Trump fills science-tech panel with tech bros

Donald Trump has named the first members of his President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), largely comprising Trump allies in the tech industry and one actual scientist. PCAST is an advisory council reporting directly to the president, and has existed in its current form since President Bush in 1990. It has been re-chartered by each incoming administration since. The latest PCAST was established by an executive order in January 2025, with two co-chairs: Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (APST) Michael Kratsios, and Special Advisor for AI and Crypto David Sacks. Trump is only now filling the rest of the board out, and has named 13 members so far, instead of the 24 it typically comprises. Many of these lucky 13 are tech industry executives who were quick to demonstrate their allegiance to the president following his inauguration last year, such as Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison, who has had a longtime friendship with Trump. Other familiar tech industry names include Michael Dell, Nvidia's rockstar CEO and AI proponent Jensen Huang, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and pontificating venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who co-founded browser pioneer Netscape. Two of the PCAST ensemble are women: Oracle executive vice chair Safra Catz and AMD president and CEO Lisa Su. Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government Trump's Genesis Mission gets its first set of 26 sure-to-succeed objectives Next-gen nuclear reactors safe enough to skip full environmental reviews, says Trump admin Trump says he got a deal for rare earths in Greenland, but they won't come easy Other more unusual choices include Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and South African-American tech billionaire investor David Friedberg, who is a cohost of the popular bro-tech podcast All In alongside Sacks. Bob Mumgaard is co-founder and CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a firm aiming to develop nuclear fusion, while Jacob DeWitte is co-founder and CEO of nuclear microreactor startup Oklo. Just one PCAST member is an academic: John Martinis, professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who led a team to develop a quantum computer at Google's Quantum AI Lab. This is in contrast to previous incarnations of the advisory panel, which tended to be full of academic experts in various fields of science and technology. According to Trump's executive order, the current PCAST will terminate two years from the date the order was issued, which means it has just ten months left, unless extended by the president. Perhaps more worrying is Trump's assertion in his executive order that the pursuit of truth in science is increasingly under threat. "Today, across science, medicine, and technology, ideological dogmas have surfaced that elevate group identity above individual achievement, enforce conformity at the expense of innovative ideas, and inject politics into the heart of the scientific method," it says. We wonder if President Trump has ever heard of projection. ® × Narrower topics Astronomy Biotech Climate Change Contact Tracing CRISPR Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act DOGE Federal Aviation Administration Fusion Power GPS Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 IRS Laser Meteorology NASA National Highway Traffic Safety Administration National Institute of Standards and Technology National Labor Relations Board NCSAM Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory Physics Pi Renewables Superconductor Telecommunications Act of 1996 United States Department of Defense United States Department of Justice US Securities and Exchange Commission