The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) is a federal advisory panel under the Executive Office of the President that advises the President on science, technology, and innovation. In the second Trump administration (2025-), it is co-chaired by David Sacks and Michael Kratsios and functions as a coordination point between the administration and frontier-AI executives, with named members including Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison.
| Field | Value | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Federal advisory panel under the Executive Office of the President | |
| Established | 1990 (Executive Order 12700, George H.W. Bush; restructured under each administration since) | |
| Authority | Advises the President on matters of science, technology, and innovation; convened and chartered under FACA (Federal Advisory Committee Act) | |
| Staff | Operated through the [[entities/ostp | Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)]] |
History
PCAST is the longest-running of the modern presidential science advisory bodies, descended from the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC, 1957-1973). It was reconstituted in its current form in 1990 under Executive Order 12700 (George H.W. Bush) and has been restructured by each administration since. Each administration sets its own composition and emphasis; the Trump-administration emphasis is on AI, compute, and crypto as the chartered priority areas, in contrast with the Biden-era emphasis on biotech, climate technology, and AI safety. The 2025 restart of PCAST under Sacks and Kratsios was the first formal Trump-administration body to elevate frontier-AI principals to standing-member status; prior PCAST configurations carried mostly academic and government-lab principals. The council is convened and chartered under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) and operates through OSTP.
Composition under the second Trump administration
PCAST is co-chaired by David Sacks, the White House AI & Crypto Czar, a venture capitalist and PayPal Mafia member, and Michael Kratsios, the OSTP Director who served as Chief Technology Officer of the United States during the first Trump administration. The Sacks–Kratsios co-chair structure operates as the coordination point between the administration and the frontier-AI executive class.
Named members include Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta CEO), Larry Ellison (Oracle chairman, described as a principal benefactor and political-spend anchor of the second Trump administration), and venture investor Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz. The composition places the frontier-AI compute supply chain (Huang), the consumer-AI deployment surface (Zuckerberg), and the enterprise-AI infrastructure stack (Ellison) alongside the policy-leadership layer (Sacks, Kratsios) in a single chartered body.
Andreessen's standing as a member did not preclude public dissent from administration action: on June 25, 2026 he said he opposed the order requiring Anthropic to withdraw access to its Fable model, a split within the administration's orbit over the export-control move (Source: insideaipolicy.com).
In this configuration PCAST is associated with several executive-branch AI-policy efforts: the America's AI Action Plan rollout; the draft state-preemption EO and the parallel frontier-AI cyber EO (the latter pulled at the last minute after Bannon-led counter-pressure); and the Strategic Compute Reserve ask floated by OpenAI in May 2026.
Pam Bondi appointment
Per Axios reporting dated May 27, 2026, President Trump appointed former Attorney General Pam Bondi to PCAST on May 26, 2026, with the stated charge of facilitating coordination between the administration and the tech executives on the council (Source: axios.com). Bondi was the first law-and-policy-coordinator appointment to PCAST in the second-term composition; prior to her appointment the named members were technology principals (Huang, Zuckerberg, Ellison) and the co-chairs (Sacks, Kratsios). Her portfolio shifts toward administration-side political and legal coordination as the administration works through state-preemption posture, federal-AI procurement build-out, and frontier-AI litigation (cf. Anthropic v. United States (Pentagon ban challenge)).
The appointment came with the preemption EO draft still pending and the frontier-AI cyber EO back under consideration after the Bannon-led postponement, positioning Bondi, whose prior DOJ tenure cleared her into Cabinet-level policy work, as a designated coordinator for the executive-side AI policy stack. Axios framed the move as consistent with a broader Trump-administration pattern of using AI-industry channels for political-coordination work that previously routed through cabinet departments, a continuation of the Elon Musk DOGE-era operating model extending into other advisory bodies.
Relationships
- chaired-by: David Sacks, Michael Kratsios
- members-include: Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Pam Bondi, Marc Andreessen
- staffed-through: Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
- operates-under: Executive Office of the President
- coordinates-with: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), US AI Safety Institute (insofar as it still exists post-relaunch)
- related: America's AI Action Plan, EO — Trump Federal Preemption of State AI Laws (Dec 11, 2025), EO — Promoting Advanced AI Innovation and Security (Trump, signed June 2, 2026), Strategic Compute Reserve
Sources
- Axios — "Trump appoints Bondi to White House AI panel" (May 27, 2026) (Source: axios.com)
- White House — PCAST charter and member roster (general reference) (Source: whitehouse.gov)