NASA, DOD and others join Energy Department-led Genesis Mission 

The Genesis Mission is expanding beyond the Department of Energy to include 20 federal agencies that are bringing a combined commitment of more than $5 billion and a range of challenges to tackle. 

The Genesis Mission is a DOE-led effort to combine the advancements in AI, quantum and high-performance computing to stand up supercomputers, launch a national platform and double the productivity of the country’s research-and-development budget. 

The federal agencies enlisting in the initiative include the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Transportation, and Interior, as well as NASA and the National Science Foundation. The expansion was announced Wednesday at the Genesis Mission 2026 Summit in Washington, D.C., with several agency leads in attendance. 

“There’s a tremendous amount of overlap and opportunity for coordination across a range of departmental agencies that have biotech and health-focused missions,” Ethan Klein, U.S. chief technology officer and an associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told reporters at the event. “It’s been something that’s been in development for a number of months.” 

An initial set of 26 national challenges was unveiled in February as a “direct call to action” to industry, researchers and other innovators. The list has now grown to 33 challenges, including subsets of existing ones and some that are wholly new. 

Some of the new challenges include accelerating the design of weapons components with agentic workflows, scaling biological discoveries via data and autonomous experimentation, and mining decades of space data with agentic AI.

While the Genesis Mission has primarily been the focus of DOE, a whole-of-government approach is taking shape now that additional agency partners are jumping on board.

The agencies are putting money behind the effort. DOD, for example, is on track to commit over $200 million in funding to the Genesis Mission across fiscal 2026, and more than $1.3 billion in the next fiscal year. 

“Those are really big numbers that we’re proud of because the collaboration between DOE and Genesis and the department is going to be so important when you think about things like quantum computing, biomanufacturing dynamics,” Emil Michael, DOD under secretary of war for research and engineering, said during a panel discussion. 

Agencies are expecting the investments will lead to results. Michael said DOD is particularly interested in quantum and digital twins. 

“There’s a lot of weaknesses in our defense industrial base and the broader American supply chain because of our outsourcing,” Michael said. “Instead of trying to replicate the old methods that have been done before, we have new methods.”

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the expertise coming from agencies that are involved in the effort will propel the agency forward as it looks to expand discoveries in space. 

“Being able to reach beyond the limitations of chemical propulsion… would certainly be a component of our Genesis Mission strategy,” Isaacman said. 

The NSF sees its role in the Genesis Mission as far-reaching. 

“All the things that you heard are going to be replicated across every other discipline and that’s what we’re going to be doing,” said Brian Stone, chief of staff at NSF. “Anytime we get this amount of horsepower together and we start pulling in the same direction, amazing things start to happen.”

The agency announced a $400 million-plus investment to set up 20 test beds that will be used for Genesis Mission-related experiments. NSF is also putting $100 million into curating AI-ready datasets that will work similarly to the protein databank. 

“We were involved very early on in things like the internet … and we enabled universities and institutions to connect,” Stone said. “It was that connectivity that really catalyzes and that’s exactly what we’re doing with the Genesis Mission right now.”