Trump taps Michael Kratsios, Lynne Parker for tech and science roles

President-elect Donald Trump announced several new officials to lead his technology and science policy efforts, including a couple of familiar faces from his first administration.

Michael Kratsios was named as Trump’s choice for the new director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and assistant to the president for science and technology. He previously served as chief technology officer during the first Trump administration. 

Meanwhile, Lynne Parker was named as the executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology and counselor to the OSTP director. Parker previously served as deputy CTO and was the founding director of the National Artificial Initiative Office.

In addition to Kratsios and Parker’s announced returns Sunday, Trump also named Bo Hines as the executive director of the President’s Council of Advisers for Digital Assets, which will be focused on crypto, and Sriram Krishnan as senior policy advisor for AI at OSTP. Krishnan will be focused on U.S. leadership on AI and coordinating AI policy across government, including working with PCAST.

Per the announcement, all four individuals will work with David Sacks, the venture capitalist and former CEO of enterprise social network firm Yammer who Trump previously selected as AI and crypto czar. On AI in particular, Trump is expected to repeal and replace President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, likely scaling back some of the current administration’s approach. 

Kratsios, whose nomination will need to be confirmed by the Senate, is currently the managing director of Scale AI, a technology company and defense contractor focused on providing training data for AI models. Before that, he was acting undersecretary of defense for research and engineering at the Department of Defense. 

During his time as CTO, Kratsios advised Trump on a variety of technology issues and was also a leader during the release of the administration’s own AI executive order (EO 13960) in December 2020. That order set up guardrails for the use of trustworthy AI within the government and established the process by which agencies publicly report their AI use cases, which Biden’s approach has built upon.

Parker, who led the interagency committee that drafted that executive order, told FedScoop in September 2023 that Biden’s Office of Management and Budget would benefit from improving the quality of the use case inventories, as the accounting could help the office create guidance for the government. The Biden administration, for its part, expanded those disclosures for 2024 and recently released a consolidated inventory that shows more than 1,700 uses across federal government agencies.

Parker, associate vice chancellor emerita at the University of Tennessee and the founding director of the university’s AI Tennessee Initiative, said the initial intent of those disclosures was to improve public transparency, help agencies see what others in the government are using, and inform policy guidance on responsible use of AI.