President Donald Trump’s pick for director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios, holds just a bachelor’s degree in political science, but his extensive background in Artificial Intelligence makes him an attractive appointment amid the United States’ struggle with China over gaining AI supremacy.
Earlier this week, Wall Street tech advisers were sent into a panic upon the release of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company. The company’s introduction, deemed to be far more cost-efficient than U.S. company AI models, led to Nvidia, which develops chips that power AI, to see its stock drop by 17% as of 2 p.m. Tuesday.
Trump’s appointment of Kratsios came last week, just before DeepSeek’s introduction, and it signals that national science policy will be centered more on advancing AI technology.
In 2017, Kratsios was appointed to serve in Trump’s first administration as assistant technology director, where he focused on policy initiatives such as AI, drones, cybersecurity, and quantum computing. Prior to serving in the Trump administration, Kratsios worked as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley for an investment fund run by Peter Thiel, a major Trump donor who advised Trump on technology issues.
In a 2019 Op-ed for Wired, Kratsios said that AI should be a high priority.
“We must invest in the industries of the future—and few industries are more important than AI,” Kratsios wrote. “If we do, we can create autonomous cars, industrial robots, algorithms for disease diagnosis, and more. However, we must act now to ensure this innovation generates excitement rather than uncertainty.”
A month later, Trump picked Kratsios to be his nation’s chief technology officer — a post created by the Obama Administration and umbrellaed under the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, home of the president’s science adviser.
In July 2020, Kratsios was appointed to be the acting under secretary of defense for research and engineering. In this position, he oversaw the Space Development Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. His work in this position garnered him to receive the Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest award given by the Department of Defense to private citizens or noncareer federal employees.
Kratsios’s appointment has garnered mixed results, with fears that climate and health issues will now be put on the back burner as AI development becomes the Trump administration’s top priority.
“This is an utter disaster,” Michael S. Lubell, a professor of physics at the City College of New York and former spokesman for the American Physical Society, told the New York Times. “Climate science is dead. God knows what’s going to happen to biomedicine. This marks the beginning of the decline of the golden age of American science.”
However, Clinton administration science advisor Neal F. Lane, who was previously critical of Kratisios’s appointment to the Trump administration, has since changed his tune on Kratsios.
“Technology is a much higher priority for everybody in the White House than in years past,” Lane told the outlet. Lane also said that Kratisios has an extensive background in management and scientific policy, for “he can point to experience that could be more important than a Ph.D.”
In Trump’s first administration, it took him nearly two years to appoint Kelvin Droegemeier, a meteorologist with a Ph.D. in atmospheric science, as national science adviser. Droegemeier, who served on the National Science Board between 2004 and 2016, which advises Congress and the president, falls in line with the standard pedigree of past science advisors.
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Droegemeier spoke very highly of Kratsios, joking that he wanted to get a degree in political science after getting to know Kratsios.
“He has a really good vision for things and a sense of what needs to be done,” Droegemeir said. “He looks through a geopolitical lens.”
