Why Trump Picked a Science Adviser Who Isn’t a Scientist
The New York Times
Michael Kratsios, who served in the White House and Defense Department in the first Trump administration, is a policy specialist on artificial intelligence.
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.
That official was Kelvin Droegemeier, a meteorologist who received his Ph.D. in atmospheric science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. For almost a decade, up to his White House appointment, Dr. Droegemeier served as vice president for research at the University of Oklahoma, a pioneering center in the development of weather forecasting. He also served from 2004 to 2016 on the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation and gives independent advice to Congress and the president.
