The CHIPS Act is a government finger on the market's scale that anyone can look up -- named recipients, dollar figures, filed with Congress. There's a second, older mechanism that works the opposite way. In 1999 the CIA created a nonprofit venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, to invest in private tech companies -- funded by taxpayer money, but structured as a 501(c)(3), which means it files a tax return with the IRS instead of the disclosures a public investor would owe the SEC. It has grown since: it now invests on behalf of most of the 17-agency intelligence community plus DHS, U.S. Cyber Command, Space Force, Space Command, and -- as of its most recent expansion -- the Army and the Navy. By its own account it has made roughly 325 investments since founding. More than 100 of them were never announced.