Trump stacks new science panel with tech titans to keep u.s. on ai throne
Donald Trump rebooted the White House science advisory committee on Thursday and stuffed it with the same Silicon Valley barons he once vilified on the campaign trail. The new President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology (PCAST) will be co-chaired by venture capitalist David Sacks and outgoing CTO Michael Kratsios, while seats go to Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison and Jensen Huang, the administration confirmed in an executive order released minutes after the swearing-in ceremony.
From courtroom foes to boardroom allies
The optics are impossible to ignore. Four years ago Trump accused Zuckerberg of rigging the 2020 election; today the Meta founder is a formal presidential counselor. The same president who bashed Oracle over cloud-contract losses now leans on Ellison’s database empire for “Golden-Age industrial policy.” The memo frames the council as a Cold-War-style mobilization to keep American workers competitive against Chinese labs and European regulators. Translation: write the rules before Brussels or Beijing do.
The cast is stacked with semiconductor muscle. Huang’s NVIDIA already sells 80 % of the world’s ai accelerators; his inclusion guarantees the White House will hear every plea for export-license leniency. Zuckerberg brings a metaverse bill that needs federal spectrum and privacy pre-emption. Ellison arrives with a $1.5 billion cloud contract up for renewal at the Pentagon. Each man gains a direct line to the Resolute Desk, bypassing the usual agency grind.
What the council actually controls
PCAST has no statutory power, but it writes the technical annexes that Congress rarely reads. Previous iterations green-lit the Apollo program, seeded the internet and, under Biden, nudged CHIPS Act subsidies toward TSMC and Intel. Trump’s version will focus on “workforce displacement” from generative ai and the security of supply chains for gallium, neon and other exotic materials China once embargoed. Expect policy papers in 90-day sprints, each drafted in the open yet calibrated to favor the companies at the table.
The first deliverable is already penciled in: a national ai talent visa that lets startups poach PhDs without H-1B caps. Sacks previewed the idea on a podcast last month; now it has White House letterhead. The second is a federal “compute reserve” — essentially a sandbox of government-owned GPU clusters that any U.S. firm can rent at cost, provided it shares the training weights back to Washington. Think of it as a public utility for models too large for private clouds.
The price of admission
Participation is unpaid, but the return on lobbying is measurable. When Obama’s PCAST pushed precision-medicine data rules, Illumina’s stock tripled. Under Trump 1.0, council member Safra Catz saw Oracle’s federal bookings jump 24 % the year after she joined. This time the upside is bigger: the global ai hardware market is forecast to hit $474 billion by 2027, and the first regulatory carve-outs will hardwire advantages for incumbents.
Yet the invitation list omits the researchers who built the field. No academic society presidents, no Nobel laureates, no labor economists. The footnote explains that slots remain “rotational,” but the signal is clear: this is a CEO council disguised as a scientific body. Critics on the transition team argued the move “instrumentalizes expertise,” according to a memo leaked to Coastal Code. They lost the fight when Sacks reminded the president that DeepSeek, a Hangzhou startup, just matched OpenAI performance on a $6 million budget. Nationalism trumped purity.
By sunset the order was filed, the signatures dry. A president who rose on populist anger against coastal elites now entrusts the nation’s technological destiny to the three richest men in California. The next breakthroughs will be written in their image; the rest of the country gets to live with the bugs.