President-elect Donald Trump announced several new officials to lead his technology and science policy efforts, including some familiar faces from his first administration.
Michael Kratsios has been named as Trump’s choice for the new director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and assistant to the president for science and technology. He previously served as chief technology officer during the first Trump administration.
Meanwhile, Lynne Parker was named executive director of the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and advisor to the director of OSTP. Parker was previously assistant technical director and was the founding director of the National Office of Artificial Initiative.
In addition to the announced returns of Kratsios and Parker on Sunday, Trump also named Bo Hines executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, which will focus on crypto, and Sriram Krishnan senior policy advisor for AI at OSTP . Krishnan will focus on U.S. leadership in AI and coordinating AI policy across government, including working with PCAST.
According to the announcement, the four will work with David Sacks, a venture capitalist and former CEO of enterprise social media company Yammer, who Trump previously selected as AI and crypto czar. On AI in particular, Trump should repeal and replace President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, likely scaling back some of the current administration’s approach.
Kratsios, whose appointment must be confirmed by the Senate, is currently director general of Evolving AIa technology company and defense contractor focused on providing training data for AI models. Prior to that, he served as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering at the Department of Defense.
During his tenure as CTO, Kratsios advised Trump on various technology issues and was also a leader in issuing the administration’s own executive order on AI (EO 13960) in December 2020. This order put in place guardrails for the use of trusted AI in government and established the process by which agencies publicly report their AI use cases, on which Biden’s approach relied on.
Parker, who led the interagency committee that drafted this executive order, told FedScoop in September 2023 that Biden’s Office of Management and Budget would benefit from improve quality use case inventories, as accounting could help the office create guidance for the government. The Biden administration, for its part, has expanded these disclosures for 2024 and recently released a consolidated inventory that shows over 1,700 uses in federal government agencies.
Parker, associate vice chancellor emeritus at the University of Tennessee and founding director of the university’s AI Tennessee Initiative, said the original intent of these disclosures was to improve public transparency, help agencies to see what other members of government are using and to inform policy directions. on the responsible use of AI.