The Genesis Mission: Trump Launches a National AI-for-Science Drive
President Donald J. Trump has signed an Executive Order launching The Genesis Mission, a national initiative to speed scientific discovery by applying advanced AI to federal research. The plan frames this effort as a bold, government-led mobilization modeled on the spirit of the Apollo Program. Its goal is practical: turn data and computing power into faster, repeatable breakthroughs across key industries.
The Genesis Mission centers on integrating the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, their supercomputers, and federal datasets into a coordinated AI platform. That platform is described as a closed-loop system to automate experiment design, speed simulations, and build predictive models that can shorten development cycles. The approach treats computing and data as core infrastructure for American scientific competitiveness.
The Executive Order assigns the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology to coordinate this work across agencies. That direction explicitly includes collaboration with major research agencies to connect datasets spanning energy, health, and manufacturing. The aim is to align federal R&D resources so results move from lab to application faster and at lower cost.
Michael Kratsios has been named to lead the effort inside the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Before joining the administration, Kratsios worked in finance and tech with roles at Barclays, Lyford Group, and as chief financial officer at Clarium Capital Management. He later became a principal at Thiel Capital, served as chief of staff to Peter Thiel, and was a managing director at Scale AI, a private company in the AI training market valued between $15-30 billion.
From 2020 to early 2021, Kratsios served as Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, effectively the Pentagon’s chief technology officer. In that role he oversaw research, engineering, and prototyping across the Department of Defense, including DARPA, the Missile Defense Agency, the Defense Innovation Unit, the Space Development Agency, and the DOD labs. Those responsibilities exposed him to the full range of defense science and high-end engineering projects.
Kratsios holds a Bachelor of Arts in politics from Princeton University and spent time as a visiting scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He has appeared on lists and in forums such as Fortune’s “40 Under 40” and the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders, and received the U.S. Defense Department’s Distinguished Public Service Medal. Those recognitions track a career that has moved between private-sector AI work and public-sector technology leadership.
The Genesis Mission directs the Department of Energy to weave its supercomputers and datasets into a unified research pipeline under federal coordination. Integrating computing, shared data, and AI tools is meant to let agencies automate routine tasks, run far larger simulation campaigns, and generate models to guide experiments. That could reduce the time and expense of turning promising ideas into working technologies.
The order also charges coordination with agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Institutes of Health to align datasets and standards. The practical value is in making cross-domain data usable for AI-driven discovery across medicine, materials science, and energy systems. A centralized effort aims to avoid duplicated infrastructure and accelerate national priorities.
“President Trump is taking a revolutionary approach to scientific research, harnessing the power of AI to propel America into the Golden Age of Innovation. The Genesis Mission connects world-class scientific data with the most advanced American AI to unlock breakthroughs in medicine, energy, materials science, and beyond,” said Michael Kratsios, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House of Science and Technology Policy.