OSTP taps policy scholar Dean Ball as AI, emerging tech advisor
Dean Ball, a policy scholar with a focus on the intersection of history, political theory, policy and technology, is joining the Trump administration as a senior policy advisor on artificial intelligence and emerging technology, he announced Tuesday on the social media platform X.
Ball said in his post of joining the Office of Science and Technology Policy: “It is a thrill and honor to serve my country in this role and work alongside the tremendous team [OSTP Director Michael Kratsios] has built.”
He comes to OSTP from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where he has served as a research fellow for the past year.
Ball is also the author of an AI-focused blog called Hyperdimensional, in which he has defended the AI Safety Institute and commented on the Trump administration’s terminations of probationary employees.
“Because probationary employees are disproportionately likely to be young and focused on more recent government priorities (like AI), the move had unintended consequences,” Ball wrote. “While the memo was a disruption for many federal agencies, it would have been an existential threat to the [USASI], virtually all of whose staff are probationary employees.”
In another post, Ball says that he is interested in AI being built at the “very same time the Republican party and Donald Trump in particular, seek to advance theories of a ‘unitary executive’ — the notion that the president exercises the powers granted to him by the Constitution and Congress absolutely. By the end of President Trump’s term, that may be more possible than anyone ever imagined.”
Ball currently serves as a board member at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, which is a New York-based think tank “inspired by Alexander Hamilton’s life and work,” according to its website.
His past experience includes serving as a senior program manager for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, an executive director for the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, and the director of the Adam Smith Society at the Manhattan Institute.
