A future-minded Republican senator launches an uphill battle

Politico

12-02-2025

Presented by
A key Senate Republican with some big ideas about tech is calling for Trumpworld to reconsider some of its basic governing premises.
Writing Monday in the realist international relations magazine The National Interest, Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) — an architect of the CHIPS and Science Act — made an exhaustive case that in order to keep America's place as the global tech leader, the second Trump administration might have to embrace spending and diplomacy at a level it has so far shunned.
'If America leads smartly to strengthen our industrial base and enhance our economic resilience, our allies and partners will follow, and our adversaries will quake,' Young wrote in what he called the 'Tech Power Playbook for Donald Trump 2.0.'
'The promise of America First will be fulfilled.'
While conveyed with Trump-friendly rhetoric and bluster — and seemingly aligned with the America-first tech vision that Vice President JD Vance touted in Paris yesterday — Young's ideas differ in crucial ways from other major players on the Trumpian right.
Elon Musk is engaged in a single-minded cost-cutting project. Steve Bannon continues to preach his gospel of isolationism. Young, a second-term senator from Indiana and heir to that state's legacy of technocratic, yet still pointedly conservative governance, argues instead that if America really wants to ensure supremacy on AI over China and the triumph of American values abroad, it needs a muscular State Department and well-funded federal research infrastructure.
That's a seemingly counterintuitive program for the modern GOP, but one that's earning praise from tech-focused thinkers on the right.
'Senator Young has been consistently ahead of the curve on AI's enormous geopolitical implications,' Samuel Hammond, chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, told DFD, calling Young's worldview 'appropriately paranoid' about the risks of China winning the AI race.
It's not just Young's fellow tech-first Republicans who lauded the document: Oren Cass, founder of the anti-libertarian American Compass think tank, praised its 'focus on leveraging our economic power rather than blindly embracing globalization,' and the Brookings Institution's Mark Muro called it a 'compelling argument.'
Maintaining both a Biden-era spending package and good relations with allies are likely to be a tough sell — to say the least — for a Trump administration seemingly more concerned with dismantling the administrative state and taking back the Panama Canal. But Young's document represents one of the most thorough attempts yet to ground Musk and Trump's star-spangled vision of interplanetary techno-supremacy in real-world policy, and tackle the more prosaic problems that need to be solved for it to achieve liftoff.
The 'playbook' undergirds its global ambition with a domestic spending program. Young, as an author of the CHIPS and Science Act, is clearly chagrined at Congress' failure to appropriate the billions of dollars in research spending it authorized. 'Congress should act swiftly to fully fund the authorities of the 'and Science' portion of the bill' to 'out-compete and out-innovate' competitors, he writes, and 'help more innovators commercialize their research and present options to the world that are not tainted by the authoritarian designs of the CCP.'
Is anyone in Congress listening? It remains to be seen whether there's an audience for big ideas about the American future from anyone not named Trump or Musk. A Young spokesperson said in an email that 'Senator Young has had conversations with colleagues about the importance of science funding, particularly how important it is to our national security.'
Meanwhile, current negotiations over the budget center around border security and military funding, while Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has called for massive cuts at agencies, including the National Science Foundation where the bulk of the 'and Science' funding was promised. Ars Technica reported last week that cuts to the NSF budget in Trump's forthcoming budget request could be up to 66 percent.
When it comes to diplomacy, Young clearly believes in Trump-style sticks as much as carrots. He calls in his blueprint for a strong, active approach to enforcing export controls against China on AI and other advanced technologies, arguing that 'growth in the U.S. market catalyzed by the CHIPS Act will help offset restrictions on selling into the Chinese market.'
He lays out a wonky plan for the State and Commerce Departments to work together using offices and funding established under the CHIPS and Science Act to ensure compliance, and for America to 'keep working with like-minded allies and partners while utilizing commercial and trade advantages wherever possible to develop a liberal, democratic market for technology that reinforces our values — privacy, transparency, safety, property rights, freedom of speech, and religion.'
To a certain kind of MAGA Republican, that might sound suspiciously like the 'globalism' that Trump made his first political hay in part by railing against. At the same time, even for tech-friendly moderate Democrats the pitch's pointed hawkishness toward China and invocation of the Reaganite 'we win, they lose' mentality could make it a hard pill to swallow.
For now, Young's path forward is unclear. In response to a query about whether it will continue the International Technology Security and Innovation Fund that Young cites as a key tool for diplomacy — and which was set up through CHIPS and Science — a State Department spokesperson said 'As a general matter, we do not comment on congressional communications and correspondence.' And with the administration's all-out trade war against geopolitical foes and allies alike, the prospect of multilateral collaboration on tech and economics seems to fade each day.
All this means that Young and the otherwise Trump-friendly thinkers who support him might, for the moment, be swimming upstream politically. Still, they seem to be placing a bet that when the shock-and-awe of the first 100 days wears off, and the everyday burden of governance sets in, the administration will ultimately come around to their way of thinking — that the AI and semiconductor race provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and responsibility, to roll up their sleeves and get to the bureaucratic dirty work required to fit geopolitics to American values.
FAI's Hammond described the document as an attempt to bring Republicans back around to 'grand strategy,' a foreign policy concept associated with the post-World War II era that demands such a sweeping program aimed at establishing multi-generational hegemony.
'If we lose the AI race to China, it will be more a failure of statecraft than raw technological capability,' Hammond said.
If AI turns out to be as powerful a world-changing tool as Vance proclaimed it in Paris Tuesday, Young and his allies are betting a return to that level of statecraft will be necessary to make sure America guides it.
Christine Mui contributed to this report.
doge at gsa
Employees at the General Services Administration are chafing at the Silicon Valley-style approach DOGE is taking to their workplace.
POLITICO's Danny Nguyen reported today based on conversations with three anonymous GSA employees that staff fear 'career-ending' consequences should they not answer questions to DOGE's satisfaction. One project manager said people are trying to play up their technical skills because 'They don't think DOGE people respect the softer 'moving complex projects through government bureaucracy' types of skills.'
The staffers said DOGE representatives did not indicate what happens next after these interviews. One data scientist argued that the chainsaw Elon Musk seemingly wants to take to the GSA could be counterproductive for the mission of modernizing government IT systems, although the staffers believe they are most likely to keep employees who engineer and ship code.
One supervisor familiar with DOGE leadership's thinking said its vision for the agency likely reflects 'a Silicon Valley mental model of 'pour all the data into a [language learning model] and then replace all the jobs with AI.'
europe pivots on ai
The AI Action Summit's reframing of the global AI discussion earned cheers and boos as it came to a close Tuesday.
POLITICO's Morning Tech Europe reported this morning on the response from industry and digital rights groups, as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made a pitch that the EU is 'innovation-friendly' and open for business.
Industry was happy — to a certain extent. OpenAI's chief lobbyist Chris Lehane told reporters he was encouraged by von der Leyen's remarks, but he still wants more out of the EU's regulatory framework: 'Attracting the global capital to invest in infrastructure in those places is really going to require a regulatory framework here that will allow for this part of the world to be able to develop and build its own AI ecosystem so that the economic model can justify the investment into that infrastructure.'
On the other hand, digital rights groups saw European regulators as caving to industry pressure. Blue Duangdjai Tiyavorabun, policy adviser at the nonprofit advocacy group European Digital Rights, said that EU tech czar Henna Virkkunen was 'caving in on pushback against EU's tech laws … she fuels deregulation, appeases U.S. and tech corporations, while ruining civil society's few, but hard-won human rights victories in the AI Act.'
post OF THE DAY
The Future in 5 links
Stay in touch with the whole team: Derek Robertson ([e-mail]); Mohar Chatterjee ([e-mail]); Steve Heuser ([e-mail]); Nate Robson ([e-mail]); Daniella Cheslow ([e-mail]); and Christine Mui ([e-mail]).