The Great AI Sellout

Trump’s White House is handing our future to the highest bidder

By Jeff Nesbit

While the media was busy chasing the latest shiny object in the news cycle, the Trump administration opened two fronts in a war against artificial intelligence oversight. It’s a coordinated, two-pronged assault designed to strip the public of protection and hand the keys of the future to a select group of Silicon Valley donors with extraordinary access to the Oval Office.

And, it should go without saying, all of this is really dangerous.

The strategy is “all-in” deregulation, but it’s far more insidious than simple libertarian neglect. On one hand, the White House has launched “Genesis Mission,” a federal program that effectively privatizes public scientific data for corporate gain. On the other, the president signed an executive order attempting to muzzle states from protecting their own citizens.

The White House Facebook account announces the Genesis Mission.

Taken together, these moves represent a massive transfer of power and resources from the American people to the tech giants, with almost no scrutiny whatsoever.

Let’s start with the federal effort: the Genesis Mission. Announced with surprisingly little fanfare (and even less media interrogation) this initiative is being marketed with the loftiest of comparisons.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has tried to compare it to the Manhattan Project or the Apollo program. But unlike those historic government-led endeavors, which had clear finish lines and served the national interest, the Genesis Mission appears to be an open-ended giveaway to the private sector.

The executive order launching Genesis calls for building an integrated platform using proprietary federal scientific datasets to “train scientific foundation models.”

In plain English, the administration is taking decades of taxpayer-funded research—data on everything from biotechnology to advanced energy—and feeding it into the commercial models of Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and other private companies.

The mechanism for this transfer is a “public-private partnership” that reeks of the pay-to-play culture defining this presidency.

Much like when Donald Trump forced dozens of corporations to pony up cash for his hideous East Wing demolition and ballroom construction, the Genesis Mission is roping in dozens of corporations for a funding scheme that will receive little, if any, real scrutiny.

It’s a shakedown masquerading as innovation.

With David Sacks (a venture capitalist moonlighting as the administration’s “AI czar”) steering the AI ship for Trump, we’re witnessing a blending of government and industry that creates a minefield of conflicts of interest.

Sacks’ order calls for “coordinated funding opportunities,” a nebulous phrase that should set off alarm bells for any government ethics watchdog. It leaves a massive, open-ended question: Is the federal government regulating these AI companies, or is it functioning as their venture capital firm?

While the administration is busy cutting sweetheart AI tech firm deals in Washington, it’s simultaneously trying to burn down the guardrails in the fifty states.

On Thursday, Trump signed a separate executive order explicitly designed to block states from enforcing their own AI regulations. The order directs the attorney general to establish an “AI Litigation Task Force” to sue states that try to protect their citizens from deepfakes, algorithmic discrimination, or predatory data harvesting.

The audacity of this move is matched only by its likely illegality. The administration claims it wants a “single national framework” to avoid a patchwork of laws that might slow down innovation. It sounds reasonable in a soundbite, until you realize that “single national framework” is code for “no rules at all.”

Furthermore, Trump simply does not have the authority to do this. Under our system of federalism, states have the police power to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens unless Congress explicitly preempts them.

Congress has done no such thing. In fact, Congress has done the exact opposite. Just last July, the Senate voted nearly unanimously to remove a ten-year moratorium on state AI regulations from a domestic policy bill. Lawmakers also refused to add an AI moratorium to the National Defense Authorization Act, despite White House pressure.

Congress has decisively rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to jam through a ban on state regulation. Trump’s new executive order is an attempt to legislate from the Oval Office, overriding the expressed will of the legislative branch. Legal experts and consumer groups are already lining up to challenge the order, and it will almost certainly hit a brick wall in the courts.

But the administration knows this. The goal isn’t necessarily to win in court eventually; the goal is to create a chilling effect now. It wants to intimidate governors and attorneys general into silence while the AI industry solidifies its dominance.

The hypocrisy is staggering. The party that has spent decades championing “states’ rights” is now weaponizing the Department of Justice to crush state innovation the moment it inconveniences its Silicon Valley donors.

They are arguing that California, Florida, or Tennessee shouldn’t be allowed to stop a company from using AI to defraud seniors or exploit children because it might hurt America’s “competitiveness” with China.

It’s a false choice. We don’t need to choose between innovation and safety. We can have a thriving tech sector without turning our citizens into guinea pigs for untested algorithms.

By launching the Genesis Mission, Trump is effectively selling off our federal scientific heritage to private corporations. By signing the state-blocking executive order, he is trying to strip local voters of their voice.

We’re standing at a critical juncture in the development of artificial intelligence. The decisions made today will determine whether this technology serves the public good or merely the bottom lines of a few trillion-dollar companies.

Right now, the Trump White House has made its choice clear: It is all-in for Big Tech and Silicon Valley donors. The rest of us are on our own.

Jeff Nesbit was the public affairs chief for five Cabinet departments or agencies under four presidents.

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