By executive order last month, Donald Trump launched his so-called “Genesis Mission.”
Described as a “historic national effort” to “invest in AI-enabled science to accelerate scientific advancement,” Trump claimed his mission would address key challenges to American energy dominance, innovation, and national security.
This mission, Trump boasted, would be a game-changer to science akin to putting a man on the moon or firing the first nuclear weapons. By building “an integrated AI platform” trained on “the world’s largest collection” of federal scientific data sets, he promised, the government could set off cascades of scientific breakthroughs.
Access to such a platform, Trump imagined, would supercharge top US labs, powering AI agents to do tasks like quickly test hypotheses and automate research workflows to speed up discoveries.
However, the mission crucially depends on strengthening collaboration between public, private, and academic sectors. And Trump’s order is concerningly vague on how those partnerships will be structured and funded at a time when many scientists have been sidelined due to a flurry of Trump orders earlier this year that eliminated their funding or removed them from their labs.
To critics, including scientists, policy experts, advocates, and historians, Trump’s order seems divorced from reality, given that he spent the past year attacking some of the very institutions the Genesis Mission would seem to depend on. Trump also seemed unclear about what can be achieved with AI and confused about how scientific progress is actually made, some critics suggested.
Among the critics was Arati Prabhakar, who served as the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under the Biden administration. Prabhakar told Ars that Trump’s crippling cuts to government science agencies, research grant funding freezes, and attacks on universities must be repaired or his mission will fail.
“After the Trump administration has inflicted so much damage to valuable datasets and publicly funded research, the new executive order is a Band-Aid on a giant gash,” Prabhakar said.