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Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg (left) has been appointed to US President Donald Trump’s science and technology advisory council. Credit: Will Oliver/EPA/Bloomberg through Getty
US President Donald Trump has appointed 13 folks to his panel of science advisers — and all however one is a number one technology government. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) now features a single college researcher and a minimum of 9 billionaires.
Among the new members are Mark Zuckerberg, the chief government of Meta, the mother or father firm of Facebook; Larry Ellison, the chief chairman of software program big Oracle; and Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. There are additionally chief executives of tech {hardware} firms — Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, Lisa Su of Advanced Microdevices and Michael Dell of Dell Technologies. The company chiefs have a mixed wealth in extra of US$900 billion.
Three of the chief executives have earned PhDs from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. Su’s diploma is in electrical engineering. Jacob DeWitte and Bob Mumgaard, who each head nuclear-energy start-up corporations, have levels in nuclear engineering and utilized plasma physics, respectively.
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The sole academic researcher is John Martinis, a quantum physicist on the University of California, Santa Barbara, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics last year for observations of macroscopic quantum phenomena. “I am honoured to be on the committee,” Martinis instructed Nature.
Laura Greene, a physicist at Florida State University in Tallahassee and a member of PCAST in the course of the administration of president Joseph Biden, praised Martinis and Su as being “outstanding, both in science and technology”.
But others are vital of the committee’s make-up. “Not a single biologist and only one university researcher on PCAST,” Vaughan Cooper, an evolutionary biologist on the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, stated in a post on Bluesky. “This leaves the country unbelievably ill prepared for an age of biotechnology, a race we are already beginning to lose.”
The stability may but change: below the phrases of a presidential order Trump issued in 2025, he may appoint as many as 11 extra members to the committee, says Kenny Evans at Rice University in Houston, Texas, who’s a specialist in science coverage and co-founder of the White House Scientists Archive.
The White House didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Gather the council
PCAST makes science-policy suggestions to the White House on matters equivalent to improving nutrition science and bolstering the scientific workforce. It additionally evaluations cross-agency programmes which can be already below manner, such because the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development initiative. Most of PCAST’s work is finished by subcommittees, and its reviews are largely ready by workers on the Science and Technology Policy Institute, a federally funded analysis and growth centre in Washington DC.
During Trump’s first time period, from 2017 to 2021, PCAST had 13 members excluding the chair — 7 academic scientists and 6 folks from trade. Under Biden, whose time period ran from 2021 to 2025, it had 28 members (not counting chairs), 19 of whom had been academic researchers, with the remaining 9 from trade and the federal government. Aside from the PCASTs appointed by Trump, each PCAST since 2001 has had a minimum of 10 members who had been academic researchers.
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The new PCAST members’ backgrounds aren’t any shock, says Evans. “Historically, PCAST’s membership reflects the president’s science and tech priorities,” he says. “This group is about what you would expect from the Trump administration — a handful of billionaires and tech executives with expertise narrowly focused on AI, quantum and nuclear fusion.”
Artificial intelligence and quantum info are the primary and second entries on the Trump administration’s list of research and development priorities. The administration goals to quadruple US industrial nuclear power by 2050, and a merger was introduced in December between nuclear-fusion firm TAE Technologies and a agency co-owned by Trump.
The committee can be co-chaired by Trump’s AI czar, enterprise capitalist David Sacks, and the director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios. On the social-media platform X, Kratsios introduced the new council, saying that “PCAST unites America’s brightest minds to advise the President on the most pressing national issues in science and technology” and that it’ll “focus on the opportunities and challenges that emerging technologies present to the American worker and how to best ensure the U.S. continues to lead in the Golden Age of Innovation.”