It's less executive action and more pipeline issues.

The department related to approval for these things just hired 140 new employees that just got through on-boarding for this specific task. That 140 is literally the max Congress approved for handling applications in all tiers of the program, with a lot of Senators having hoped that somewhere around ½ that number would have been the final tally hired in.

Those new employees will then need to navigate the 50+ page applications for each bid. With something around 480 bids in the first CHIPs acceptance round. So around 180 people will need to digest as quickly as possible somewhere around 24,000+ pages of applications. That's not counting any kind of objections that might have been filed by State, private citizen, and also competitors (Samsung and Intel have a few of these already on some of the first tier 1s already).

And all of this is just the first steps of the program that was written out by Congress. Congressional oversight, because remember all executive agencies established by law have Congressional oversight, has been really clear as mud on some of the finer details of this program. Biggest back and forth is the offshore but American funding, which holy crap I can't write enough about how complicated that debate has become.

All of this is happening on the several step process that Congress prescribed for this whole thing. Because, tier 3 and tier 2 funding are good candidates for abuse of funding. Solyndra echos can almost be heard when mentioning this. Or more recent example of what could go wrong when you just open the flood gates, PPP loans.

Thing is, companies complain money isn't coming fast enough all the time. The money could be on it's way next week and they'd still complain that it wasn't there on Monday. The more important thing is that the money isn't being wasted too badly and that's only happening with careful consideration. This is literally the exact same thing I said about Trump's wall. One, I don't think it would work anyway. Two, it's ignoring a lot of commitments we have internationally. But three, if we're going to do it, at least have a plan for properly spending the money which Trump did not because it basically took military funding and diverted it toward the wall, and thus it fell into one of those "you either spend it or lose it" and it meant that the construction had to be rushed and why a lot of "Trump's wall" is mostly falling into the Rio Grande or made of metal slats that can easily be sawed through with a hand saw.

So sure, whatever, but the more important thing.... Well let me clarify, the more important thing from my perspective, so totally cool if someone disagrees, is that the money is carefully spent wisely. It doesn't have to be a homerun, I just would rather the money not be tossed all over the place like PPP was.

And I get some of the arguments for why PPP was done the way it was, but to put it to scale, I would prefer handing it out like a 3, I understand why people would want it handed out like a 7, but holy fuck we handed it out like a 9.3. Where 1 is being penny up the ass to make copper wire tight about the money and 10 is prolapsed colon flow of money out the ass. It was really indefensible how just loosey goosey we were with that money. And yes, there's been other times we've done that (cough military cough), I didn't like those either.