On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order launching the Genesis Mission, and the rhetoric he used reveals how this administration thinks about AI—and what questions we should be asking. The order calls the Genesis Mission “comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project,” the wartime program that built the atomic bomb. And although it’s described as aimed at accelerating scientific discovery, it’s telling that Trump compared it to a program that built a bomb, rather than scientific discovery programs like Apollo, the Human Genome Project, or the U.S. BRAIN Initiative.
The framing matters because the Manhattan Project was not about improving human flourishing, but about winning a race to build a weapon of unprecedented destructive power to win World War II. When a president invokes that particular historical parallel, he’s saying we are in a conflict that is so urgent that extraordinary measures are justified.
Let’s take the framing seriously and ask, are we actually at war?
The order’s language says, “America is in a race for global technology dominance in the development of artificial intelligence.” Which is certainly economic, technological, and strategic competition, but is it a war? We haven’t declared war on China, we’re not in an armed conflict with them, and we haven’t declared their development of artificial intelligence to be an existential military threat to the United States.
Why does this matter? Because wartime permits extraordinary executive action. The actual Manhattan Project operated in secrecy with minimal civilian oversight because we faced an enemy that might build the bomb first and use it against us. FDR could justify hiding a $2 billion weapons program from most of Congress because we were fighting for national survival.
The expenses for the Manhattan project were “concealed from Congress, subsumed in appropriations for the War Department,” with Congressional leaders helping get funding “buried inside appropriations bills.” During an actual declared war. For an actual weapon.
But major science initiatives have followed a different Constitutional playbook. The Human Genome Project began after NIH Director James Wyngaarden testified before Congress in 1987, with Congress agreeing to fund the research Embryo Project Encyclopedia. The U.S. BRAIN Initiative received major funding through the 21st Century Cures Act, which was Congressional legislation that allocated $4.8 billion. Apollo had multiple NASA Authorization Acts. In general, big science initiatives require Congressional authorization and appropriation.
Genesis Mission is an executive order that launches a new national initiative, establishes a federal AI platform, sets up public-private partnerships with companies such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Nvidia, and directs agencies to share decades of taxpayer-funded scientific data, all while relying on the constitutional fig leaf of “subject to available appropriations.” Can the President create what he calls a Manhattan Project-scale initiative through executive order alone, by invoking existing agency budgets and adding “subject to available appropriations”? Or does the scale and novelty of what’s being created require Congress to actually authorize it?
And what if we aren’t even running the right race with this move?
The Genesis Mission assumes we’re competing with China to build the most powerful AI, or the so-called race to AGI (artificial general intelligence). However, China seems to be taking a different approach to win the race for global AI dominance.
While we obsess over frontier language models, China deployed over 295,000 industrial robots by 2024, while the United States installed about 50,000. China dominates embodied AI, which is the physical systems that transform manufacturing, logistics, and infrastructure. They also control approximately 90% of rare earth minerals processing, which are the essential materials for making the chips we’re trying to deny them through export controls. And through open-source AI models, China is flooding the developing world with free, capable technology, trying to build ecosystem dependence on their technology, while we continue to debate export controls in the United States.
Which brings me to what I find most revealing about Genesis Mission: the way it exposes the gap between the administration’s rhetoric and its reality.
Professor Alondra Nelson, who served as acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Biden, put it sharply when analyzing Trump’s AI approach. She argued that the AI Action plan, and the administration’s broader approach, “performs itself as being laissez-faire and deregulatory. But I think relative to both the prior Trump administration, the Biden administration, and even the Obama administration, it has been a very long time, probably since the early 20th century, in which a government has leaned in so much into a particular industry.”
Genesis Mission isn’t deregulation. It’s the government building a centralized AI platform, choosing which companies become partners, providing access to federal data and infrastructure, and establishing “clear policies for ownership, licensing, trade-secret protections, and commercialization of intellectual property,” with those policies to be determined after partnerships are formed. Taxpayers fund the research, while the commercialization terms come later.
Meanwhile, a draft executive order emerged just days before Genesis Mission that would direct the attorney general to challenge state AI laws and preempt them with federal policy. The combination is striking. Federal resources are being given to select companies while states are blocked from holding them accountable.
This is industrial policy with national security branding. The government is picking winners, socializing costs, and positioning itself to privatize benefits, while using Manhattan Project rhetoric to suggest that questioning any of it is naive about the threat we face.
I don’t know whether Genesis Mission will produce breakthroughs in fusion energy and disease therapies, as its proponents promise. I don’t know whether the constitutional questions about executive authority will ever be tested in court, nor whether the Genesis Mission is the right strategy in a “race against China.”
But when we invoke weapons programs to justify peacetime policy, bypass Congress, fund private companies on uncertain terms, and block state oversight, we should at least be honest about it.
The Manhattan Project built a bomb that the government owned to win a war that Congress had declared. Genesis Mission builds a platform with private partners under commercialization terms to be determined to win a race we’ve defined for ourselves.
If that’s the right policy, make the case to Congress. And if we’re truly at war, we should declare it. But we should be careful not to dress up industrial policy in wartime rhetoric and claim it is inevitable. The questions are too important, and the precedents we’re setting will outlast this administration.
