Trump AI Action Plan: Short on Action

In response to a request for comments on what a national plan to advance artificial intelligence (AI) should cover, EDUCAUSE joined the American Council on Education (ACE) and several other higher education associations in submitting joint comments. The Trump administration subsequently released its AI Action Plan on July 23, 2025.^Footnote1 The administration built the plan around the concepts of innovation, infrastructure, and international diplomacy. Innovation, however, appears to be the core area for action, given the much more extensive list of steps the plan calls for compared to the other two areas—and the administration's strong emphasis on removing or preventing government regulation that could slow AI development and deployment. Here are a few examples:

• The White House plans to direct its Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to issue a request for comments on identifying and eliminating federal regulations that might inhibit AI development.^Footnote2
• Meanwhile, it will task the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) with leading a federal agency effort to identify regulations or other forms of agency guidance that the administration and industry might see as a barrier to AI progress and determine how best to remove or bypass them.^Footnote3
• OMB will also lead an interagency effort to identify grant programs or other sources of discretionary funding that the administration might leverage to discourage state regulation of AI that it considers inappropriate or counterproductive.^Footnote4
• Consistent with the administration's whole-of-government effort to eliminate policies or programs that seek to address problems in the areas of misinformation; climate change; or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), the plan directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to remove references to those topics from its AI Risk Management Framework.^Footnote5 The White House also stated its intention to revise federal procurement regulations to prevent agencies from contracting with AI providers whose systems attempt to account for such issues.^Footnote6

Beyond regulatory matters, the innovation section of the plan includes a few items of direct interest to higher education researchers and research institutions. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is directed to adapt its National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) in various ways to support the development and adoption of open-source and open-weight AI models, with the goal of advancing academic research in AI in general. The plan gives OSTP responsibility for establishing a National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan "to guide Federal AI research investments." In addition, the plan identifies investment in "AI-enabled science" and "AI testbeds for piloting AI systems" to support researchers in developing "new AI systems and translat[ing] them to market" as specific objectives.^Footnote7 However, the White House does not call on Congress to provide new funding to support these investments. Instead, the plan implies that funding will come from existing agency budgets, which calls into question whether these investment objectives have a reasonable chance of being fulfilled.

The plan's emphasis on reducing regulation as a way to stimulate progress in AI development and deployment extends to its infrastructure section, which identifies streamlining or eliminating regulations under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and other relevant laws as a key strategy for facilitating environmental permitting of new data centers.^Footnote8 This section also includes a provision that calls for leveraging national laboratories at the Department of Energy to increase research training and development opportunities in AI "for undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate students and educators."^Footnote9 Once again, however, the administration makes no mention of working with Congress to secure the funding necessary to support this expansion of AI research training in higher education. Similarly, although the administration calls for bolstering critical infrastructure cybersecurity in relation to AI, it advocates for improving cyberthreat information sharing across industry and government rather than investing in the resources, services, and support needed to enable such improvement.^Footnote10

In terms of international diplomacy to promote the adoption of U.S. approaches to AI, a few proposals might draw the interest of higher education, again, primarily in the research space. The plan calls for key federal agencies to work with AI providers to use "new and existing location verification features on advanced AI compute to ensure that the chips are not in countries of concern."^Footnote11 This requirement implies a level of hardware monitoring that higher education institutions may find concerning. Similarly, a provision of this section directs the Department of Commerce to work with the U.S. intelligence agencies to establish a heightened "global chip export enforcement" regime that would involve "monitoring emerging technology developments in AI compute to ensure full coverage of possible countries or regions where chips are being diverted."^Footnote12 Higher education is specifically identified as an area that a core set of federal agencies—including research funding agencies—should incorporate into "complementary technology protection measures . . . to mitigate risks from strategic adversaries and concerning entities."^Footnote13 And finally, of note for biological and biomedical research in particular, the plan stipulates that "all institutions receiving Federal funding for scientific research" will be required "to use nucleic acid synthesis tools and synthesis providers that have robust nucleic acid sequence screening and customer verification procedures," subject to "enforcement mechanisms" as opposed to "voluntary attestation."^Footnote14

The prior efforts of the administration to reduce federal agency staffing and budgets raise questions about the speed and effectiveness with which already taxed agencies will be able to pursue the provisions of the AI Action Plan. Although the affirmative steps discussed above—along with the range of measures not mentioned—may go begging due to a lack of resources, the plan's clear anti-regulation message regarding AI signals to model providers that they will face few federal agency actions that might interfere withtheir plans. That, in and of itself, may be enough to keep investors and companies dedicated to expanding AI operations as quickly as possible. EDUCAUSE will work to keep members informed as the real-world impacts of the AI Action Plan continue to take shape, particularly in relation to higher education.

Notes

1. Bailey Graves, "EDUCAUSE Joins Comments to Inform Trump Administration's AI Action Plan," EDUCAUSE Review, June 4, 2025; Executive Office of the President (Trump Administration), Office of Science and Technology Policy, Winning the Race: America's AI Action Plan (Washington, DC: White House, July 2025). Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.↩
2. Ibid., 3. Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.↩
3. Ibid. Jump back to footnote 3 in the text.↩
4. Ibid. Jump back to footnote 4 in the text.↩
5. "Overview of the AI RMF,"AI Risk Management Framework, National Institute of Standards and Technology Information Technology Laboratory, accessed July 29, 2025. Jump back to footnote 5 in the text.↩
6. Office of the President, Winning the Race: America's AI Action Plan, 4.Jump back to footnote 6 in the text.↩
7. Ibid., 5, 8, 10. Jump back to footnote 7 in the text.↩
8. Ibid., 14–15. Jump back to footnote 8 in the text.↩
9. Ibid., 17–18. Jump back to footnote 9 in the text.↩
10. Ibid., 18. Jump back to footnote 10 in the text.↩
11. Ibid., 21. Jump back to footnote 11in the text.↩
12. Ibid. Jump back to footnote 12in the text.↩
13. Ibid., 21–22. Jump back to footnote 13in the text.↩
14. Ibid., 23. Jump back to footnote 14in the text.↩

Jarret Cummings is Senior Advisor for Policy and Government Relations at EDUCAUSE.