Inside OSTP’s ‘promote’ and ‘protect’ science and tech strategy

White House leadership is approaching U.S. global competitiveness in science and technology breakthroughs through a “promote” and “protect” strategy, Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios said on Monday.

“Essentially, what we have to do as a country is pursue a two part strategy, one of promote and one of protect,” he said, speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, California.

Kratsios spotlit several policy items that are integral to the Trump administration’s push for U.S.-led tech dominance. To ensure the U.S. is leading in both the creation and adoption of critical technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum information sciences, nuclear energy and biotechnology, OSTP intends to use a “whole-of-government” approach.

“First and foremost, the president wants us to win on these key, critical and emerging technologies,” he said. 

In order to do so, the government is poised to promote the U.S. research and development landscape through continued federal funding to help accelerate scientific and fundamental breakthroughs in emerging tech areas. 

“The U.S. government spends about $150 [billion] to $170 billion a year on R&D,” he said. “We need to direct that and prioritize those dollars into the areas that are most important for [the] national security mission.”

Deregulation is also foundational policy. Kratsios said that removing regulations that act as “barriers to innovation” will help foster progress in the technology stack within the U.S. 

For the final element of OSTP’s “promote” effort, Kratsios said the widespread adoption of these tech solutions will both catalyze domestic efficiency and set an example internationally.

“We as a country need to be having our great industry at companies, academic institutions and everyday Americans using this technology,” he said. “But also, even more importantly, we need to have the rest of the world running on an AI stack that is ours, that’s American.”

Deploying these solutions within the federal government is also a critical step to promoting U.S. leadership in emerging tech and science realms. Kratsios said that accelerating adoption at a public- and private-sector level, potentially facilitated with the help of the deregulation policies, will help further drive U.S. innovation.

“Those breakthroughs are only really valuable if we actually adopt them and allow the American people to fully realize the benefits of those technologies,” Kratsios said. “But if no one is using it, if the Department of Defense isn't actually adopting and using it in its stack, if all of our great financial institutions aren't attempting to leverage those models to drive better services for their customers, it really doesn't matter.”

He added that the White House is contemplating the idea of creating an “ecosystem of trust” to facilitate adoption of new U.S. technologies. 

Along with championing U.S. technology breakthroughs worldwide, protecting them is equally important. Kratsios said that the latter half of OSTP’s promote-protect strategy will be safeguarding U.S. intellectual property from adversarial nations through a familiar vehicle: export controls. 

“We have to have simple and strict export controls,” Kratsios said. He explained that this involves threading the needle between making U.S.-based systems — such as semiconductor chips and frontier AI models — available to ally nations and prohibiting actors like China and Russia from building off of them. 

“If we as a country are ... creating these great breakthroughs in labs at universities and even in some of our great companies, we have to make sure that they're not being stolen by an adversary,” he said. 

The Trump administration is also continuing the government’s focus on protecting critical infrastructure, with Kratsios singling out China-backed digital actors as an ongoing threat.

President Donald Trump has made it clear that emerging technologies have a central focus in his second administration. Between launching a new executive order on national AI strategy and working to bring more AI systems into the U.S. education system, the Trump administration also spared federal investments in emerging technology research from the sweeping cuts proposed in his 2026 budget request. 

Not all federally-funded research made the cut. Through the Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration has terminated hundreds of government grants that did not match the National Science Foundation’s new priorities, resulting in the cessation of funding to projects on diversity in STEM education and the spread of mis- and disinformation.

Kratsios briefly touched on the delineation the Trump administration is drawing within the sciences, saying that the U.S. needs “to be doing real science, not politicized science.”

“We have to…allow our entrepreneurs and our scientists to pursue real hypotheses and not be sort of drawn left and right by the political whims of Washington,” he said. “And we as an office are going to be promoting that sound science agenda, or that gold standard science, in the months ahead.”