Energy official says agency will deliver Genesis Mission goals ‘on an ongoing basis’

The Department of Energy is confident in its ability to reach the goals laid out by President Donald Trump’s Genesis Mission executive order, according to Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil, who spoke this week at the Consumer Technology Association’s trade show. 

The Energy official pointed to the department’s agile implementation method, enthusiasm levels, interagency coordination, industry partners and rate of technological innovation as prime enablers of progress. 

“It’s not like we’re going under a rock and we’re going to come out three years from now and say, ‘Here it is,’” Gil said during an on-stage discussion Thursday at CES in Las Vegas. “We are going to deliver a lot of results on an ongoing basis.”

The Genesis Mission includes several components, such as building a platform that ties together supercomputing and AI advancements, with the ultimate goal of outcompeting foreign adversaries and doubling the productivity of the U.S. research and development budget. The project is a top priority for DOE, as well as for the federal government as a whole. 

“This is the flagship science and technology initiative of the administration,” Gil said.

Deadlines, as directed by the executive order, are quickly approaching. 

By late March, the Energy secretary must lay out plans for a risk-based cybersecurity strategy to protect the datasets that are coming from federally funded research, other agencies, private sector partners and academic institutions. Around mid-year, the secretary is tasked with demonstrating the initial capabilities of the Genesis platform. 

“We are going to deliver platform instantiations this year, and on an ongoing basis, based on an agile methodology,” Gil said. 

Execution is already underway with the department doling out hundreds of millions of dollars for complementary programs, setting up accountability structures and bringing together two dozen tech companies to further fuel the efforts. 

While technological advances are core touchstones of the Genesis Mission, Gil is also prioritizing cultural changes across the department. 

“These AI-enabled workflows and, in the future, [high performance computing] and quantum workflows [will be] just second nature,” Gil said. “That cultural transformation of how we do R&D will be a key element of success.”