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Why Trump Picked a Science Advisor, Michael Kratsios, Who Isn’t a Scientist

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  • Post last modified:February 3, 2025

President Trump last week formally nominated Michael Kratsios, a member of the first Trump administration with no degrees in science or engineering, to be his science adviser.

Science policy experts say that Mr. Kratsios’ wide experience in private and public technology policy and management is what makes him an attractive candidate. His expertise includes a central role in early federal efforts to speed the rise of artificial intelligence and to compete with China in its development. He will join a cohort of White House advisers on the fraught topic.

Even so, Mr. Trump’s selection marks a clear break from a long tradition in which presidential science advisers bore top degrees and deep science roots. The appointment of Mr. Kratsios has led other experts to warn of budget cuts to the health and physical sciences.

“This is an utter disaster,” said Michael S. Lubell, a professor of physics at the City College of New York and former spokesman for the American Physical Society, the world’s largest group of physicists. “Climate science is dead. God knows what’s going to happen to biomedicine. This marks the beginning of the decline of the golden age of American science.”

Neal F. Lane, a physicist who served as President Bill Clinton’s science adviser, said the nomination of Mr. Kratsios represented a profound shift. “The first Trump administration had a science adviser with extraordinary credentials,” he said.

Virtually all of the nation’s previous science advisers had doctorates, often from elite universities with reputations for producing Nobel laureates.

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