White House Announces PCAST Members

President Donald Trump announced yesterday the first 13 members of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, almost all of whom are current or former CEOs from major tech companies.

PCAST convenes eminent volunteer experts from outside the federal government to advise the White House on matters relating to science and technology policy.

Previous PCAST cohorts included a mix of university researchers and experts from major companies. The experts drawn from private industry were usually high-ranking technical or scientific leaders within those companies, such as chief technology officers and heads of research divisions, rather than CEOs.

For example, in the first Trump administration, eight of the 15 people who served on PCAST were university scientists. The remaining members all came from private industry, but only two of them were CEOs. The other five were heads of research or chief technology officers.

A similar dynamic was consistent across the Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations.

The latest membership appears to mark a striking departure, although the White House announcement noted that PCAST can have up to 24 members and that more members will be appointed “in the near future.”

At present, the council includes only one university scientist, UC Santa Barbara physicist John Martinis. The rest of the members are:

• Marc Andreessen, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital company
• Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, a social media company
• Sergey Brin, former president of Alphabet, the parent company of Google
• Safra Catz, vice chair and former CEO of Oracle, a technology company
• Larry Ellison, executive chairman of Oracle and a major backer of his son David Ellison’s media conglomerate
• Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies, a computer technology company
• Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, a semiconductor company
• Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, a semiconductor company
• Jacob DeWitte, CEO of Oklo, an advanced nuclear power company
• Bob Mumgaard, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a fusion energy start-up
• David Friedberg, former CEO of The Climate Corporation, an agri-tech company that is now part of Monsanto
• Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and CEO of a neurotechnology start-up

The only returning members of PCAST are Su and Dell, who served in the council during the Biden and Bush administrations, respectively.

The announcement also confirmed that White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks and Office of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios will be the co-chairs of PCAST, roles that were previewed in Trump’s order restarting the council early last year.

In a post highlighting the new members, Kratsios said, “PCAST will 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.”

In his own post, Sacks emphasized that the council will “make policy recommendations to ensure that America leads—and wins—in artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies.”

At present, the latest cohort of PCAST members appears to be more narrowly focused on technology development than in previous years. In comparison, the Biden White House’s announcement of its PCAST membership in 2021 emphasized its members’ expertise in “astrophysics and agriculture, biochemistry and computer engineering, ecology and entrepreneurship, immunology and nanotechnology, neuroscience and national security, social science and cybersecurity.”