Happy Thanksgiving!

The PolicySphere Briefing returns next week.

The Administration is touting its new "Genesis Mission" and it does sound exciting.

The executive order launching Genesis directs DOE to knit together the 17 national labs, their world-class supercomputers, and the Federal government’s scientific datasets into a single "closed-loop" AI experimentation platform. The goal is to train scientific foundation models, drive robotic laboratories, and radically shorten the cycle from hypothesis to discovery. Priority domains read like a catalogue of 21st-century statecraft: biotech, critical minerals, nuclear fission and fusion, quantum information science, semiconductors, microelectronics, and space.

The fundamental notion is that the US government has gigantic troves of unique scientific data that has never been put together in one place, and that combining this unique data and frontier AI models can yield new breakthrough scientific discoveries.

It certainly sounds like something worth trying.

Institutionally, the order gives DOE the lead and asks key White House advisors to orchestrate contributions from across the Federal science apparatus and the private sector. In other words, the Trump White House is trying to turn what has long been a loose confederation of agencies, labs, and grant programs into something closer to a national AI-for-science platform.

Genesis is a classic Hamiltonian project: use the unique assets of the state—its data, its labs, its convening power—to build platforms that markets can then exploit. DOE already owns three of the world’s top supercomputers.

At the same time, the order is a quiet admission that the American scientific state has grown sclerotic. Research productivity has fallen even as budgets have risen; new drug approvals have slowed; ever more graduate students toil for marginal returns. Genesis is an attempt to use AI not as another grant program buzzword, but as a lever to re-engineer the research process itself—automated experiment design, simulation-heavy workflows, and robotic labs that can run 24/7.

Again, it sounds great, but what will matter most will be implementation. this is, above all, a data and governance problem. Identifying which datasets exist, cleaning them, imposing common standards, setting security tiers, and brokering access between agencies and private partners is hard, boring work. DOE and its labs have also seen an exodus of talent in recent months and have long struggled to recruit AI experts who can command start-up salaries. The order’s call for a senior political designee to drive the mission is thus essential—and very good news.

We will be tracking this. History may indeed remember this as a new Manhattan Project or Apollo or DARPA—and not their successors, the dozens failed white elephant "Manhattan Project of X"s. We are very excited and will be following the progress with great interest.

Policy News You Need To Know

#ImportantPolicyNews — BREAKING: President Trump has pardoned Gobble the turkey.

#AmericanMeritocracy — Well, it's the most depressing study that it's ever been our displeasure to read. The conventional wisdom, backed by many studies, says that which college you attend doesn't really matter, if you're smart you'll tend to do well in life. Not so much. "Attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average flagship public college increases students' chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 50%," according to a new study by the hallowed Raj Chetty, co-authoring with David J Deming and John N Friedman at the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The reason why this is depressing is, of course, that admission at these universities is, as we know, not meritocratic. Not by a long shot. If the smartest people ended up at the top universities and then ended up doing better than others, all would be well. But that's not what's happening. The smartest people are being kept out of "top" universities—and then being kept out of opportunities because they don't have the right credential, while mediocrities who do have that credential get to reap the benefits. America really is a kind of caste society, with the Ivy League parchment as the new equivalent of a title of nobility. And you wonder why populism exists…

#DOGE — Yesterday, like everyone else, we reported on the demise of DOGE. DOGE have put out a denial.

#ItsTheEconomyStupid — According to a new Fox News poll, 85% of Americans say groceries cost more and majorities say utilities, health care, and housing are too.

#AI #Reg — Major insurance carriers from AIG to Great American and WR Berkley are seeking permission from US regulators to carve out broad exclusions for AI-related losses, the FT reports. In some clases they want to bar claims tied to "any actual or alleged use" of AI. In other words, the insurance market is quietly voting that today’s generative models are uninsurable at scale, a judgment with enormous stakes for the real economy and for conservative governance. If underwriters will not touch the risk that a model misprices a product, defames a small business, or helps a fraudster siphon off tens of millions, then AI adoption will increasingly be confined to a handful of giant firms that can self-insure, while everyone else either sits on the sidelines or rolls the dice uncovered. At the same time, the specter of a single model failure triggering thousands of correlated claims creates a classic "too systemic to insure" scenario that would invite demands for a federal backstop, European-style command-and-control regulation such as the EU’s AI Act, and an even more powerful trial bar to allocate liability after the fact.

#BroadcastRegulation — In a characteristically combative Truth Social post, President Trump weighed in on the FCC's ongoing review of the 39% national audience cap for broadcast television, blasting ABC and NBC as "a virtual arm of the Democrat Party" and warning that scrapping the limit would "enlarge" the "radical left networks." The cap, a relic of the analog era, is supposed to prevent any single broadcaster from controlling too much of the national conversation, but in practice it now mainly constrains consolidation among station groups such as Nexstar, which would likely need a waiver to consummate its proposed merger with Tegna. Newsmax chief executive Chris Ruddy is lobbying the White House to keep the cap, arguing that eliminating it would let corporate giants tied to Disney and Comcast use their broadcast networks to roll up more local affiliates and further marginalise dissenting voices on the right. Trump’s intervention aligns him, unusually for a Republican, with a more restrictive stance on media ownership, reflecting a broader shift in conservative thinking: when legacy media are seen as structurally hostile to the Right, the old deregulatory reflex gives way to a new priority—using the tools of competition policy and communications law not to grow the market for its own sake, but to prevent further concentration of cultural power in the hands of an adversarial establishment.

#Reg — With the shutdown in the rearview mirror, American Action Forum's good "This Week in Regulation" is back on the menu. If you must know, this week, agencies rolled out 17 rules with quantified cost–benefit estimates and roughly 925 million dollars in new costs, almost all of it driven by a DHS rule tightening “Air Cargo Advance Screening” requirements and imposing some 3.1 million additional paperwork hours every year on carriers.

#HigherEd — Columbia University is saying that President Trump getting rid of the international student pipeline is forcing them to dramatically expand undergraduate enrollment. Which is obviously good for America and good for Americans.

#NewCrimeCity — Zohran Mamdani is the future of the Democratic Party, so whether he moderates in office (as many are confidently predicting) or governs as the radical he's said he was all along is something to watch. Well, he has appointed New York’s most prominent police abolitionist to his transition team. Make of that what you will.

#GreenNewScam — At the UN’s self-styled "COP of truth" confab in Belém, Brazil negotiators once again treated the 1.5°C global warming target as a kind of secular catechism, but a new analysis from Heritage Foundation economists Kevin Dayaratna and Krishna Mehta quietly explodes the premise: even eliminating all American emissions would trim projected 2100 temperatures by at most 0.23°C, with a similar effort in the European Union yielding just 0.13°C, despite trillions already poured into subsidies and mandates. Meanwhile, over the past century, the spread of cheap, reliable energy has coincided with a more than 500% increase in incomes, a 60% rise in life expectancy, and an 80% collapse in child mortality, as electricity-enabled hospitals, refrigeration, sanitation, and resilient infrastructure turned poverty into prosperity. Even Bill Gates now concedes that the morally meaningful metric is not atmospheric CO2 but human flourishing—health, nutrition, and access to affordable power. Yet the Belém declaration, signed by 43 countries and the EU in the name of “people-centered” climate policy, still subordinates growth and energy affordability to abstract temperature targets. The authors argue that a serious climate politics for a serious world would put adaptation, innovation, and economic development first, treating abundant energy not as a sin to be expiated but as the precondition of any humane environmentalism.

Thanksgiving Essays

Thanksgiving is one of the most wonderful American traditions, and so this year we'd like to present you some of our favorite essays on this blessed holiday.

At Public Discourse, R.J. Snell argues that Thanksgiving is "a day training us in virtue," drawing on Josef Pieper's concept of "existential poverty" to suggest modern society has "thick wallets but thin and starving souls."

Also at Public Discourse, the great Yuval Levin's "Gratitude in an Angry Time," from last year, explores the tensions between justified outrage and gratitude, arguing that "gratitude may be exactly what can help us distinguish justified from unjustified outrage."

At The American Conservative, Grayson Quay writes about coming home to Trump country for Thanksgiving. "It’s a chance to catch up with high school buddies, run into random old acquaintances, and remind myself of what America looks like outside the Beltway."

At National Review, Rich Loury reminds us that Thanksgiving is not a lie. Against far-left revisionist narratives, Lowry argues, rightly that "it's a mistake to read future conflict back into the 1621 feast, a moment of comity and hopefulness."

If you're feeling particularly thoughtful this Thanksgiving weekend and not too weighed down by the turkey and the liquor, do yourself a favor and read Richard Samuelson's "A National Thanksgiving: President Washington and America’s National Holiday," a constitutional and philosophical analysis of Washington's 1789 proclamation.