New Initiative Gives Trump Last Laugh Over ‘Believe The Science’ Clods

If a civilian version of the Manhattan Project were being launched in 2025, what would it look like? It would look like this.

It would be something that pushes the frontiers of science and research while incorporating the cutting edge of digital computing and information technology… giving it access to as much of the up-to-the-minute bleeding-edge research as we have available.

Today, the Department of Energy is introducing the Genesis Mission.

President Trump is launching this historic national effort to harness the AI computing revolution and double the productivity of American science within a decade. America’s Golden Age of discovery begins now. pic.twitter.com/ZBGCKvax08

— U.S. Department of Energy (@ENERGY) November 24, 2025

We’ve already seen examples of this kind of approach in pharmaceuticals, where LLMs do the heavy computing to identify likely candidates for new molecules viable for medical use.

The President has launched a new initiative takes that process and supercharges it with something he’s calling

…The Genesis Mission

From the founding of our Republic, scientific discovery and technological innovation have driven American progress and prosperity. Today, America is in a race for global technology dominance in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), an important frontier of scientific discovery and economic growth. To that end, my Administration has taken a number of actions to win that race, including issuing multiple Executive Orders and implementing America’s AI Action Plan, which recognizes the need to invest in AI-enabled science to accelerate scientific advancement. In this pivotal moment, the challenges we face require a historic national effort, comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project that was instrumental to our victory in World War II and was a critical basis for the foundation of the Department of Energy (DOE) and its national laboratories.

This order launches the “Genesis Mission” as a dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI‑accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century. The Genesis Mission will build an integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific datasets — the world’s largest collection of such datasets, developed over decades of Federal investments — to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs. The Genesis Mission will bring together our Nation’s research and development resources — combining the efforts of brilliant American scientists, including those at our national laboratories, with pioneering American businesses; world-renowned universities; and existing research infrastructure, data repositories, production plants, and national security sites — to achieve dramatic acceleration in AI development and utilization. We will harness for the benefit of our Nation the revolution underway in computing, and build on decades of innovation in semiconductors and high-performance computing. The Genesis Mission will dramatically accelerate scientific discovery, strengthen national security, secure energy dominance, enhance workforce productivity, and multiply the return on taxpayer investment into research and development, thereby furthering America’s technological dominance and global strategic leadership.

The rest of the EO goes on to explain the particulars.

It’s pretty extensive, with detailed dates and targets. To give a sense of what they’re hoping to accomplish, I can point to this section of the EO:

Within 60 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall identify and submit to the APST a detailed list of at least 20 science and technology challenges of national importance that the Secretary assesses to have potential to be addressed through the Mission and that span priority domains consistent with National Science and Technology Memorandum 2 of September 23, 2025, including:

(i) advanced manufacturing;

(ii) biotechnology;

(iii) critical materials;

(iv) nuclear fission and fusion energy;

(v) quantum information science; and

(vi) semiconductors and microelectronics.

If we’re throwing Manhattan Project and Moon Shot energy to these six areas? There’s no telling what could change in the next five or ten years.

Trump likes to throw around the term ‘golden age’ a lot. But that’s the kind of formula that really could kick off a golden age of new discoveries in these disciplines, especially when science writ large has been bogged down by bureaucratic bottlenecks and funding models that favor cautious advancement in known directions over radical departures or challenges to the status quo.