{"id":894389,"date":"2026-03-26T03:11:53","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T08:11:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/26\/trump-staffs-science-and-technology-panel-with-non-scientists\/"},"modified":"2026-03-26T03:11:53","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T08:11:53","slug":"trump-staffs-science-and-technology-panel-with-non-scientists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/26\/trump-staffs-science-and-technology-panel-with-non-scientists\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump staffs science and technology panel with non-scientists"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

PCAST, the President\u2019s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, is generally not a high-profile group. It tends to be noticed when things go wrong, such as when the PCAST head named by Biden had to resign<\/a> due to abusive behavior. Biden, who was generally supportive of science, didn\u2019t even name the members of PCAST until eight months after his inauguration. So it\u2019s no surprise that an administration that\u2019s been hostile to science took even longer to staff its version of the group.<\/p>\n

The list of appointees was finally released on Wednesday<\/a>, and it\u2019s notable for its almost complete absence of scientists. There are still nine unfilled vacancies on the council, so it\u2019s possible more scientists will be named later. But for now, PCAST is heavily tilted toward extremely wealthy technology figures.<\/p>\n

These include investor Marc Andreessen, Google\u2019s Sergey Brin, Michael Dell of Dell, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, Lisa Su of AMD, and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta. But many of the lesser known names have similar backgrounds. Previously named chairs of PCAST are investor David Sacks and a former investment company CFO and current head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, John Kratsios. Of the new appointees, Safra Catz also comes from Oracle, Fred Ehrsam co-founded Coinbase, and David Friedberg is another investor.<\/p>\n

A few of the new members actually have some background in academic research. Both Jacob DeWitte and Bob Mumgaard got PhDs from MIT before founding nuclear companies: DeWitte is the CEO of the small modular nuclear startup Oklo, and Mumgaard is the CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Su has a PhD as well, although she\u2019s been in executive positions for many years. John Martinis is a Nobel Prize winner for his work on quantum physics; he played a critical role in the development of Google\u2019s quantum computing efforts and has since been involved in two additional quantum computing startups.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n John Timmer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PCAST, the President\u2019s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, is generally not a high-profile group. It tends to be noticed when things go wrong, such as when the PCAST head named by Biden had to resign due to abusive behavior. Biden, who was generally supportive of science, didn\u2019t even name the members of PCAST<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":894390,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[116350,46,4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-894389","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-staffs","8":"category-technology","9":"category-trump"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=894389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/894390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=894389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=894389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=894389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}