tl;dr

>Chief among them is red tape. From 1990 to 2020, the time required to construct new chip plants (called fabs) in the US soared by 38%. Clean Air Act permits can take 18 months. National Environmental Policy Act reviews take an average of four and a half years. A half dozen other federal laws may come into play, plus endless state and local variants. [...] Another challenge is that the US lacks the needed workforce for this industry, thanks partly to a broken immigration system. [...] A final concern is politics. Companies hoping for significant Chips Act funding must comply with an array of new government rules and pointed suggestions, meant to advantage labor unions, favored demographics, “empowered community partners” and the like.

Personal take: America can't build things anymore. America doesn't want to build things anymore. Americans don't want to build things anymore. Building things is a difficult, dirty, and usually demoralizing process of iterative failure until a usable design is chiseled out. Americans do not want factories, they do not want a huge industrial concern requiring a carefully negotiated social contract, and they don't want the engineers who might introduce scary things like workers' rights into our society. It is socially unacceptable to have a lowly machine tool or electrical engineering job, and it is unacceptable to build such facilities in America. The Northeast doesn't have enough land, the South doesn't have enough education, midwesterners are distrustful of electronics, and the west coast bans it on enviomental grounds. Asia doesn't have such concerns and just builds, they will win as a result.