In 2009 Obama’s Secretary of Commerce, Gary Locke, announced that the Economic Development Agency (EDA) had awarded Pensacola, Florida a grant of $2 million dollars to attract tech businesses to the Panhandle city. The grant was estimated to create 670 jobs and attract $27 million in private investment. The project, a “tech campus” set in the middle of the city’s rapidly gentrifying downtown, was finished in 2012. When I moved to Pensacola in 2016, it was a green field that homeless people hung out at. When I moved in 2022, it was being used as a practice field for youth soccer. The “tech campus” has yet to attract a single tenant, a single job, or a single dollar of private investment.
Despite past failures, the federal government is once again attempting to build new tech hubs outside of the big coastal cities where they have previously been concentrated. This time, they’re going even bigger. The EDA recently finished accepting applications for its new Regional Technology and Innovation Hub Program (known colloquially as “Tech Hubs”), a large grant program created by the CHIPS Act which will see 20 regions designated as Tech Hubs. Of these 20, three to eight will be given grants averaging $65 million dollars for programs meant to develop the local tech sector. The convoluted details of this program demonstrate a clear commitment to DEI principles, naked political patronage, and are littered with self-erected barriers to the programs own success.
Let’s start with DEI:
In a section of the Tech Hub Program’s Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) titled: How should applicants consider equity? the agency writes:
[The] EDA expects projects to advance equity to underserved and underrepresented populations4 to the extent practicable. Specifically, applicants are expected to articulate which populations or communities will benefit from the project and how the project will provide for inclusive community engagement, ensuring that the economic benefits of the project will be shared by all communities in the project area, including any underserved communities.
In a footnote, the EDA defines underserved and underrepresented communities as: people who rent their homes, racial and ethnic minorities, limited English proficiency populations, persons with disabilities, and racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty — the last being a neat little reverse-racism dog whistle that good lawyer could argue refers to blacks in the Mississippi Delta and Scotch-Irish in Appalachia equally, although we can all infer otherwise.
Utilizing a variety of patronizing euphemisms, the diversity and equity requirements in this program make it clear that the EDA believes minorities require special and preferential treatment. For example, the EDA says it “seeks evidence-driven equity and inclusion initiatives, including o
