The Genesis Mission opens Energy Department supercomputers and government datasets to more than 15 agencies, even as a new administration report moves to steer research funding toward individual scientists and AI over universities.
The Trump administration committed more than $5 billion in federal money to expand the Genesis Mission, the government-wide effort it launched to put artificial intelligence to work on scientific research. Trump created the program by executive order in November 2025, and it is run from the executive branch. Kratsios announced the funding alongside a fresh set of National Science and Technology Challenges.
What began inside the Department of Energy now spans more than 15 federal agencies, including Health and Human Services, Transportation, Defense and Interior, each contributing grants, funding openings, datasets and facilities toward the challenges. Researchers will reach the department's supercomputers, its AI and its specialized government datasets through the American Science and Security Platform, common infrastructure the DOE built to link them with data and computing power.
The work targets concrete goals: pinpointing what drives chronic disease, speeding the search for new drugs, and developing construction materials that last longer. Those National Science and Technology Challenges span fields as varied as medicine, power, public works, industrial production and cost of living.
The White House put the number of projects chosen so far at 278, a figure it attributed to Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who cast the level of interest as evidence that the country's capacity for innovation remains robust and signaled more funding to come. Microsoft said it will contribute $40 million worth of AI computing credits over three years to back the effort.
The spending arrives alongside a report, written by Kratsios and released the night before the announcement, that proposes to overhaul how federal research money is distributed — steering it toward individual scientists and the use of AI rather than toward universities, and giving the administration more say over how those dollars are spent. The report holds that government backing for science must answer to the political process.
That direction has already met resistance in the courts: in January, an appellate panel held that the administration may not reduce the federal grant money the National Institutes of Health provides to universities carrying out scientific and medical research.