Meet the official quietly leading Trump's science and tech push
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Darío Gil on April 17. Photo: Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Energy Department undersecretary Darío Gil is taking a long-term view of science and technology.
Why it matters: While President Trump's second term has been marked by high-drama fights over AI policy, Gil's been working behind the scenes to strengthen U.S. competitiveness in science and tech.
The big picture: A familiar pattern is unfolding in AI policy.
- An AI lab comes out with a frighteningly powerful model, sending officials scrambling, and states advance AI laws — which spark congressional efforts to get a federal standard in place.
- Gil is trying to spearhead a different approach where the federal government plays a larger role in shaping emerging technologies before crises emerge or competitors like China gain an advantage.
- "The posture that the U.S. government should have towards AI is much more proactive," Gil, who spent decades leading IBM's research team before joining the administration, told Axios.
Zoom in: Gil has been at the forefront of the Genesis Mission, an effort to boost science and technology research and development and to encourage government information sharing with industry, academia and other scientific institutions.
- The program reached a major milestone this week, when the Energy Department and Japan struck a $1 billion information sharing partnership, expanding Genesis internationally.
- Gil said that the program has received a record number of submissions from universities and scientific institutions looking to participate, with over 5,000 unique proposals coming in.
- "It is the record in the history of the Department of Energy, like two and a half times the next largest solicitation," Gil said.
For his efforts to stand the test of time and future political headwinds, two key things need to happen, Gil said.
- One, Congress has to appropriate more money to science R&D. And two, lawmakers need to pass a bipartisan law codifying the Genesis Mission.
- "I'm having very active discussions again in this philosophy in a bipartisan manner, talking to everybody who's interested… both in the House and the Senate."
Friction point: Gil's ambitions will collide with a major challenge: funding.
- Critics say that the administration's research goals are difficult to reconcile with cuts to federal science agencies.
- The Center for Strategic and International Studies' Navin Girishankar said that the goal of strengthening U.S. science leadership is hard to square "without a complete turnaround or a significant shift in the four decade long reduction in public spend on R&D."
Zoom out: Gil highlighted fusion energy and quantum computing as two of the scientific breakthroughs that excite him the most.
- Gil said that fusion is one of the most "inspirational" problems to solve that would be "civilizational" in terms of its impact: "It's essentially building a little star on Earth."
- Gil also said he wants to see a fault-tolerant quantum computer that would operate correctly in the presence of errors in the next few years.
What we're watching: The department expects to announce its first Genesis awardees this summer, Gil said, with hundreds of teams potentially participating in the program's first cohort.
