In Brief
TAKE ACTION: Enjoy a Happy, Healthy Holiday Season
On behalf of all of us at the Biophysical Society, happy holidays to you and your families. Thank you for being an active member of the Society and supporting our efforts in 2024. Here’s wishing you a safe and happy holiday season!
CR Funds Federal Spending Through March 2025
On December 21, the President signed the American Relief Act, 2025 (HR 10515), a continuing resolution (CR) to extend funding at fiscal year (FY) 2024 levels for all 12 annual spending bills, including the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education bill which provides funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), through March 14, 2025. The House approved the bill the day before by a vote of 366-34 and the Senate passed the bill by a vote of 85-11.
The House and Senate are now in recess and will return on January 3 for the start of the 119th Congress.
OSTP and AI Czar Nominee Names Released
President-elect Donald Trump has named technologist Michael Kratsios to be director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and an assistant to the president for science and technology. Kratsios, a former Silicon Valley executive, was the de facto manager of OSTP at the start of Trump’s first term until Kelvin Droegemeier was nominated and confirmed nearly two years into the term. Joining Kratsios will be computer scientist Lynne Parker. Parker will serve as Kratsios’s counselor, a new position, and as executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Parker, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, spent 4 years at OSTP during the administrations of Trump and President Joe Biden and led its artificial intelligence (AI) initiative along with serving as deputy CTO.
Kratsios and Parker will be part of a team led by billionaire David Sacks, his new AI and cryptocurrency czar, who will also chair PCAST. The team will also include a White House newcomer, internet entrepreneur and podcaster Sriram Krishnan, who Trump said would be “working closely with Sacks” as a senior policy adviser on AI.
OSTP traditionally oversees the entire $200 billion federal investment in science and technology; it remains to be seen if the appointment of an AI czar will remove AI from the portfolio of OSTP.