Why I’m Applauding a Trump Executive Order

Trump’s AI executive order is flawed and self-serving. It’s better than anything we’ve got.

Last week, the Trump Administration issued an executive order launching the “Genesis Mission.” In brief, it kicks off a national effort led by the Department of Energy to coordinate AI-driven scientific research across fields including advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear fission and fusion energy, quantum information science, and semiconductors and microelectronics.

Like any order from the Trump Administration, it could be highly consequential or it could amount to nothing. But, it is undeniably serious as a document: this order does not merely state a vague aspiration, but gets into goals, the specific authorities of various actors for meeting those goals, timelines, regular reporting, etc. Someone wrote this order intending to execute what’s in it. If they do—and that is not certain at all—it could change the course of American scientific progress, innovation, and industry for a generation.

If you haven’t heard of it, that’s not surprising. It got light coverage in the technology press, but didn’t get anywhere near the front page of major news outlets. The New York Times gave it 350 words the day it was released. By contrast, the paper gave about 1,500 recently to the history of the theremin.

Despite that baffling indifference, this executive order is worth knowing about and worth discussing. I’m going to talk about it from three angles here:

1. My reactions to what’s in it

2. Putting it in context of the Trump Administration

3. Putting it in context of this broader political moment

1. What’s in it

I’m not going to go deep on the substance here, i.e., who’s supposed to do what by when, because I’m skeptical that anything like this ever gets enacted the way it’s laid out; as they say, man plans and God laughs. The specificity shows that they’re serious, not what’s really going to happen. But there is plenty to say about the general idea here: to coordinate government resources so scientists can use AI to make progress on major problems.

In short: this is a good idea and I want the American government to do this. We had a lot of political debates in law school, and a friend used to say that he could only take arguments on behalf of a candidate seriously if the speaker could say at least one major negative thing alongside the positives. In that spirit, I’ll say that while I believe the Trump Administration is broadly a threat to American strength and rule of law, this order is a move in the right direction.

First, it’s focused on the right things. So much of the public conversation around AI today is about consumer use cases, and particularly chatbots and image generators. Those are some of the least interesting applications of AI, and I wouldn’t mind seeing them regulated. The real potential is in things that are not in plain sight to the public: scientific research and invention, national security, and every kind of mundane process optimization imaginable. Those are the areas where we can accelerate progress in discovery while increasing efficiency and thereby our economic capacity. As I’ve said during this campaign, we need discovery and efficiency to solve major problems facing humanity and to create the growth that can pay for better jobs and better care for all Americans, and AI will be central to that. This order focuses attention on those areas, and the steps it proposes—e.g., coordinating and securing data, securing and expanding compute capacity—could make a real difference.

Second, it’s ambitious and optimistic. Following the administration’s previous executive order, it positions AI as a critical race for the United States and for the whole planet, and sets sights high for what we should accomplish and how quickly, and that’s right. It does not address the risks of AI, from user safety to job loss to environmental devastation, and that is a glaring hole. I take those problems very seriously and have worked on trying to fix them. But, we can’t choose between speed and responsibility; we have to have both. We should fight to address the risks, but not by dismissing progress.

Third, it sees a critical role for government in making that progress. For fifty years or more, we’ve been suffering a strain of politics that thinks government is inherently intrusive and ineffective. That’s been a self-fulfilling view as politicians—particularly Republicans, and most of all this administration—show their contempt for government by appointing the least capable people they can find. But government always has a role to play in any major national endeavor. It is “simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together,” and it’s up to us to recognize that and commit to doing those things well.

If anything, the role the order imagines for government may go too far. Government can do so much to drive innovation: set rules that facilitate progress, make international agreements that open markets, invest in ideas before the returns are clear enough to draw in private investors, convene the right people, offer challenges and prizes to direct research, and more. But, I’d still like to leave as much decision-making as possible to academic freedom and free markets. Some decisions are best made centrally, and some are best made by distributed decision-makers, and the order looks like it’s centralizing too much. The order compares itself to the Manhattan Project, but that was a project with a specific goal on a specific timeline, and its one intended user was the United States government. AI-driven science will spread across every field for generations, with as many users and use cases as we can imagine, and over-centralizing decision-making is a recipe for bad decisions, missed opportunities, and stagnation.

But that doesn’t change my overall sense that this is a good direction for the federal government. Whether it’s a good direction for this administration specifically and why they’re doing it is where I’ll go next.

2. Genesis in the context of the Trump Administration

As I said, it’s unusual for me to find myself broadly agreeing with a Trump executive order, but it’s a reminder that the President and his movement are not monolithic. Trump is a coalition builder, and MAGA is cobbled together from nationalists, tech bros, MAHA, and more. The one thing they have in common is that they saw in Trump a transactional politician with few strong convictions. You can spend years trying to convince Democrats to see things your way, or you can throw a fundraiser for Trump and be in the Oval Office by Presidents Day.

Coalition-building helps win elections, but Trump’s mercenary way of doing it leads to absurd inconsistencies. The Genesis Mission comes from the tech bros in the administration, and sets an ambition of leading in AI-driven science at the same time that the administration is attacking American universities, canceling critical scientific research, canceling ongoing clean-energy projects, driving away international students and high-skilled immigrants, shaking down American companies for money, and putting up tariffs that will choke American industry and innovation, to name only a few of its self-defeating actions. Together, those actions will do more to hold American progress back than this executive order can ever do to accelerate it.

Moreover, Trump’s willingness to let his donors into the administration with broad powers and few safeguards means we have to be skeptical of the motivations behind the order. It may have been strange a few paragraphs above to see a Democrat arguing that a Republican administration should leave more authority to the market, but this is a different kind of administration. Competitive markets are democratic in the sense that they spread out authority and decision-making, but the companies in those markets are typically hierarchical and anything but democratic. Executives used to issuing orders historically hate government involvement that constrains what they can do, but that changes if they can simply take over the government and run it like one of their holdings. Even in the best case, they’ll neglect safety concerns and make bad decisions, because centralized decision-making is brittle. People will get hurt. In the worst and sadly most likely case, the Genesis Mission will also become yet another vehicle for corruption, as research funding and contracts are steered to administration insiders.

I like the ambition in the order. I wish it came from people I could trust.

3. Genesis in broader context

We should have better options. We shouldn’t have to look to the Trump Administration and their unprincipled, crony-capitalism version of technology investment to find a vision for the future. Democrats should be the party of progress, and driving forward discovery and invention while spreading their benefits has always—always—been essential to progress. But Democrats have lost interest. Take a look at the Democratic Party’s website right now, under “Where We Stand,” and in November 2025 you will find a PDF of the 2024 party platform full of promises of what President Biden will do in his second term. Nearly every mention of technology is about how to mitigate its risks and hold technology companies accountable. Or you can take a look at the party’s issues page, which lists 17 issues, none of which relates to science, technology, or innovation—in a year when AI investment dominates the economy and is set to define the future for at least a generation.

I don’t buy the argument from prominent tech investors and executives that Democrats are hostile to progress. I’m a Democrat, most of the people I worked with in the tech industry were Democrats (I think), and voters I’ve talked to during this campaign have overwhelmingly been excited to hear from a candidate who believes technology and social progress can and must go hand-in-hand. But it would be hard to argue that Democratic politicians are any better than indifferent. Aside from the evidence above, I’m the only candidate in my enormous congressional field talking about innovation. Almost nobody in Congress has experience with technology today, and still in 2026 we could well elect a new crop of Democrats with nothing to say about the most important technology of our lifetime.

If we aren’t serious about shaping the future we want, we leave it to others—to MAGA—to shape it for us. So I’m left applauding this executive order, even when it gets some things wrong, even when I don’t trust its authors, because it’s better than the nothing that Democrats are offering.

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