Trump’s $293 Million Bet to Supercharge Science Faces Spending Headwinds

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has framed its push to boost scientific discovery through greater use of artificial intelligence tools, known as the Genesis Mission, as part of a broader competition with China over technological advancement. But the effort is facing hurdles that could undermine its goals, as agencies leading AI contend with significant budget cuts.

Speaking at an April 8 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) event, Darío Gil, the Trump administration official leading the Genesis Mission, cast the initiative in explicitly competitive terms, warning that the United States cannot afford to fall behind China in the field of AI-enabled scientific discovery.

To support that effort, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced in March that it will make $293 million to “advance the Genesis Mission’s efforts to tackle the nation’s most complex science and technology challenges.” The program invites teams from national laboratories, universities and private industry to apply AI to more than 20 national challenges. Those include advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, nuclear energy and quantum information science.

Gil, also the Under Secretary for Science at the Department of Energy, said at the CSIS event that while Congress had provided “fantastic support” for the project, more would be needed to keep the US ahead of China.

“What is the rate at which this revolution is happening and the impact it is going to have? What is the pace-setting aspect of our strategic competitors and adversaries outside, namely China, on this domain?” said Gil.Gil acknowledged that Congress, not the executive branch, ultimately holds the purse strings for the mission's long-term success, including through its upcoming review of the Trump administration’s funding request for the agency for next year. He said he has been particularly vocal about a gap in the US government's AI supercomputing capacity.

“The only thing we don't have a luxury on is time,” Gil said.

One former official said efforts to boost scientific development could be stymied by spending reductions elsewhere in the federal government.

Asad Ramzanali, who served as chief of staff for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden administration, said the Genesis Mission should be viewed as part of a larger federal research portfolio, not as a substitute for the work of agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Ramzanali noted that NSF has funded research for decades that helped the development of what is now called AI, and that the new Genesis serves as a useful but incomplete follow-up.

“Announcing $300 million for these challenges is a good thing to do, and I hope it spurs all types of innovation, but I worry that this comes in the context of the president’s budget also proposing a 55% cut to the National Science Foundation,” said Ramzanali, now the director of AI and technology policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator.

For context, the NSF was allocated about $8.8 billion in the fiscal 2025 and 2026 budgets, but the President’s budget request for 2027 seeks just $4.0 billion.

Ramzanali underscored that DOE and NSF funding serve fundamentally different roles in fueling scientific discovery. And he stressed that future AI advances may come not only from AI researchers, but also from biologists, mathematicians and cognitive scientists using AI in new ways.

“We actually have to do all of the above,” he said. “It’s not a competition. We should do each of those things.”

For decades, NSF has been the federal government’s central funder of basic science. In its fiscal year 2027 budget request, NSF says it has a “long and rich history” of supporting foundational and use-inspired AI research.

In a statement to Tech Policy Press, a representative for NSF said its work is complementary to that of DOE, and that both Genesis and the National AI Research Resource are both essential to US leadership in AI. The representative added that leaders at both agencies are coordinating efforts, including on education and workforce development initiatives.

There are some early signs that the broader spending cuts are slowing progress in the field.

Eric Yu, a generative multimodal AI research scholar at the University of North Carolina, said that their computer science department limited recruitment to three graduate research scholars starting in 2024 because of the lack of funding.

“Many professors, especially those who have a Chinese background, rely more on the National Science Foundation’s funding because it's on a more neutral term. So, the decrease in funding from the National Science Foundation is going to inevitably impact their research progress. Many of them didn’t even recruit new researchers last year,” Yu said.

Gil said Genesis is not just about grants. It also aims to train tens of thousands of scientists and engineers to use AI in research. Phase I awards for the program will range from $500,000 to $750,000. Phase II awards will range from $6 million to $15 million over three years. Applications are due April 28.

These competing dynamics, constrained funding in some areas and investment in others, feed into a broader debate over US-China competition.

George Washington University Assistant Professor of Political Science Jeffrey Ding argued that AI competition should be understood less as a sprint to one breakthrough than as a long-term race to spread the technology across the economy through skills, infrastructure and university-industry ties. In a recent research memo, he wrote that the decisive edge will go not simply to the country that builds the best frontier systems, but to the one that diffuses AI most effectively across research and production.

Gil said that while Congress will ultimately set how much federal investment goes into the initiative, the administration sees Genesis as part of a broader national effort to keep pace with strategic competitors.

“The opportunity for strategic surprise, the opportunity to do things that are beyond your ability to recover around that are really profound,” he said.