The White House released the document in November 2025, a season of sharp light and long shadows, when Washington typically settles into the low-grade fever of budget reconciliations and holiday receptions. The document was an executive order bearing a title that seemed designed to bypass the usual bureaucratic boilerplate and aim directly for the theological: The Genesis Mission.
The name is striking. It is not the “National AI Research Initiative” or the “Federal Science Acceleration Program.” It is Genesis, the beginning, the act of creation. The administration was announcing our place in the cosmos. In the flat, confident language of the Federal Register, the administration told us we stand on the precipice of a new golden era, a time when the messy, human business of scientific discovery would be handed over, in no small part, to the machines.
The animating spirit is the specter of geopolitical decline.
The ambition is American in its scale. The Genesis Mission is explicitly compared to the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, those two totems of American effectual will that we invoke to convince ourselves that we can still do big things. But where Manhattan was about a bomb and Apollo was about a rock, Genesis is about everything. The goal is to “double the productivity and impact of U.S. science and engineering within a decade.” The proposition suggests that the rate of human epiphany is a variable that can be adjusted, a dial that can be turned up if only we have enough compute power.
The mechanism for this miracle will be something called the “American Science and Security Platform,” which is a “mega laboratory in the cloud,” a “closed-loop system.” The idea is to link the Department of Energy’s supercomputers, the fastest in the world, with vast troves of data from decades of federal research.
A promised new golden age of human flourishing will dawn, but the flourishing seems to be based on a certain obsolescence of the human element. The work will be undertaken by “self-driving labs,” facilities where autonomous agents formulate hypotheses, design experiments, and execute them with robotic arms, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The scientist will no longer be the lonely figure in the lab coat waiting for the results of the experiment. Instead, he will be the pilot, the overseer who feeds the prompt into the machine and waits for the answer to be delivered.
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This effort is motivated by the unhappy “innovation paradox.” Each year, we spend more money on science, yet the breakthroughs seem to grow scarcer. New drugs are harder to find. Materials are harder to invent. Economists call it “Eroom’s law,” Moore’s law in reverse. The Genesis Mission is the administration’s bet that this stagnation is a failure of processing power, a bet that the answers are already there, hidden in the noise of the data, waiting for an intelligence fast enough to see them.
Reading through the directives, the 60-day deadline to identify “national challenges,” the 90-day deadline to build the data core, the 270-day deadline to prove it all works, one is struck by the urgency of elites who feel something gaining on them. The executive order speaks of “security” as much as “science.” It speaks of a global race to be won. We are trying to “secure American technological leadership” before someone else does. The animating spirit is the specter of geopolitical decline.
The man charged with orchestrating this creation is Dr. Darío Gil, the new mission director. He speaks of the platform as “a scientific instrument for the ages,” a phrase that carries a heavy burden of expectation. He is tasked with unifying the disparate, often territorial fiefdoms of the national laboratories into a single, humming engine of discovery. The task requires a profound faith in the system, a belief that if you connect enough processors, if you feed them enough data, if you remove enough friction, the truth will emerge.
There is something attractive about this vision. Who wouldn’t want to see the cure for Alzheimer’s emerge from a server farm in Oak Ridge instead of waiting another 30 years for serendipity? The promise of Genesis is that we can engineer our way out of our own limitations. It offers a clean, efficient future in which the messiness of trial and error is replaced by certainty.
One wonders what is lost in the translation. Science has always been a deeply human endeavor, driven as much by intuition and accident as by logic, by the mistake that turns out to be the answer, the anomaly that breaks the theory. The Genesis Mission proposes a science that is smoother, faster, and more predictable. It proposes a world where the “eureka” moment is a scheduled deliverable.
The Genesis Mission reflects a belief about control, a belief that we can tame the complexity of the world if we just build big enough computers, that we can maintain our dominance, our prosperity, and our health by digitizing the very process of learning.
As the winter settles over Washington, the work begins. The lists are being drawn up, the datasets tagged. The supercomputers are beginning to hum in their air-conditioned vaults, waiting to be fed. We have launched our new Genesis, and we must now wait to see what we have created. Whether we have built a new engine for human flourishing, or merely a very fast, very expensive mirror that reflects our own desperate need for answers, remains to be seen. The only certainty is that the machine is on, and it is hungry.
Tech, Genesis mission, Supercomputer, Ai
