In a speech delivered at the Endless Frontiers Retreat in Austin, Texas, Michael Kratsios, Trump’s new director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and chief science adviser, painted a compelling portrait of America’s drift away from its once world-leading pace of innovation. Kratsios lamented an America burdened by bureaucracy and a “regulatory regime opposed to innovation and development” where “stagnation [is] a choice.”
Kratsios’s speech was at times provocative. At one point, he commented on America’s perhaps unrealized technological capabilities, stating, “Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space. They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity.” “We are capable of doing so much more,” he said.
Characteristically, President Trump delivered an equally provocative remark during an April 10 Oval Office press conference, hinting at America’s technological edge in weaponry. “We have a weapon that no one has a clue what it is. And this is the most powerful weapon in the world, which is more powerful than anyone’s, it’s not even close,” he said.
Kratsios’s and Trump’s remarks undeniably stir the imagination. It’s reasonable to assume that DARPA and the Department of Defense are pursuing covert technological advancements that would astonish the uninitiated. Kratsios may also be alluding to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence — an accelerant for innovation across virtually every domain.
Though I don’t claim insider knowledge of these cutting-edge technologies, I can speak to the broader policy framework Kratsios referenced. At its core is President Trump’s renewed push to reignite America’s innovation engine, exemplified by his updated April 15 Presidential Memorandum, “Updating Permitting Technology for the 21st Century” — a continuation of efforts launched during his first term.
President Trump’s reintroduced executive order on technology takes on new relevance. Framed as unleashing American innovation in the 21st century, the order represents an attempt to tackle the same sclerosis identified in Kratsios’s speech: that the U.S. is overregulated, under-built, and structurally averse to progress.
Kratsios and Trump are not alone in their frustration. Their remarks echo a growing consensus within America’s resurgent industrial and tech nationalist movement — a coalition of policymakers, entrepreneurs, and thinkers such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Richard Hanania, and Mark Andreessen. This movement argues that America’s decline from its technological peak wasn’t inevitable, but self-inflicted, driven by a preference for bureaucracy over boldness, debt over development, and regulatory restraint over technological risk-taking.
At the core of Kratsios’s critique lies a striking paradox: Never before have we possessed such powerful tools, yet our collective ambition has diminished. We can collapse distance and scale productivity through digital means. And yet, in critical areas like energy, infrastructure, and transportation, the pace of physical progress has ground to a halt.
Kratsios traced today’s stagnation back to the collapse of the postwar consensus that once defined American ambition. In 1972, the U.S. put men on the moon, flew at Mach 6.7, and embraced nuclear energy as the future. Fifty years later, we close nuclear plants faster than we build them, fly slower than we did in the jet age, and bury innovation under layers of red tape.
Kratsios argued that the regulatory architecture born in the 1970s — initially designed to protect public health and the environment — has calcified into a maze of chokepoints throttling American innovation. The chokepoints have become, said Kratsios, “an ever-tightening ratchet, first hampering America’s ability to become a net-energy exporter and then making it harder and harder to build.” Environmental regulations have produced decades of delays, stalling progress. Burned out by the process, innovators retreated.
Fortunately, Trump enters his second term more confident, having assembled a team that appears fully aligned with his agenda, unlike the internal resistance he faced during his first term. As part of his broader deregulatory push, his E.O. aims to streamline federal permitting, accelerate the rollout of critical infrastructure, and cut through the bureaucratic red tape that has turned even modest construction efforts into multi-year slogs. The core message is clear: Step aside, and let Americans build.
However, though Trump enjoys more support, Kratsios makes clear with his remarks that the scope of the problem is larger than fixing permitting or governmental bureaucracy. It is cultural, institutional, and geopolitical, and he believes that Americans must rise to the occasion.
To revive America’s innovation engine, Kratsios laid out a three-pronged strategy: promotion of innovation, protection of critical technologies, and proliferation of American values through technological leadership. Borrowing a Trumpian sentiment, he states we are “here in the early light of the new Golden Age of America,” with a “monumental task: the renewal of our nation.”
The Golden Age of America will require “smart choices” that lead with optimism, not fear. On the promotion side, the plan calls for a new wave of investment in R&D, not just in dollar amounts, but in how the government invests — through prizes, fast grants, and advance market commitments. It urges a comprehensive review of outdated rules and regulations that hold back fusion energy, supersonic travel, and biotech. Crucially, it positions the federal government as a key early adopter of American technology — a break from a procurement system that often favors the lowest bid over the highest impact.
Protection means more than cyber-security. It means re-shoring supply chains, fortifying research institutions, and keeping adversaries like China from harvesting American intellectual property and sensitive data under the guise of collaboration. As Kratsios puts it, “we want peace between our countries, and that peace depends on keeping America’s bleeding-edge technology out of our competitors’ hands.”
Geopolitically, Kratsios echoes Trump’s recent push to re-shore industry with tariffs and other measures. Both are advocates for manufacturing independence and better control over our critical infrastructure.
“Our infrastructure, supply chains, and those of our allies must be secured, too.” Krastsios stated. “We cannot afford to remain dependent, as we are in too many essential industries, on Chinese inputs and products, nor can we allow our closest partners to become points of insecurity by relying on Chinese-controlled critical infrastructure, whether in telecom, the grid, or AI. We must establish and secure trusted supply chains, implement public-private partnerships to enhance supply-chain resilience, and create investment incentives to re-shore more critical manufacturing.”
Finally, “[a]fter thirty years of subsidizing Chinese growth,” Kratsios continued, “It is time for us to stop helping a rival catch up with us in this race. Strict and simple export controls and know your customer rules, with an unapologetic America-first attitude about enforcing them, are central to stopping China from continuing to build itself up at our expense. We want peace between our countries, and that peace depends on keeping America’s bleeding-edge technology out of our competitor’s hands.”
Kratsios also reinforced Trump’s dedication to the American way of life and the American worker. Achieving a Golden Age of technology, he argued, requires confronting an uncomfortable reality: that the world is profoundly shaped by politics and technology, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. Although the instinct may be “to withdraw,” Kratsios urged Americans to resist the pull. Instead, Kratsios believes that Americans must “continue to rise to the occasion, to make full use of their talents, and to build.”
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
This article was originally published at www.americanthinker.com
