National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST

The Constitution gives Congress the power to fix the standard of weights and measures, and on March 3, 1901, Congress created the National Bureau of Standards to do it, at a time when American industry lacked reliable references for length, mass, and electricity. It was renamed the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 1988. Its main campuses are in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Boulder, Colorado, and its Director also serves as Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology.

NIST maintains the official U.S. time through atomic clocks, calibrates instruments, and sells certified reference materials that labs use to check their results. Its scientists have won several Nobel Prizes in physics. It has no regulatory power, but its voluntary standards carry great weight: the Cybersecurity Framework is widely used by companies and agencies, its encryption standards protect government and commercial data, and in 2024 it published the first standards designed to resist attacks from quantum computers.

The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 made NIST the home of a roughly $50 billion program to rebuild domestic semiconductor manufacturing. In 2025 the administration renegotiated several awards, including converting grants to Intel into a federal equity stake of about ten percent, and renamed the institute's AI Safety Institute the Center for AI Standards and Innovation. Supporters said the changes got taxpayers a better return and refocused on competitiveness, while critics said equity stakes and shifting terms politicized the program and that the AI rename deemphasized safety.