Culture and Society
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Fourteen months into his presidency, the White House has now announced Donald Trump’s picks for the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). All but one of them are technology executives, and at least nine of them are billionaires.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.PCAST was instituted in 1933 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to advise on matters of science and technology. Since 2001, every single PCAST, except for the one appointed by Trump’s first term, has had at least 10 members who were academic researchers. Biden’s Council had 28 members, 19 of whom were academics.
The White House's announcement, made on March 25, suggests that more people might be added to the panel, but currently, there is only one academic in PCAST. It is John Martinis, a quantum physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of macroscopic quantum phenomena in 2025. He told Nature: “I am honoured to be on the committee.”
Everyone else in PCAST comes from industry and includes supporters and donors to the Trump presidential campaign. These are their names, professions, and estimated net worth (according to data from Forbes, as of March 30):
- Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and former software engineer (net worth: $1.9 billion)
- Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google (net worth: $237 billion)
- Safra Catz, executive vice chair and former CEO of Oracle (net worth: $2.9 billion)
- Larry Ellison, cofounder and CTO of Oracle (net worth: $180.5 billion)
- Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies (net worth: $144.1 billion)
- Jacob DeWitte, cofounder of nuclear fission startup Oklo Inc. (net worth: unknown)
- Fred Ehrsam, cofounder of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (net worth: $2.3 billion)
- David Friedberg, entrepreneur and investor (net worth: unknown)
- Jensen Huang, founder, president, and CEO of Nvidia (net worth: $144.9 billion)
- Bob Mumgaard, cofounder and CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (net worth: unknown)
- Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (net worth: $1.4 billion)
- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (net worth: $185.1 billion)
The estimated net worth of the board based on available data is over $900 billion. That is more than the gross domestic product (GDP) of countries like Belgium, and just behind Taiwan and Switzerland, according to International Monetary Fund data.
The panel will be co-chaired by White House tech advisor Michael Kratsios and Trump’s artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency czar David Sacks. The list and chairs suggest that PCAST will be focused specifically on AI, crypto, and quantum information. While those subjects are important from both political and geopolitical perspectives, there are plenty of scientific areas, from material science to aeronautics, and climate to biotechnology, that would warrant the same interest.
The value that the Trump administration places on science and scientific institutions has been demonstrable. Major cuts were pushed at research centers and agencies. A series of executive orders also curtailed the freedom of scientific institutions, including making false assertions on the impact of climate change and incorrectly defining sex as binary. Those orders have been described as illegal and violating the Constitution.
The administration has also pushed vaccine misinformation and promoted the “lab leak hypothesis” of COVID-19 as fact without definitive supporting evidence. All of this prompted over 1,900 US scientists and engineers to write an open letter to the American public to stress the danger that this poses to the country.
[H/T: Nature]
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