The Trump administration is committing $5 billion to harness artificial intelligence for breakthrough science, leveraging the government's vast computational power and datasets to attack problems from chronic disease to drug discovery and building materials.
Fifteen federal agencies will coordinate the effort, spanning Health and Human Services, Energy, Transportation, Defense, Interior, and others. Scientists participating will gain access to Department of Energy supercomputers, specialized datasets, and AI tools needed to run complex algorithms on longstanding scientific challenges.
Michael Kratsios, Trump's chief technology adviser, said the initiative pools resources across government domains that traditionally operate in silos. The federal government holds some of the world's largest datasets, including chemical records, mineral inventories, and patient health information, he noted. AI models trained on this data could identify patterns and generate predictions to answer questions that have eluded researchers.
The announcement comes as the administration signals a broader shift in how federal research gets funded. A White House report released Tuesday, authored by Kratsios, proposes moving money away from universities and toward individual scientists and AI-driven work. The report states that federal science support must be "politically accountable," reflecting the administration's push for greater control over research dollars during Trump's second term.
That push has already hit legal resistance. An appeals court panel ruled in January that the Trump administration cannot unilaterally cut federal grant funding from the National Institutes of Health to universities engaged in scientific and medical research.
Microsoft is backing the effort with a $40 million donation in AI computing credits over three years.
Author James Rodriguez: "This bet on AI for science is smart policy, but the power grab to starve universities and hand decisions to political appointees is a dangerous overreach that courts will likely block again."
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