“This is an utter disaster,” said Michael S. Lubell, a professor of physics at the City College of New York and former spokesman for the American Physical Society, the world’s largest group of physicists. “Climate science is dead. God knows what’s going to happen to biomedicine. This marks the beginning of the decline of the golden age of American science.
Virtually all of the nation’s previous science advisers had doctorates, often from elite universities with reputations for producing Nobel laureates. The first, Vannevar Bush, science adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, received his doctorate jointly from M.I.T. and Harvard. He played a central role in persuading Washington to build the first atomic bomb.
In March 2017, early in his first term, Mr. Trump appointed Mr. Kratsios as his deputy assistant for technology policy. He was the administration’s first hire among its many openings for science and technology advisers. In that post he led tech policy initiatives on such issues as A.I., drones, quantum computing and cybersecurity.
At the time, Dr. Lane, Mr. Clinton’s science adviser, referred to Mr. Kratsios in a New York Times opinion piece as “a technologically inexperienced Silicon Valley financier holding just a bachelor’s degree in political science.” The title of the essay was “Trump’s Disdain for Science.”
"In an interview, Dr. Lane, Mr. Clinton’s science adviser, said his criticism of Mr. Kratsios in 2018 could not take into account the strides he subsequently made in his tech career. Mr. Trump’s picking him as science adviser, he added, can be seen as warranted given Washington’s current push to beat China in the global A.I. race.
“Technology is a much higher priority for everybody in the White House than in years past,” Dr. Lane said, including in Mr. Trump’s first term. And that, he added, made a science adviser with deep knowledge of technology and its arcane complexities a significant asset."
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