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.
Virtually all of the nation’s previous science advisers had doctorates, often from elite universities with reputations for producing Nobel laureates. The first, Vannevar Bush, science adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, received his doctorate jointly from M.I.T. and Harvard. He played a central role in persuading Washington to build the first atomic bomb.
Victoria LaCivita, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the office would not comment on the selection of Mr. Kratsios. Instead, she listed science leaders who voiced support for Mr. Kratsios, including Sudip Parikh, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; Barbara R. Snyder, head of the Association of American Universities; and Mark Becker, head of the Association of Public Land-Grant Universities.
Mr. Kratsios, 38, grew up in South Carolina and graduated magna cum laude in 2008 from Princeton with a Bachelor of Arts degree in politics. He has no other degrees. While in college, he was an intern for Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican of South Carolina.
After school, he was a Wall Street analyst before working in an investment fund run by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who backed Mr. Trump’s first presidential bid and advised him on technology issues.
In March 2017, early in his first term, Mr. Trump appointed Mr. Kratsios as his deputy assistant for technology policy. He was the administration’s first hire among its many openings for science and technology advisers. In that post he led tech policy initiatives on such issues as A.I., drones, quantum computing and cybersecurity.
At the time, Dr. Lane, Mr. Clinton’s science adviser, referred to Mr. Kratsios in a New York Times opinion piece as “a technologically inexperienced Silicon Valley financier holding just a bachelor’s degree in political science.” The title of the essay was “Trump’s Disdain for Science.”
Many critics faulted the Trump administration for leaving open many of its top science posts. For instance, Mr. Trump had been in office for nearly two years before Dr. Droegemeier was confirmed by the Senate as his science adviser.
Technical experts also accused the Trump administration of ceding the United States’ A.I. edge to China. Mr. Kratsios soon after led the administration’s call for stronger A.I. initiatives.
“We must invest in the industries of the future,” he wrote of the need for tougher A.I. policies in a Wired article in February 2019. “We must act now to ensure this innovation generates excitement, rather than uncertainty.”
Simultaneously, he played a central role in the birth of what the Trump administration hailed as the nation’s first A.I. strategy, known as the American Artificial Intelligence Initiative.
In March 2019, Mr. Trump formally picked Mr. Kratsios to be the nation’s chief technology officer. The post, created by the Obama administration, requires Senate confirmation and sits within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, home of the president’s science adviser.
In July 2020, the White House gave Mr. Kratsios a second job — the acting under secretary of defense for research and engineering. In that role, he oversaw a sprawling maze of units that included the department’s research labs as well as the Space Development Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
For his service, he received the Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest award given by the Department of Defense to private citizens or noncareer federal employees.
In an interview, Dr. Droegemeier, Mr. Trump’s science adviser in his first term, called Mr. Kratsios extremely smart and very well organized. “He has a really good vision for things and a sense of what needs to be done,” he said. “He looks through a geopolitical lens.”
Dr. Droegemeier, who often collaborated with Mr. Kratsios at the White House, added he “knows what he doesn’t know” and would constantly draw on specialists who did.
He jokingly noted Mr. Kratsios’ bachelor’s degree in politics and said that after an early encounter with him “I wanted that degree.”
After leaving government when President Biden won the election in 2020, Mr. Kratsios became managing director of Scale AI, a San Francisco startup that helps A.I. companies hone their products. As the startup’s head of strategy, his main job was to help companies bring their A.I. pilot projects to maturity and the commercial market.
In 2024, the Pentagon chose Scale AI to aid its testing and evaluation of A.I. models that might one day help warfighters make decisions.
The Trump administration has made A.I. a top priority. As president-elect, Mr. Trump picked David Sacks, a Silicon Valley conservative and close ally of Elon Musk, to be his A.I. and crypto czar.
In an interview, Dr. Lane, Mr. Clinton’s science adviser, said his criticism of Mr. Kratsios in 2018 could not take into account the strides he subsequently made in his tech career. Mr. Trump’s picking him as science adviser, he added, can be seen as warranted given Washington’s current push to beat China in the global A.I. race.
“Technology is a much higher priority for everybody in the White House than in years past,” Dr. Lane said, including in Mr. Trump’s first term. And that, he added, made a science adviser with deep knowledge of technology and its arcane complexities a significant asset.
“He can point to a wide range of responsibilities,” Dr. Lane said of Mr. Kratsios’ résumé, including not only his jobs in technology, but also his tenure as the head of Pentagon research.
In terms of acquired skills in scientific policy and management, Dr. Lane added, “he can point to experience that could be more important than a Ph.D.”
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