Trump remembers to appoint science panel, fills it mostly with tech bros

Summary

Donald Trump has named the first members of his President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), largely comprising Trump allies in the tech industry and one actual scientist. PCAST is an advisory council reporting directly to the president, and has existed in its current form since President Bush in 1990. It has been re-chartered by each incoming administration since. The latest PCAST was established by an executive order in January 2025, with two co-chairs: Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (APST) Michael Kratsios, and Special Advisor for AI and Crypto David Sacks. Trump is only now filling the rest of the board out, and has named 13 members so far, instead of the 24 it typically comprises. Many of these lucky 13 are tech industry executives who were quick to demonstrate their allegiance to the president following his inauguration last year, such as Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison, who has had a longtime friendship with Trump. Other familiar tech industry names include Michael Dell, Nvidia's rockstar CEO and AI proponent Jensen Huang, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and pontificating venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who co-founded browser pioneer Netscape. Two of the PCAST ensemble are women: Oracle executive vice chair Safra Catz and AMD president and CEO Lisa Su. Other more unusual choices include Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and South African-American tech billionaire investor David Friedberg, who is a cohost of the popular bro-tech podcast All In alongside Sacks. Bob Mumgaard is co-founder and CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a firm aiming to develop nuclear fusion, while Jacob DeWitte is co-founder and CEO of nuclear microreactor startup Oklo. Just one PCAST member is an academic: John Martinis, professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who led a team to develop a quantum computer at Google's Quantum AI Lab. This is in contr...