. Awards shall evaluate warning delivery, response time, reliability during outages, accessibility, recovery capability, and independently verified reduction of exposure or loss. Procurement counts shall be separated from demonstrated operational readiness.
(e) LOCAL PARTICIPATION. State, local, and Tribal participation shall be voluntary and supported by clear operating and cost agreements. Exercises shall not be used to bypass lawful consent, land access, emergency authority, or safety requirements.
(a) PROGRAM. Commerce, NIST, EPA, and Energy shall support repair, reuse, disassembly, materials recovery, lifecycle measurement, calibration, reference data, and enabling public infrastructure that connects the preceding sectors and addresses a demonstrable common bottleneck.
(b) PUBLIC PURPOSE. A cross-sector project shall identify its users, shared function, access terms, technical uncertainty, and allocation of costs. This section shall not operate as a residual authority to finance any activity that does not qualify under the Act.
(c) VERIFICATION. Circularity claims shall distinguish material collected, sorted, recovered to specification, and actually returned to useful production. Exported waste, incineration, inventory accumulation, or a contractual promise of future recycling shall not be counted as completed material recovery without the applicable verified basis.
(d) MEASURES. Awards shall evaluate useful product-life extension, recovered material quality, reduced virgin resource demand, independently reproducible measurement, cost, and environmental burdens across the relevant lifecycle.
(e) SHARED STANDARDS. Publicly supported reference methods and nonconfidential data shall be accessible under title III. A private standards organization may contribute expertise but shall not obtain automatic power to change legal duties, exclude competitors, or charge an undisclosed monopoly fee for compliance with a publicly funded requirement.
NONOPERATIVE ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL
This package is a proposed Act of Congress, not enacted law, an official legislative-counsel product, a legal opinion for a particular transaction, or a Congressional Budget Office or Joint Committee on Taxation estimate. The operative text consists of sections 1 through 5 and titles I through XX. All appendices are nonoperative. The research review is dated September 24, 2026. The fixed appropriation years assume enactment early enough to administer the FY2027 starting tranche; later enactment would require a new transition and scoring review.
The drafting objective is to implement the requested policy architecture: substantial support for American innovation and production across a broad range of industries, strict conditions on major corporate recipients, enforceable environmental duties with compliance finance, a limited initial allied network, proportionate enforcement, and a fourteen-year $7 trillion initial support envelope. Forty sector programs specify eligible activities, responsible agencies, performance measures, and sector-specific safeguards. Eligibility does not guarantee equal appropriations or funding for an unqualified project.
No text can be guaranteed immune to litigation, evasion, implementation failure, future amendment, or judicial invalidation. This package addresses identifiable issues through definitions, bounded delegations, specific appropriations, evidentiary rules, due process, savings clauses, nonduplication, and surviving obligations. Its engineering thresholds, administrative workload, market effects, and fiscal consequences require additional empirical work before introduction.
| Subject | Treatment in this draft |
|---|---|
| User-selected core | Federal industrial policy; at least twenty sectors; strict environmental rules and compliance finance; leadership accountability; a tight expandable allied club; $7 trillion over fourteen years. |
| Expanded sector structure | Forty detailed programs, with common safeguards and specialized provisions for health, agriculture, creative work, education, digital systems, and infrastructure. |
| Spending instruments | An initial $6.3 trillion in direct appropriations plus no more than $700 billion of allocated refundable credits. The credit is inside, not on top of, the $7 trillion envelope. |
| Additional numerical choices | Recipient thresholds, compensation and distribution limits, worker participation, grant shares, emissions and electricity milestones, credit caps, penalty ceilings, and reporting deadlines are proposed drafting assumptions. |
| Additional revenue choices | Title XIX proposes a 28 percent regular corporate income-tax rate, an 18 percent corporate alternative minimum-tax rate, and a 4 percent covered stock-repurchase excise-tax rate. The user did not select these particular rates. |
| Revenue duration and scope | The three proposed rate changes generally begin in 2028, apply under the existing tax bases beyond program recipients, and have no 2040 sunset. No claim is made that their unscored yield fully finances this Act. |
| Not included | A universal industrial operating license, a general AI licensing regime, a new immigration quota, automatic project approval, a blanket trade-agreement exception, or an economy-wide executive compensation cap. |
The former single $7 trillion appropriation plus a discretionary payment mechanism has been replaced by separate direct-spending and genuine refundable-credit authority. Refund authority, claim procedure, tax basis, recapture, allocation ceilings, and return confidentiality are now specified. Loan face amounts are separated from initial subsidy cost. The statutory credit-reestimate mechanism is acknowledged rather than mislabeled as capped by the initial appropriation. [R1–R3]
The earlier broad definition of any affiliate or contractor as a covered entity has been replaced by more limited recipient, controlled-group, covered-facility, and covered-product definitions. Major-recipient financial restrictions operate through express parent covenants. Aggregation prevents award splitting but does not automatically make every affiliate liable for every debt, tort, or offense. Small research grants do not automatically subject an unrelated university, farm, or hospital to industrial-facility standards. Large loan or guarantee commitments also trigger the corporate covenant even when their estimated subsidy cost is zero or negative; accounting treatment does not erase the separately defined principal-exposure threshold.
The earlier Council-centered system has been replaced by coordination through an interagency Council and substantive action by named statutory agencies. The integrity office coordinates; it does not receive unlimited prosecutorial or adjudicatory authority. Inspectors General and GAO retain their separate functions. Officials cannot create new criminal elements through future guidance or waive a recipient’s general right to contest agency action.
Domestic productive location, U.S. operating commitments, sensitive-technology restrictions, government procurement preferences, and prohibited input-contingent subsidies are separately treated. The core partner list establishes initial eligibility, not an unconditional permanent exemption from security and reciprocity criteria. This distinction does not eliminate all trade disputes or countervailing-duty exposure. [R7–R9]
The earlier suggestion of negligent criminal liability based substantially on an executive’s position has been replaced by defined offenses and proof of individual conduct or culpable omission. Routine error, honest scientific failure, and inability without the required state of mind are not made crimes. Civil remedies remain available when criminal elements are absent. Existing environmental statutes provide relevant examples of separately defined civil and criminal enforcement; the new offenses are proposed additional law, not a paraphrase of those statutes. [R15–R16]
The previous thirty-year fiscal illustrations were not supported by an operational macroeconomic model. They should not be described as likely receipts or a validated return on investment. Appendix C replaces them with reproducible spending and financing arithmetic, explicit assumptions, and unscored revenue provisions. It does not replace an official cost estimate.
A 40 percent emissions-intensity reduction, a 90 percent gross reduction milestone, a residual-removal limit, a wage floor, or a compensation ceiling expresses a proposed legislative choice. The source register does not establish that each selected number is technically optimal or commercially achievable in every listed industry. Section 502 requires a technical record; section 610 permits bounded, documented extensions rather than a general escape clause. Before introduction, sector engineers should test the rules against actual facilities, grids, watersheds, process emissions, and delivery schedules.
The revenue rates are proposed choices, not research findings. Retrieved Code rates are 21 percent, 15 percent, and 1 percent respectively. Estimation must account for regular/minimum-tax interaction, credits, losses, international rules, and repurchase substitution. Multiplying a headline tax base by the rate increase is insufficient. [R4–R6]
NONOPERATIVE ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL
The principal architecture is a voluntary federal spending program with clearly stated prospective conditions. Congress also uses its taxing power for the revenue and credit titles and its interstate and foreign-commerce powers for specified transactions. A constitutional-authority recital alone cannot supply an otherwise missing substantive power.
South Dakota v. Dole addresses limits on conditional spending, including clarity, relationship to the federal interest, independent constitutional restrictions, and coercion. NFIB v. Sebelius illustrates that describing a funding arrangement as optional does not resolve every coercion issue. Their contexts differ from these industrial awards, so neither is treated as a blanket approval or prohibition. The bill does not threaten unrelated existing State funding for refusal to participate. [R13–R14]
Group-wide restrictions on distributions, executive compensation, and board structure remain contestable even where a parent expressly accepts them. A challenger could question whether the condition is sufficiently related to the financed activity or exceeds a constitutionally permissible bargain. The draft states an anti-extraction and integrity rationale, sets monetary thresholds, specifies duration, and avoids regulating every unrelated firm. That framing narrows the issue but does not predetermine judicial treatment. The same restrictions may reduce participation by firms unwilling to accept the bargain; this is a material program-design tradeoff, not merely a compliance detail.
A public subsidy does not authorize every restriction on a recipient’s speech. Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International invalidated an organizational policy requirement extending beyond the funded activity. The draft therefore prohibits viewpoint-based award decisions, compulsory ideological declarations, and use of federal investment rights to dictate editorial or unrelated political activity. [R17]
Creative-technology assistance is not conditioned on producing a favored message, casting a preferred viewpoint, or surrendering unrelated copyrighted work. Replica-consent duties address specified contractual uses of a person’s likeness or performance in the assisted activity. Existing fair-use, expressive, and other legal questions remain governed by applicable law. The Copyright Office’s AI work distinguishes digital replicas, copyrightability, and training issues; it does not establish a universal rule that every model-training use is lawful or unlawful. [R28]
Scientific security review is tied to conduct, access, control, and specified risks rather than ancestry or national origin. Protected criticism, publication of negative results, and failure of an honestly performed experiment cannot themselves constitute fraud. Security restrictions must still be reconciled with classified-information, export-control, privacy, and patent law.
Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo requires courts to exercise independent judgment on questions of statutory interpretation under the Administrative Procedure Act, while recognizing legally authorized delegations. The drafting response is to specify eligibility, relevant factors, agency responsibilities, threshold choices, enforcement limits, and procedures rather than relying on an expectation of judicial deference to an ambiguous national-interest mandate. [R10]
Technical rulemaking remains necessary for measurement methods, sector comparators, operating boundaries, verification, and engineering feasibility. A numerical target without a defensible measurement method is not a fully operational standard. The rulemaking record should explain alternatives, baseline selection, costs, health consequences, reliability, and reasons for different treatment of sectors. Standards are versioned; incorporation of a private standard is not permission for that private body to amend federal law automatically. Final actions remain reviewable under ordinary administrative-law principles. [R18]
The Council coordinates strategy and disputes but does not independently adjudicate tax liabilities, command criminal prosecutions, or exercise every agency’s appropriations authority. The career integrity office is located in Commerce and does not displace duly appointed agency heads, DOJ, Inspectors General, or GAO. Implementation agreements cannot silently transfer powers that the statute reserves to an identified officer.
SEC v. Jarkesy held that the defendant was entitled to a jury trial when the SEC sought civil penalties for securities fraud. It does not establish that every administrative payment adjustment or public-rights proceeding is unconstitutional. To avoid treating punitive penalties as ordinary grant administration, the draft assigns its new punitive civil monetary claims to federal court and preserves applicable jury rights. Nonpunitive suspension, eligibility review, and recovery of unearned assistance retain separate notice and hearing procedures. [R11]
Personal criminal responsibility requires the defined offense, the required state of mind, and the individual’s own conduct or culpable omission. An omission requires an express duty, actual authority, practical ability, and the specified knowledge. Corporate responsibility does not imply automatic personal guilt. The government retains the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt; civil negligence does not substitute for criminal knowledge. Environmental harm, fraud loss, and compensation recovery also have distinct evidentiary and remedial questions.
Emergency orders address imminent threats but require written findings, a prompt hearing, and timely judicial confirmation absent consent. Routine inspections use lawful consent or appropriate process, and administrative subpoenas are subject to court enforcement and privilege objections. A general award covenant is not treated as a universal waiver of constitutional rights.
The proposed penalty ceilings require proportionality analysis, consideration of seriousness and ability to pay, and protection against duplicative recovery. The bill preserves the False Claims Act according to its own terms, including its tax exclusion, rather than claiming every tax-credit error triggers treble damages. The statutory whistleblower extension imports an existing remedial procedure rather than promising an unspecified bounty. [R19–R20]
Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County concerns NEPA’s scope and judicial review. The new community and cumulative-impact provisions are therefore drafted as an express additional funding assessment under this Act, not a claim that NEPA itself necessarily compels analysis of every separate upstream or downstream project. Independent environmental permitting statutes remain applicable. [R12]
The bill distinguishes process coordination from legal approval. A missed schedule does not authorize construction, displace Tribal obligations, waive emission limits, or compel an independent regulator to approve an unsafe facility. No receiving agency may transform financial eligibility into FDA clearance, NRC licensing, or another safety authorization.
Feasibility risks remain substantial: new clean-power delivery can lag factory construction; thermal processes can have irreducible emissions; water conditions are local; durable removals may be costly or unavailable; and closed-loop systems may shift energy or chemical burdens. The law requires a technical record and financial assurance, but it cannot make an unavailable technology commercially ready by declaration. Extension decisions must explain these facts without treating ordinary financial inconvenience as an emergency.
The WTO Subsidies and Countervailing Measures framework distinguishes prohibited export or domestic-input contingencies from other specific subsidies that can still be actionable or subject to countervailing measures. Funding production in the United States is not identical to requiring recipients to buy U.S. inputs, but neither classification grants automatic immunity from challenge. Product, service, procurement, and partner arrangements require instrument-specific analysis. [R7]
The bill therefore separates domestic-location support from Buy American, infrastructure domestic-content requirements, and Trade Agreements Act procurement treatment. Procurement officers must apply the particular legal regime rather than assume one origin rule covers every grant, service, and purchase. Treaty and statutory obligations may constrain a tight partner arrangement; the designation mechanism does not itself amend those obligations. [R8]
Existing CHIPS guardrails offer a targeted example of restrictions on foreign expansion and sensitive technology transactions. This draft adapts that concept to defined assisted activities and conduct-based security determinations; it does not claim existing CHIPS authority already applies across all forty sectors. [R9]
Bayh-Dole treatment is preserved where applicable. The domestic-manufacturing provision for certain exclusive licenses, including its statutory waiver mechanism, is not replaced by an undefined “march-in-like” power. An additional essential-service license is instead established prospectively through an express award agreement, bounded triggering events, notice, compensation, and review. Background intellectual property is separately identified. [R21]
Asset covenants, security interests, and financial assurance must be perfected and documented under applicable law. The draft does not simply declare every federal program claim superior to all bankruptcy claims or authorize confiscation of unrelated assets. A future insolvency may still constrain collection, continuity, or cleanup. Additional bankruptcy-specific amendments would require separate analysis of priority, administration, and effects on private financing.
Before introduction, congressional counsel should verify the then-current text of every amended provision, obtain current negative-history review of relevant decisions, test tax-credit codification and refund mechanics with Treasury and tax counsel, and reconcile committee jurisdiction and budget treatment. No comprehensive commercial citator, formal agency clearance, or official fiscal score has been performed here.
The strongest remaining empirical needs are sector engineering schedules, project-level funding-gap data, borrowing and credit-loss estimates, administrative staffing models, effects of the corporate covenants on participation, and distributional analysis of the revenue title. These are not cured by a severability clause. Severability preserves legally independent portions where a court permits; it does not guarantee that a materially changed award bargain remains administratively or commercially viable.
NONOPERATIVE ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL
This appendix is arithmetic under disclosed assumptions, not a CBO or JCT score, a forecast of tax collections, a market-interest forecast, or a forecast of additional GDP. No scenario is labeled likely, conservative, or a probability-weighted central case. The amounts previously suggested in the conversation for added GDP and Treasury receipts were not derived from an adequate model of this legislation and should not be relied on as expected returns.
The initial support envelope is $7 trillion nominal: $6.3 trillion of direct appropriations and $700 billion maximum face allocations of refundable credits. Credit-related reductions in tax receipts and refundable outlays are both federal budget effects. They are not all cash grants. Unclaimed credits, unawarded funds, recoveries, loan performance, timing, and subsequent law can change actual budget effects.
Federal Credit Reform Act subsidy estimates are not loan face principal, and financing-account repayments are not an independent new tax receipt. Credit reestimates can require additional budget authority under existing permanent-indefinite authority. This model does not simulate every financing-account cash flow or Treasury financing adjustment. Its debt path is a simplified incremental-budget illustration, not a forecast of actual federal borrowing requirements. [R1–R2]
CBO’s February 2026 baseline is useful fiscal context, but its documented law and economic cutoffs predate this research date. It does not score this proposal. An average ratio of all federal receipts to GDP cannot by itself establish the marginal tax revenue produced by a large industrial policy. Nor can historical research spillovers be extrapolated linearly to $7 trillion across forty sectors. [R22, R29]
| Account or instrument | Annual, $bn | 14-year total, $bn |
|---|---|---|
| Frontier Research and Grand Challenges | 175 | 2,450 |
| Translation and Scale-Up | 100 | 1,400 |
| Strategic Manufacturing and Supply Chains | 75 | 1,050 |
| Clean Facilities and Green Infrastructure, direct | 50 | 700 |
| Workforce and Regional Development | 35 | 490 |
| Trusted Partners and Secure Collaboration | 10 | 140 |
| Oversight, Integrity, and Data Systems | 5 | 70 |
| Allocated refundable clean-investment credit | 50 | 700 |
| TOTAL INITIAL SUPPORT | 500 | 7,000 |
The $70 billion oversight account includes a $14 billion long-tail reserve. That reserve becomes available at $400 million annually in FY2041–2075. The remaining $56 billion supports administration and oversight during the initial funding period. The reserve is a finite funding choice, not a determination that every future stewardship cost is covered.
The credit program allows a base investment credit of 30 percent and a 40 percent rate for qualifying designated projects, subject to allocation, stacking, and basis rules. The face allocation ceiling is $700 billion; it does not become an additional $700 billion grant appropriation. Loan and guarantee authority has a separate $3 trillion aggregate original principal-commitment ceiling and a $300 billion annual ceiling. Initial credit subsidy costs must fit within the direct appropriations; later legally required reestimates are separately reported.
For illustration, $449 billion of nonreserve direct support and $50 billion of credit allocations are assumed committed annually on a ramp of 0.5 of a normal year in 2027, 1.0 in 2028, 1.5 in 2029, and 1.0 in each subsequent year through 2040. This uses permitted carryforward and does not increase the fourteen-year total. It is a planning assumption, not an award schedule promised by the statute.
Direct primary budget effects are assumed to occur 35 percent in the commitment year, 35 percent the next year, 20 percent in the second following year, and 10 percent in the third. Credit effects are assumed 40 percent in the second following year, 40 percent in the third, and 20 percent in the fourth. This aggregate model does not estimate each grant, credit subsidy, refundable component, and revenue-loss component separately. A formal score would require those distinctions and program-specific spendout curves.
All scheduled support is assumed used. The model adds reserve spending at $400 million annually in FY2041–2075. It assumes no credit reestimates in the basic scenarios, then separately tests additional reestimates. There is no inflation index in the $7 trillion statutory envelope. Alternative spendout, credit take-up, and cancellation assumptions would produce different results.
| Window / ending FY | Scheduled support, $tn | Primary effect, $tn |
|---|---|---|
| 1 years / 2027 | 0.500 | 0.079 |
| 5 years / 2031 | 2.500 | 1.846 |
| 10 years / 2036 | 5.000 | 4.379 |
| 14 years / 2040 | 7.000 | 6.375 |
| 30 years / 2056 | 7.000 | 6.992 |
The FY2027–2056 primary total is $6.9924 trillion in this model. Another $7.6 billion of the initially appropriated reserve is modeled after 2056, bringing the complete nominal initial-support use to $7 trillion. Debt interest, additional credit reestimates, statutory refund interest, judgments, and later appropriations are outside that calculation.
Using an assumed 2 percent annual deflator, modeled thirty-year primary effects equal approximately $5.892 trillion in constant 2026 dollars. Using a separate assumed 4 percent nominal discount rate, their end-2026 present value is approximately $5.014 trillion. These are illustrative conversion conventions, not asserted current OMB discount rates. A discounted value is not the nominal amount Congress appropriates, and a real-dollar figure must not be compared with undiscounted nominal receipts as though they share a unit.
The following scenarios assume that every modeled primary deficit is financed, there are no assigned tax or other offsets, and interest is charged annually on the opening incremental debt balance. Rates are held constant at 3, 4, or 5 percent. They do not incorporate monetary-policy responses, crowding out, inflation feedback, or a change in interest rates caused by this bill. The table is not a score of title XIX, which would generate some unknown net receipts.
| Assumed rate | 30-year primary, $tn | Added interest, $tn | 2056 added debt, $tn |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3% | 6.992 | 6.185 | 13.177 |
| 4% | 6.992 | 9.269 | 16.261 |
| 5% | 6.992 | 13.064 | 20.057 |
These hypothetical offsets are net additional receipts or primary savings of a fixed amount in every year FY2028–2056. They are not estimates of the three drafted tax-rate increases, of investment royalties, or of growth dividends. The table illustrates how timing and financing affect the amount needed to avoid adding to debt by the end of the window.
| Annual offset, $bn | 29-year offsets, $tn | Added interest, $tn | 2056 added debt, $tn |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0.000 | 9.269 | 16.261 |
| 100 | 2.900 | 6.872 | 10.965 |
| 200 | 5.800 | 4.476 | 5.668 |
| 300 | 8.700 | 2.079 | 0.371 |
Under these particular assumptions, a constant net offset of approximately $307.0 billion in each year FY2028–2056 would make the incremental debt balance approximately zero at the end of 2056. This is a mathematical financing threshold, not a finding that the bill would raise that amount. It excludes the remaining $7.6 billion reserve after the thirty-year window and any additional unmodeled cost.
A negative incremental debt balance in a sensitivity means less federal debt relative to the assumed baseline. Associated negative incremental interest means avoided baseline debt interest. It is not a new investment fund earning a guaranteed Treasury return.
| Extra FY2035 credit reestimate, $bn | 30-year primary, $tn | 2056 added debt at 4%, $tn |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 6.992 | 16.261 |
| 100 | 7.092 | 16.489 |
| 300 | 7.292 | 16.945 |
The reestimate amounts are stress inputs, not expected losses. A reliable credit analysis requires the portfolio’s loan terms, default and recovery distributions, correlated sector shocks, collateral, construction delays, interest exposure, and guarantee draw behavior. There is no basis here to assign a single expected default percentage to the full statutory face ceiling.
The Act could generate direct receipts from royalties, warrants, contractual excess returns, fees, and recoveries. Their timing and value depend on executed instruments, not the existence of a statutory permission. Loan principal, amounts already recognized in subsidy estimates, and tax receipts must not be counted twice. Penalties are enforcement tools, not a dependable financing base.
Economic evaluation should separately estimate research spillovers, private investment displaced or induced, imported equipment, wage and price effects, supply resilience, avoided illness and pollution, energy-system costs, land and housing pressure, and regional displacement. A social benefit need not become a Treasury receipt. Conversely, a higher nominal tax receipt caused by inflation does not necessarily represent a real economic gain.
Private and nonfederal costs include matching funds, reporting, verification, cleaner processes, wage and profit-sharing obligations, additional infrastructure, and the opportunity cost of complying with the corporate covenant. State and local support remains voluntary under the statute, but successful projects can still create housing, transport, water, and service demands. Those costs should appear in project analysis rather than be assumed away.
The distributed fiscal_model.py reproduces annual schedules, window totals, twelve financing scenarios, credit stresses, and the financing threshold using only the Python standard library. Run it with a chosen output directory. The included CSV files provide inspectable inputs and outputs. Changing the model is not the same as amending the statutory ceilings.
NONOPERATIVE ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL
Commerce should establish the single intake and award registry, while each administering agency designates an accountable program official, chief financial officer contact, counsel, privacy and security leads, and Inspector General liaison. OMB should issue account, apportionment, obligation, and reporting instructions consistent with title XVIII. A written interagency responsibility matrix should distinguish decisions, advice, payment certification, investigation, and review.
Initial staffing plans should be based on expected application volume, engineering complexity, transaction size, monitoring risk, and appeal workload. The statute does not establish a credible universal applications-per-reviewer ratio. Agencies should use measured processing time from early rounds to update workload estimates and publish vacancies that constrain performance. Specialized financial underwriting, environmental engineering, tax administration, acquisition, cybersecurity, and grants personnel cannot be treated as interchangeable.
Before any major commitment, establish conflict screening, segregation of duties, duplicate-benefit checks, authority-to-sign controls, records retention, and secure reporting channels. A provisional selection must be labeled as provisional. The dashboard should distinguish proposed, selected, executed, obligated, disbursed, operating, suspended, and closed projects.
Publish the first national strategy, agency implementation plans, proposed common rules, and a public inventory of overlapping programs. Consult affected workers, businesses, independent researchers, Tribes, communities, and infrastructure operators. Provide a public explanation of sector pathways and selection criteria without promising that every industry or region will receive an equal share.
Launch eligible research, workforce, measurement, and planning competitions where the applicable legal standards are already sufficiently defined. Use standard agreements for smaller awards and negotiated, counsel-reviewed covenants for major recipients. Begin partner-country verification and negotiations, but do not treat the initial named list as a substitute for executed arrangements.
Regional planning should identify transmission, water, housing, labor, transport, and emergency-service constraints before promising a large factory or data center. Funding for site preparation is not a commitment to approve the eventual production facility.
Finalize the common rulemaking required within one year, including eligibility, applications, cost allocation, financial extraction covenants, digital protections, tax allocation procedures, and technical measurement methods that can lawfully be completed on that schedule. EPA’s sector timetable is separately specified, with high-impact and remaining classes addressed in the subsequent statutory windows.
Treasury should establish the credit allocation registry, certificate controls, tax return mechanisms, examination referral, confidentiality boundaries, recapture records, and reconciliation to the refundable-credit ceiling. A non-tax agency may verify technical facts but should not receive unrestricted tax-return data. Credit certificates need persistent identifiers that survive an approved successor transaction.
Credit programs require approved subsidy models, underwriting standards, financing accounts, independent risk review, servicing contracts, and credible default workflows before commitment. An advertised loan volume is not an appropriation of its subsidy cost. Procurement and advance-purchase commitments require legal review of maximum liabilities before execution. [R1–R3]
Complete the applicable sector standards before irreversible major construction disbursements. Readiness reviews should reconcile the award agreement, engineering design, permits, utility commitments, private finance, workforce plan, environmental baseline, financial assurance, and schedule. Contractual milestones should reflect project-specific risks rather than arbitrary quarterly spending targets.
Test the monitoring and reporting system before ordinary operation. Verify meter boundaries, baseline selection, data quality, cybersecurity, auditor independence, and incident escalation. For high-impact digital or health projects, test human review, privacy, accessibility, and safety controls before general deployment. A pilot producing a functioning prototype is not equivalent to clinical authorization, an operating license, or a verified commercial capacity increase. [R27, R32]
Publish reasons for material delays, cancellations, and restructurings. GAO’s August 2026 CHIPS review identified the need for detailed plans and timelines to satisfy continuing statutory R&D requirements after program changes. The relevant lesson for this draft is documented continuity and lawful implementation, not an assumption that a particular organizational arrangement can never be changed. [R23]
Audit outcomes against the awarded baseline: productive capacity actually operating, reliable output, verified pollution and energy results, worker earnings, private capital actually at risk, and independent access to shared assets. Separate gross jobs from displaced jobs and temporary construction employment. Report whether awards funded activity that would probably have occurred without support.
Use stage-gate decisions to continue, restructure, or close underperforming projects with a reasoned record. Honest research failure may be informative and should not be confused with misuse of funds. Repeated reporting defects, unsupported costs, or withheld incidents require a different response from a valid experiment that disproves its initial hypothesis.
The fifth-year review should assess participation under corporate conditions, concentration, compliance cost, regional infrastructure pressure, allied access, tax-credit utilization, and early credit losses. Changes requiring new statutory authority should return to Congress; they should not be implemented through informal guidance that contradicts the Act.
The FY2040 end of scheduled initial funding is not the end of all duties. New awards may use their statutory availability windows, but no new award may be made after September 30, 2044. Credits have their own placement and claim rules. Valid obligations, loan servicing, financial instruments, environmental assurance, privacy duties, records, and remedies continue as specified.
Before program personnel depart, agencies should transfer complete award and asset records, document custodianship, validate successor systems, and identify open liabilities. The $14 billion reserve supports specified administration through FY2075, with annual releases, but its adequacy must be revisited. Physical remediation or credit obligations extending beyond that period may require later appropriations. A system sunset must not erase a valid borrower obligation, environmental duty, or individual remedy.
| Stage | Required record and decision | Stop or correction point |
|---|---|---|
| Intake | Identity, ownership, eligibility, sector, conflict and duplicate-benefit screening | Reject ineligible applicant; permit correction of nonmaterial errors. |
| Selection | Comparative merits, additionality, funding gap, finance, safety and public benefit | No award merely because annual funds remain. |
| Execution | Signed covenants, authority, account, ceiling, milestones, data rights, parent obligations | No public announcement counted as legal obligation. |
| Readiness | Permits, engineering, private finance, baseline, utilities, assurance | Withhold construction disbursement until applicable conditions are met. |
| Payment | Verified milestones, eligible costs, internal approval, retained amount | Suspend disputed portion; give required notice and review. |
| Operation | Output, emissions, workforce, digital safeguards, security, financial restrictions | Cure minor error; escalate serious harm or intentional misconduct. |
| Change or distress | Successor, restructure, workout, continuity and recovery analysis | No automatic release through asset sale or voluntary repayment. |
| Closeout | Final accounting, continuing duties, records, servicing and monitoring funds | Maintain surviving obligations; identify unfunded later needs. |
NONOPERATIVE ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL
Creates coordination without transferring every agency’s legal powers into a new Council. Public strategy, evidence standards, conflict rules, named responsibilities, and recurring evaluation create an administrative record. The Council does not receive a power to prosecute, assess tax, or exercise the independent functions of an Inspector General.
Defines eligibility, additionality, cost shares, concentration limits, milestone payments, parent covenants, successor treatment, review, and subsidy stacking. The main anti-evasion mechanism is common-control aggregation combined with precise liability rules, rather than declaring every supplier and affiliate liable for the entire enterprise.
Distinguishes fundamental research from commercial expansion and protects truthful negative results. Provides shared scientific infrastructure and public access while preserving privacy, background intellectual property, and applicable Bayh-Dole rights. Any additional continuity license must rest on a clear prospective bargain and reviewable trigger.
Creates prototype-to-production pathways, pilot lines, applied institutes, critical tooling, manufacturing awards, and small-firm extension. Domestic operating commitments and sensitive foreign-expansion restrictions are separate obligations. Publicly financed asset records and successor duties reduce the ability to receive a grant and later remove the financed capacity without review.
Imposes independent facility duties with numerical decarbonization and energy milestones, local pollution protections, water budgets, chemical controls, waste recovery, verification, community assessment, and closure assurance. The standards apply through a defined facility boundary and technical rules, not an unbounded definition of all activity within a corporate family.
Finances compliance and enabling energy, water, site, and grid infrastructure. Large loads must address their attributable system costs. Permitting coordination does not become deemed approval. Extensions are tied to evidence and continuing controls; they do not waive independently applicable health and environmental law.
Sets threshold-based corporate restrictions on repurchases, distributions, compensation, related-party transfers, certifications, and board oversight. Major commercial support includes an independently valued federal participation mechanism or equivalent measured public benefit. Repayment does not automatically erase a continuing environmental or misconduct obligation.
Addresses construction and operating labor standards, apprenticeships, portable credentials, regional service capacity, worker participation in project earnings, transition effects, and access. Local governments retain a voluntary role. The Act does not establish a new visa category or promise jobs to individuals based only on project announcements.
Begins with six named eligible partner countries but requires the stated criteria and arrangements. Caps federally financed foreign research performance, preserves domestic productive-location commitments, and provides conduct-based security review. Partnership status is not a blanket exemption from export controls, procurement law, or trade obligations.
Applies privacy, secure development, incident response, interoperability, and high-impact automated-decision rules to assisted systems. It is not a universal AI license for the whole economy. The bill separates system-specific accountability from control of protected scientific or political expression.
Adds clinical, product-quality, health-access, biological, farmer, performer, education, financial, transport, and public-infrastructure safeguards. A funded prototype is not deemed approved by the relevant safety regulator. Sector-specific access conditions are tied to the financed technology and prospective award terms.
Separates procurement preferences from grant eligibility and provides funded demand commitments, competition review, shared-asset access, repair, public pricing, prompt supplier payment, and vendor exit. Consultation with competition agencies does not create an implied exemption from existing antitrust law.
Caps loan and guarantee face commitments and requires advance subsidy funding, independent underwriting, collateral, portfolio review, servicing, and explicit reestimate accounting. Investment receipts are recorded separately and generally deposited to Treasury, rather than silently creating a revolving appropriation.
Creates the allocated refundable credit with defined property, rates, timing, tax-exempt participation, certificates, anti-stacking rules, full basis adjustment, recapture, tax procedure, and refund authority. It avoids describing an ordinary discretionary agency grant as though it were already an Internal Revenue Code credit.
Establishes coordinated integrity work while preserving existing independent oversight. Requires recipient-specific ownership information regardless of general reporting exemptions, proportional inspection, durable records, protected information, and counterfactual evaluation. An adverse audit does not by itself prove a crime.
Specifies the enforcer, proof standard, notice and cure, payment and recovery remedies, court-imposed punitive penalties, defined criminal offenses, individual executive responsibility, debarment, whistleblower procedure, limited private enforcement, limitations, and settlement transparency. Remedies are coordinated to avoid duplicative recovery.
Preserves ordinary judicial review and special tax and contract procedures, limits coerced waivers, protects federalism and civil liberties, requires versioned technical rules, and establishes implementation and survival provisions. Severability is accompanied by review of a materially altered award bargain.
Provides the initial $7 trillion envelope through distinct appropriations and credit instruments. Sets account totals, availability, limited reprogramming, closeout, a finite long-tail reserve, administrative discipline, and honest reporting of costs outside the initial envelope. New spending authority is not created by investment returns or optimistic forecasts.
Enacts three prospective economy-wide corporate tax-rate changes as additional drafting assumptions, with interaction and estimation requirements. Their yield is not asserted to meet the spending total. No automatic tax increase, debt-limit amendment, or executive power to cut other programs follows from a missed forecast.
Provides forty program-specific missions, agency assignments, eligible projects, outcomes, and limitations. This breadth creates eligible pathways but not forty equal entitlements. Common environmental, corporate, integrity, fiscal, and safety conditions continue to apply wherever their statutory thresholds are met.
NONOPERATIVE ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL
The EU Clean Industrial Deal State Aid Framework provides a comparative mechanism for clean-energy, industrial decarbonization, manufacturing, and investment-risk support, including funding-gap approaches. It operates within the EU’s state-aid legal system and its stated duration, not the United States Constitution or this bill’s appropriation rules. The transferable drafting feature is documented necessity and proportionality of support, not a claim that the EU framework proves this package’s fiscal return. [R24]
Australia’s Future Made in Australia framework links public investment with a National Interest Framework and community-benefit arrangements. The draft adapts the idea of an articulated public-interest test, enforceable plans, and disclosed commitments. It does not assume identical industrial scale, federal structure, trade obligations, or labor institutions. An announced framework is not by itself causal evidence of successful long-term outcomes. [R25]
The U.S. CHIPS program offers narrower experience with staged manufacturing support, foreign-expansion guardrails, and implementation oversight. Its sector concentration, award size, and statutory purpose differ from a forty-sector, $7 trillion program. This bill therefore does not obtain a spending multiplier by scaling CHIPS appropriations or a research estimate by a single constant. [R9, R23, R29]
| Group | Potential program benefit | Burden, risk, or question to measure |
|---|---|---|
| Researchers and institutions | Stable research support, shared equipment, data and compute access | Administrative capacity, security reviews, intellectual-property terms, and pressure to overpromise commercialization. |
| Manufacturers and developers | Finance, pilots, infrastructure, demand commitments | Private matching, strict covenants, cleaner-process costs, timelines, and possible reluctance to participate. |
| Smaller enterprises | Shared facilities, dedicated access, extension, prompt payment | Application burden, concentration within consortia, and dependence on incumbent-controlled infrastructure. |
| Workers and learners | Training, wage floor, portable credentials, earnings participation | Automation displacement, credentials without jobs, commuting and housing costs, and enforcement accessibility. |
| Communities and local governments | Productive investment, public infrastructure and service access | Water, land, pollution, housing, traffic, and long-term service costs; local support is not automatically funded. |
| Patients, students, farmers, creators | Sector-specific access, safety, data and contractual protections | Real-world affordability, product quality, usable remedies, and constraints on choice or interoperability. |
| Taxpayers and public agencies | Potential returns, public knowledge, resilience and service improvements | Initial spending, credit losses, interest, tax incidence, administrative limits, and uncertain additionality. |
| Allied partners and suppliers | Joint research, reciprocal capability and supply arrangements | Security duties, capped foreign performance, access disputes, and compatibility with trade commitments. |
These are mechanisms and questions, not predicted winners and losers. A distributional assessment should identify who bears tax changes, who receives support, who pays higher housing or utility costs, and which communities experience pollution reductions or new burdens. Geography, income, disability, firm size, industry, and worker occupation may yield different effects. Those differences should not be collapsed into a single national jobs number.
Hard corporate conditions may protect against financial extraction and change how recipients distribute returns, while also affecting application rates, transaction structure, and access to private capital. Strict environmental conditions can reduce certain harms while increasing capital needs or delaying capacity where enabling infrastructure is unavailable. A tight allied club can simplify initial verification while limiting some otherwise useful collaborations. These tradeoffs warrant evidence and disclosure, not a claim that one architecture eliminates all competing objectives.
NONOPERATIVE ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL
It would establish a fourteen-year federal innovation and production program with forty eligible sector pathways, shared research and manufacturing infrastructure, grants, loans and guarantees, advance purchases, workforce support, and a capped refundable clean-investment credit. It would attach environmental, corporate, workforce, security, transparency, and public-access duties to the support, according to defined thresholds.
Yes. The initial package is $6.3 trillion in direct appropriations plus no more than $700 billion of allocated credit face value. It is not $7 trillion plus another $700 billion. The amount is nominal, not automatically increased for inflation. It is also not an all-in ceiling on borrowing interest, credit reestimates, refund interest, judgments, or future laws.
That has not been established. The draft includes actual revenue-law changes, contractual investment participation, and reporting requirements, but their combined receipts are unscored. Higher output is not the same as federal revenue. Appendix C shows how various hypothetical net offsets would affect financing; those examples are not predicted yields.
The user requested research into funding but did not choose the particular 28 percent regular corporate, 18 percent corporate minimum-tax, and 4 percent repurchase-tax rates. They are additional, explicit assumptions in this version’s revenue title. They apply under the existing tax bases beyond recipients of this program and do not expire with the fourteen-year initial spending schedule. Any later revision of those choices requires a corresponding fiscal reassessment.
No. The assisted productive capacity is principally domestic, while verified allied research, supply arrangements, and ordinary lawful international commerce remain possible. Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, and the United Kingdom are initially eligible for core status, subject to criteria and arrangements. Further countries can qualify through the stated process. The Act does not exempt partnerships from applicable export, procurement, or trade rules.
A person could face prosecution for a defined offense, such as intentional assistance fraud, intentional monitoring tampering, or knowing environmental endangerment, if the government proves the required elements. Liability is not imposed merely because someone is a CEO or because a project fails. The separate civil and contractual remedies can apply where their own elements are met even without a criminal offense.
No. The corporate covenant principally applies to major commercial recipients and their expressly bound controlled groups. A small research award does not impose every condition on every unrelated activity of a university or company. The separate corporate tax amendments, however, operate under the existing economy-wide tax bases and are not restricted to award recipients.
No automatic release follows from repayment. The draft distinguishes repayment, surviving asset and operating commitments, environmental duties, tax recapture, civil liability, and criminal responsibility. A settlement or approved exit must follow the applicable process; returning money does not itself erase misconduct.
No. The Act adds conditions and finance while preserving other applicable requirements. Permitting schedules coordinate work but do not create approval by silence. New engineering rules require a record, and narrow extensions do not waive independent health and environmental law. Communities and affected individuals receive specified participation and review mechanisms, not an unlimited veto over every project.
No. It establishes programs, obligations, and remedies. It cannot guarantee a discovery, commercial demand, a particular market price, or a macroeconomic return. Its evaluations must distinguish actual outcomes from announcements and compare supported activity with plausible alternatives.
NONOPERATIVE ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL
The following sources informed the legal architecture, comparisons, and fiscal boundaries. Reference labels in the appendices point to this register. Statutory language in the proposed bill expresses new duties and choices; it is not represented as a quotation of existing law unless expressly introduced as an amendment. Research access was completed for this package as of September 24, 2026. Dated agency findings and projections retain their stated time periods.
Statutes, court opinions, agency materials, and the identified research paper are used for different purposes. A court decision is not empirical evidence of investment returns; a program announcement is not an evaluation; a historical R&D estimate is not a forecast of this Act. The source list does not constitute formal negative-history review, agency approval, or an official fiscal score.
Current reporting obligations also require care. FinCEN’s August 2026 announcement concerns changes to general beneficial-ownership reporting. Section 1506 therefore creates an independent, assistance-specific disclosure requirement, with protected personal fields, instead of assuming every domestic recipient already appears in a generally applicable registry. [R26]
The sector design also draws a distinction between existing technical resources and proposed binding conditions. NSF’s shared AI research-resource model and DOE’s dated data-center demand analysis inform access and infrastructure questions. Neither establishes the selected award caps, environmental thresholds, or a forecast of success. [R30–R31]
[R1] 2 U.S.C. § 661c, Federal Credit Reform Act budgetary treatment Advance subsidy funding, financing-account treatment, modifications, and permanent-indefinite reestimates.
[R2] 2 U.S.C. § 661d, credit-account treatment Credit-account architecture and financing authority; read with section 661c.
[R3] 31 U.S.C. § 1324, refund of internal revenue collections Existing refund appropriation framework; title XIV supplies an express additional statutory authorization.
[R4] 26 U.S.C. § 11, corporate income tax Retrieved section 11(b) provides the 21 percent rate that proposed section 1901 would change.
[R5] 26 U.S.C. § 55, alternative minimum tax Retrieved corporate rate provision is 15 percent; applicable-corporation and coordination rules remain distinct.
[R6] 26 U.S.C. § 4501, corporate stock repurchases Retrieved excise-tax rate is 1 percent, with statutory definitions, exceptions, and netting.
[R7] WTO, Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures overview Distinguishes prohibited subsidy contingencies, actionable subsidies, and countervailing measures.
[R8] Federal Acquisition Regulation, Part 25, Foreign Acquisition Procurement origin preferences and trade-agreement treatment require transaction-specific analysis.
[R9] NIST, CHIPS national-security guardrails Targeted foreign-expansion and technology-transaction guardrails; not a general forty-sector authority.
[R10] Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369 (2024) Independent judicial judgment on statutory interpretation; express lawful delegations remain relevant.
[R11] SEC v. Jarkesy, 603 U.S. 109 (2024) Jury right in the securities-fraud civil-penalty proceeding at issue; not a universal bar on administration.
[R12] Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, 605 U.S. 168 (2025) NEPA scope and judicial review. The draft separately authorizes its additional funding assessment.
[R13] South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203 (1987) Opinion text addressing conditional spending; historical context is not treated as identical to this bill.
[R14] National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519 (2012) Opinion text addressing, among other matters, coercion in the Medicaid expansion funding arrangement.
[R15] 42 U.S.C. § 7413, Clean Air Act federal enforcement Existing civil and criminal environmental enforcement provisions; proposed offenses require their own elements.
[R16] 33 U.S.C. § 1319, Clean Water Act enforcement Existing water-pollution enforcement, mental-state distinctions, and remedies.
[R17] Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, 570 U.S. 205 (2013) Opinion text concerning a compelled organizational policy beyond the funded activity.
[R18] 5 U.S.C. § 706, scope of judicial review Administrative-law review of agency action and questions of law.
[R19] 31 U.S.C. § 3729, False Claims Act Material false-claim liability, statutory definitions, and subsection (d) tax exclusion.
[R20] 41 U.S.C. § 4712, contractor and grantee whistleblower protection Defined reporting, administrative process, remedies, judicial review, and nonwaiver rules.
[R21] 35 U.S.C. § 204, preference for United States industry Domestic-manufacturing terms for covered exclusive licenses and specified waiver authority.
[R22] CBO, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036, February 11, 2026 Baseline fiscal context with disclosed law and economic cutoffs. This is not a score of the proposed Act.
[R23] GAO-26-109121, Semiconductors: Commerce Needs Plan to Meet CHIPS for America R&D Requirements, August 6, 2026 Dated oversight findings on awards, milestones, program changes, and plans to meet statutory requirements.
[R24] European Commission, Clean Industrial Deal State Aid Framework Comparative framework adopted June 25, 2025, with its own legal context, period, and funding-gap tools.
[R25] Australian Government, Future Made in Australia Comparative national-interest and community-benefit architecture; not causal proof of program returns.
[R26] FinCEN, final beneficial-ownership reporting exemption announcement, August 11, 2026 Recipient ownership disclosure in section 1506 is an independent award duty, not reliance on universal existing reporting.
[R27] NIST, Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework Risk-management reference. The framework itself is not treated as a universal binding AI licensing law.
[R28] U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence initiative Distinguishes digital-replica, copyrightability, and training questions; unresolved issues are not declared settled.
[R29] Andrew J. Fieldhouse and Karel Mertens, The Social Returns to Public R&D, NBER Working Paper 33780, May 2025 Research on public R&D and productivity. Historical estimates are not linearly extrapolated to the proposed $7 trillion package.
[R30] U.S. Department of Energy, data-center electricity-demand report announcement, December 2024 Dated evidence and projections supporting attention to load planning; projections are not current metered outcomes.
[R31] National Science Foundation, National AI Research Resource Existing shared research-resource model; this bill’s separate eligibility, appropriations, and access rules are proposed law.
[R32] FDA, Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Medical Devices Sector regulatory context; financial assistance does not substitute for applicable FDA authorization.
[R33] Internal Revenue Service, Notice 2026-15 Current guidance relevant to prohibited-foreign-entity restrictions under specified energy credits. This draft creates a separate credit and does not assume all earlier energy incentives remain unchanged.
NONOPERATIVE ACCOMPANYING MATERIAL
The operative text contains 232 sections across twenty titles, including forty sector programs in sections 2001–2040. The generated contents list matches the headings. Definitions, agency assignments, cross-references, thresholds, remedies, tax administration, and continuing duties were checked during assembly. Numeric cross-reference checks do not substitute for substantive legal review.
Annual direct appropriations total $450 billion and annual allocated credit authority totals $50 billion. Fourteen years yield $6.3 trillion and $700 billion respectively. The $14 billion post-award reserve is included in the $70 billion oversight account. Automated model assertions check the initial-support total and financing identities.
Named agencies receive specified powers; a constitutional recital is not the sole source of authority. Review, inspections, civil penalties, criminal proof, individual culpability, expression, and federalism are addressed. Group-wide corporate conditions, environmental rules, private remedies, and international arrangements remain contestable. No immunity from litigation or invalidation is asserted.
Coverage, enforcers, evidence, reporting, payment conditions, notice, cure, sanctions, court access, and survival are specified. Implementation still requires usable forms, staffed review, reliable verification, and an evidentiary record. Detailed text does not guarantee discovery of concealed misconduct or collection from an insolvent recipient.
The $7 trillion is not represented as an all-in thirty-year cost. Revenue yield, economic growth, and direct investment receipts are unscored. The model provides explicit scenarios, not expected returns. Credit cash-flow analysis, official CBO/JCT scoring, and distributional estimates remain outstanding. The revenue rates are additional drafting assumptions, not previously selected user instructions.
Material risks include administrative and industrial capacity, project additionality, grid and water constraints, skills, procurement, environmental measurement, cyber and privacy compliance, correlated credit losses, and long-term servicing and cleanup. The finite reserve and phased rules do not eliminate those risks. Numerical standards have not received comprehensive sector engineering validation.
Required further work includes current statutory and case-history verification; Treasury review of tax, refund, and credit provisions; official scoring; agency staffing plans; engineering feasibility; instrument-specific trade and bankruptcy analysis; and consultation with affected governments, workers, firms, researchers, and communities. The package supplies complete proposed language without placeholders, but is not a certification of fiscal self-financing, regulatory approval, judicial validity, or real-world performance.
