Trump’s Second Term Will Change AI, Energy, and More
U.S. presidential administrations tend to have big impacts on tech around the world. So it should be taken as a given that when Donald Trump returns to the White House in January, his second administration will do the same. Perhaps more than usual, even, as he staffs his cabinet with people closely linked to the Heritage Foundation, the Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank behind the controversial 900-page Mandate for Leadership (also known as Project 2025). The incoming administration will affect far more than technology and engineering, of course, but here at IEEE Spectrum, we've dug into how Trump's second term is likely to impact those sectors.
Read on to find out more, or click to navigate to a specific topic. This post will be updated as more information comes in.
- Artificial Intelligence
- Consumer Electronics
- Cryptocurrencies
- Cybersecurity
- Energy
- Robotics
- Semiconductors
- Telecommunications
- Transportation
During Trump's campaign, he vowed to rescind President Joe Biden's 2023 executive order on AI, saying in his platform that it hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology." Experts expect him to follow through on that promise, potentially killing momentum on many regulatory fronts, such as dealing with AI-generated misinformation and protecting people from algorithmic discrimination.
However, some of the executive order's work has already been done; rescinding it wouldn't unwrite reports or roll back decisions made by various cabinet secretaries, such as the Commerce secretary's establishment of an AI Safety Institute. While Trump could order his new Commerce secretary to shut down the institute, some experts think it has enough bipartisan support to survive. It [helps develop] standards and processes that promote trust and safety-that's important for corporate users of AI systems, not just for the public," says Doug Calidas, senior vice president of government affairs for the advocacy group Americans for Responsible Innovation.
As for new initiatives, Trump is expected to encourage the use of AI for national security. It's also likely that, in the name of keeping ahead of China, he'll expand export restrictions relating to AI technology. Currently, U.S. semiconductor companies can't sell their most advanced chips to Chinese firms, but that rule contains a gaping loophole: Chinese companies need only sign up for U.S.-based cloud computing services to get their AI computations done on state-of-the-art hardware. Trump may close this loophole with restrictions on Chinese companies' use of cloud computing. He could even expand export controls to restrict Chinese firms' access to foundation models' weights-the numerical parameters that define how a machine learning model does its job. -Eliza Strickland
Consumer ElectronicsTrump plans to implement hefty tariffs on imported goods, including a 60 percent tariff on goods from China, 25 percent on those from Canada and Mexico, and a blanket 10 or 20 percent tariff on all other imports. He's pledged to do this on day 1 of his administration, and once implemented, these tariffs would hike prices on many consumer electronics. According to a report published by the Consumer Technology Association in late October, the tariffs could induce a 45 percent increase in the consumer price of laptops and tablets, as well as a 40 percent increase for video-game consoles, 31 percent for monitors, and 26 percent for smartphones. Collectively, U.S. purchasing power for consumer technology could drop by US $90 billion annually, the report projects. Tariffs imposed during the first Trump administration have continued under Biden.
Meanwhile, the Trump Administration may take a less aggressive stance on regulating Big Tech. Under Biden, the Federal Trade Commission has sued Amazon for maintaining monopoly power and Meta for antitrust violations, and worked to block mergers and acquisitions by Big Tech companies. Trump is expected to replace the current FTC chair Lina Khan, though it remains unclear how much the new administration-which bills itself as antiregulation-will affect the scrutiny Big Tech is facing. Executives from major companies including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Qualcomm congratulated Trump on his election on social media, primarily X. (The CTA also issued congratulations.) -Gwendolyn Rak
CryptocurrenciesOn 6 November, the day the election was called for Trump, Bitcoin jumped 9.5 percent, closing at over $75,000-a sign that the cryptocurrency world expects to boom under the next regime. Donald Trump marketed himself as a procrypto candidate, vowing to turn America into the crypto capital of the planet" at a Bitcoin conference in July. If he follows through on his promises, Trump could create a national bitcoin reserve by holding on to bitcoin seized by the U.S. government. Trump also promised to remove Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchanges Commission, who has pushed to regulate most cryptocurrencies as securities (like stocks and bonds), with more government scrutiny.
While it may not be within Trump's power to remove him, Gensler is likely to resign when a new administration starts. It is within Trump's power to select the new SEC chair, who will likely be much more lenient on cryptocurrencies. The evidence lies in Trump's procrypto cabinet nominations: Howard Lutnick as Commerce Secretary, whose finance company oversees the assets of the Tether stablecoin; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who has said in a post that Bitcoin is the currency of freedom"; and Tulsi Gabbard for the Director of National Intelligence, who had holdings in two cryptocurrencies back in 2017. As Trump put it at that Bitcoin conference, The rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry." -Kohava Mendelsohn
CybersecurityTrump's campaign has been light on specific technological policy plans, and cybersecurity appears to be caught between two competing considerations. On the one hand, Trump's stance on international cyber warfare during his first administration was hawkish: If we ever get hit, we'll hit very hard," he said during an interview in 2020. He also claimed that the U.S. is better at cyber than anyone in the world." On the other hand, Trump's emphasis on deregulation may result in imposing fewer cybersecurity requirements, especially for private companies, relying instead on an opt-in approach.
Specifically, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) faces an uncertain fate. Trump signed the agency into law in 2018 as an expanded successor to the National Protection and Programs Directorate. However, in 2020, Trump fired CISA's director, Christopher Krebs, for creating a Rumor Control blog dedicated to combating election fraud disinformation.
Now, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is slated to chair the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Paul has reportedly said he'd like to eliminate CISA entirely, claiming that its disinformation efforts amounted to censorship in violation of first amendment rights. I would have liked to, at the very least, eliminate their ability to censor content online," Rand said.
CISA serves many vital functions, however, mainly safeguarding national infrastructure from cyberattacks in energy, healthcare, transportation, and finance, as well as coordinating responses to specific cyberattacks. The core part of CISA's mission still has strong bipartisan support, so it is unlikely to be dismantled entirely. However, slashed funding or a re-distribution of some of CISA's activities to other agencies are both possible. For example, Project 2025, a policy document written by the Heritage Foundation and the authors of which include several former and future Trump appointees, recommends moving CISA under the U.S. Department of Transportation. Trump explicitly disavowed Project 2025 on the campaign trail. -Dina Genkina
EnergyTrump's plans for the energy sector focus on establishing U.S. energy dominance," mainly by boosting domestic oil and gas production, and deregulating those sectors. To that end, he has selected oil services executive Chris Wright to lead the U.S. Department of Energy. Starting on day 1, I will approve new drilling, new pipelines, new refineries, new power plants, new reactors, and we will slash the red tape," Trump said in a campaign speech in Michigan in August.
Trump's stance on nuclear power, however, is less clear. His first administration provided billions in loan guarantees for the construction of the newest Vogtle reactors in Georgia. But in an October interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Trump said that large-scale nuclear builds like Vogtle get too big, and too complex, and too expensive." Trump periodically shows support for the development of advanced nuclear technologies, particularly small modular reactors (SMRs).
As for renewables, Trump plans to terminate" federal incentives for them. He vowed to gut the Inflation Reduction Act, a signature law from the Biden Administration that invests in electric vehicles, batteries, solar and wind power, clean hydrogen, and other clean energy and climate sectors. Trump trumpets a particular distaste for offshore wind, which he claims will end on day 1" of his next presidency.
The first time Trump ran for president, he vowed to preserve the coal industry, but this time around, he rarely mentioned it. Coal-fired electricity generation has steadily declined since 2008, despite Trump's first-term appointment of a former coal lobbyist to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. For his next EPA head, Trump has nominated former New York Representative Lee Zeldin-a play expected to be central to Trump's campaign pledges for swift deregulation. -Emily Waltz
RoboticsOne of the incoming administration's priorities has been the promise to put the interests of American workers first" by targeting immigration. However, there are currently far more job openings than humans (American or otherwise) can fill, primarily lower skilled jobs at lower rates of pay than American workers are typically willing to accept. This is especially true in agriculture.
If immigration reform further lowers the pool of available labor, either prices for goods and services will rise, or something else will need to fill this gap. Robots are often put forward as a solution to labor shortages, and the incoming administration is no exception. But with some exceptions (typically highly structured brownfield environments), robots are still very much a work in progress. Cheap human labor will not be completely replaced by robots within the next four years, or even within the next decade.
Progress towards robots that can make a tangible difference in the agricultural labor market will require research funding, and the Biden administration prioritized robotics R&D as an Industry of the Future" (IOTF). Project 2025 suggests that Congress should encourage the establishment of an industry consortium of agricultural equipment producers and other automation and robotics firms" by providing matching funding in exchange for intellectual property concessions. But much of agricultural robotics still requires funding in basic research like sensing and manipulation to enable impactful scaling. To what extent the incoming administration will fund robotics research that doesn't have immediate commercial applications is unclear. -Evan Ackerman
SemiconductorsThe Biden-Harris administration's signature achievement in semiconductors was the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which promised to revitalize chipmaking in the United States. When the bill was passed, there was no leading-edge manufacturing done in the country. In its early years, the new administration will enjoy a very different environment with at least two leading-edge fabs, one from Intel and one from TSMC, scheduled for operation. Nevertheless, the Biden administration is concerned about the Act's implementation under Trump, so it is rushing to get as much done as possible before inauguration day.
I'd like to have really almost all of the money obligated by the time we leave," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told Politico in mid-November, adding that the CHIPS office had been working seven-day weeks toward that goal. Prior to the election, only $123 million was committed. But between the election and Thanksgiving it pumped out nearly $16 billion more, including $6.6 billion to TSMC and $7.8 billion to Intel to help build those advanced fabs. Critics worry that this haste is coming at that expense of workforce goals, tax-payer guardrails, and environmental review.
Even if the incoming administration were interested in pulling back on this manufacturing boon, it would be difficult, says one Washington expert. Unlike many other programs, that part of the CHIPS Act has a five-year appropriation, so Congress would have to act to specifically defund it. And with manufacturing funds in negotiation for projects in at least 20 states, such a move could be politically costly to Congressional Republicans.
The Biden-Harris administration has also been busy on the and Science" part of the Act-deciding the sites for two of three R&D centers as well as promising billions for packaging R&D, semiconductor workforce development programs, and defense-related research.
Harish Krishnaswamy, a managing director at Sivers Semiconductors and Columbia University wireless expert, is part of two projects funded by the latter program. With the initial contracts already signed earlier this month, he isn't worried about the funding through the project's first year. I think where there's uncertainty is the extension to year two and year three," he says.
As for semiconductor R&D coming from the National Science Foundation, it's not a likely target in the short term, says Russell Harrison, managing director of IEEE-USA. And it can always fall victim to general budget cutting. Research is an easy thing to cut out of a budget, politically. In the first year there is little broad impact. It's in the 10th year that you have a big problem, but nobody is thinking that long term." -Samuel K. Moore
TelecommunicationThe telecom priorities of the incoming administration are marked already by a conspicuous social media footprint-for instance with the expected new FCC administrator Brendan Carr threatening social media and other tech companies that exercise too much of what he calls Orwellian" fact-checking. Beneath this bluster, however, lies a number of significant telecom policy shifts that could have outsized implications for the industry.
Chief among them is the FCC's authority to auction wireless spectrum-which expired in March 2023 because of disagreements over future spectrum auctions and the national security and financial potentials of such auctions. Republican senators Ted Cruz and John Thune (the latter being the likely next Senate Majority Leader) have announced their prioritization of this renewal early in the next administration.
Cruz and Thune also appear poised to revisit another key element of telecom regulation in the year ahead: reforming the Universal Service Fund. As part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the Fund was established to support telecom priorities among low-income households, rural health care providers, and educational institutions. The focus appears to be where the USF derives its funding-a shift that could also affect the Affordable Connectivity Program, which dates from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
There is also an expected shift of the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program. At the moment, BEAD prioritizes fiber-optic networks as the means to expand consumer access to high-speed internet. Given the outsized role of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk in the incoming administration, BEAD is expected to underwrite more satellite Internet connections to underserved communities.
And to return to the cudgel that Carr threatened Meta, Google, and others with in his recent tweets: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230-famously called the 26 words that made the Internet"-provides some needed legal immunity for websites that seek to have open forums and thus third-party speech. The incoming Trump administration is expected to scale back Section 230 protections. -Margo Anderson
TransportationThe incoming administration hasn't laid out too many specifics about transportation yet, but Project 2025 has lots to say on the subject. It recommends the elimination of federal transit funding, including programs administered by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA). This would severely impact local transit systems-for instance, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City could lose nearly 20 percent of its capital funding, potentially leading to fare hikes, service cuts, and project delays. Kevin DeGood, Director of Infrastructure Policy at the Center for American Progress, warns that taking away capital or operational subsidies to transit providers would very quickly begin to result in systems breaking down and becoming unreliable." DeGood also highlights the risk to the FTA's Capital Investment Grants, which fund transit expansion projects such as rail and bus rapid transit. Without this support, transit systems would struggle to meet the needs of a growing population.
Project 2025 also proposes spinning off certain Federal Aviation Administration functions into a government-sponsored corporation. DeGood acknowledges that privatization can be effective if well structured, and he cautions against assuming that privatization inherently leads to weaker oversight. It's wrong to assume that government control means strong oversight and privatization means lax oversight," he says.
Project 2025's deregulatory agenda also includes rescinding federal fuel-economy standards and halting initiatives like Vision Zero, which aims to reduce traffic fatalities. Additionally, funding for programs designed to connect underserved communities to jobs and services would be cut. Critics, including researchers from Berkeley Law, argue that these measures prioritize cost-cutting over long-term resilience.
Trump has also announced plans to end the $7,500 tax credit for purchasing an electric vehicle. -Willie D. Jones