Trump’s Funding Cuts Threaten America’s AI Competitiveness

For more than a year, Courtney Gibbons was focused on exploring the mathematical foundations of artificial intelligence — the kind of arcane research that can sometimes be overlooked until it helps pave the way for the next ChatGPT.

But in February, Gibbons was one of 170 employees fired at the National Science Foundation, a federal agency that has long been a linchpin of domestic technology research and investment. Many of these were probationary staffers and part-time experts like Gibbons who had been handpicked over the past two years specifically for their expertise in AI. About a quarter worked inside groups central to deploying NSF funding for AI research, according to documents viewed by Bloomberg.

The wave of layoffs pushed by the Trump administration, combined with looming budget cuts, is now threatening the ability of the NSF to sustain AI research at the scale necessary for the US to remain competitive, according to industry watchers and current and former employees at the organization. These moves risk severing the talent pipeline that feeds the industry’s most cutting-edge companies and ceding leadership in artificial intelligence to China at a time when President Donald Trump has made it a priority to bolster US AI supremacy, largely through a deregulatory agenda.

“This directly contradicts other Trump administration priorities,” said Gregory Allen, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Almost every employee with an advanced degree at every American AI firm has been a part of NSF-funded research at some point in their career. Cutting those grants is robbing the future to pay the present.”