Trump Appoints Coinbase Co-Founder, Silicon Valley Heavyweights to Presidential Science and Technology Council

President Donald Trump has named the first 13 members of his President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), stacking the panel with chief executives from the nation’s largest technology companies alongside prominent figures from the cryptocurrency and venture capital sectors.

The appointments, announced by the White House on Wednesday, place digital asset industry voices alongside artificial intelligence and semiconductor leaders at the highest level of presidential science advice for the first time.

The council will be co-chaired by David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto czar, and Michael Kratsios, Trump’s assistant for science and technology, who previously served as the nation’s chief technology officer during the president’s first term. Sacks, a former PayPal executive and co-founder of venture capital firm Craft Ventures, has been the administration’s point person on digital asset policy since his appointment in December 2024.

A council weighted toward industry

The roster reads like an invitation list to a Fortune 50 boardroom. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Oracle co-founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison, AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell all received appointments. Andreessen Horowitz general partner Marc Andreessen — one of the most active crypto-sector venture investors in the United States — rounds out the contingent of high-profile technology figures.

For the digital assets industry, the most consequential appointment may be Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase and co-founder of Paradigm, the crypto-focused venture capital firm. Ehrsam’s presence, combined with Sacks’s role as co-chair and Andreessen’s deep portfolio of blockchain investments through a16z, gives the cryptocurrency sector at least three advocates on a panel originally designed to advise the president on matters of science and technology policy.

Zuckerberg, in a statement sent to AFP, said the United States has the opportunity to lead the world in AI and that he was honoured to work with other industry leaders on the council.

The remaining appointees extend the council’s reach into emerging energy and frontier science. Jacob DeWitte, co-founder and CEO of nuclear microreactor startup Oklo, and Bob Mumgaard, co-founder and CEO of nuclear fusion company Commonwealth Fusion Systems, represent the administration’s interest in next-generation power generation. David Friedberg, an entrepreneur and co-host of the All-In podcast alongside Sacks, and John Martinis, a University of California, Santa Barbara physicist who led Google’s quantum AI team, complete the initial slate.

Notable absences

The appointments drew immediate attention for who was left off the list. Neither Elon Musk — who led the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency before stepping back — nor OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were included among the first tranche of members, as Fortune reported. No executives from Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon appeared on the roster either.

The White House said the council may include up to 24 members and that additional appointments would follow shortly, leaving open the possibility that further names could be added. The omission of Musk is nonetheless striking given his early and vocal support for Trump’s 2024 campaign, and it comes at a time when the relationship between the two men has attracted sustained public scrutiny following the winding down of DOGE.

Crypto’s seat at the policy table

The composition of PCAST underscores how far the digital asset industry has travelled in Washington since Trump took office in January 2025. Sacks declared a “golden age” for digital assets at his first public briefing in February 2025, and the administration has since signed an executive order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, hosted a White House Crypto Summit, and presided over the passage of the GENIUS Act — the first federal stablecoin framework to become law.

Ehrsam’s inclusion is particularly significant given that Coinbase has been at the centre of the regulatory recalibration. The exchange was among the firms targeted by the Securities and Exchange Commission under the Biden administration’s enforcement-led approach; the SEC subsequently dropped the majority of those cases after Paul Atkins replaced Gary Gensler as chair. Coinbase has since applied for a federal banking charter through the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, part of a broader rush by crypto firms to secure national trust bank status under the new regulatory regime.

Andreessen, meanwhile, has been a prolific political donor and informal adviser to the Trump transition team. Through Andreessen Horowitz, he has deployed billions of dollars into crypto infrastructure companies, decentralised finance protocols, and blockchain layer-one projects. His appointment formalises an advisory relationship that has existed informally since Trump’s Bedminster dinner with Silicon Valley donors in mid-2024.

What the council will actually do

PCAST is a purely advisory body. It produces reports and recommendations on topics the president directs it to study, but it has no regulatory or enforcement power. Every administration since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s creation of a Science Advisory Board in 1933 has established its own version of the council. Past iterations have weighed in on subjects ranging from pandemic preparedness to clean energy to quantum computing.

Under Trump, the White House said, PCAST will focus on “the opportunities and challenges that emerging technologies present to the American workforce.” The framing suggests the council will address AI’s impact on employment, the competitiveness of U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, and the role of digital assets in the financial system — themes that align with the administration’s broader economic agenda.

The announcement came just days after the White House released a national AI framework calling on Congress to pass legislation that would pre-empt state-level AI regulation. The administration has positioned the United States as the global centre for AI development, with companies pledging trillions of dollars in domestic infrastructure spending over the coming years.

Market structure legislation still stalled

While the executive branch continues to expand the crypto industry’s policy footprint, Congress has struggled to deliver the comprehensive market structure legislation the sector has long demanded. The CLARITY Act passed the House of Representatives in July 2025, but Senate progress has stalled repeatedly. A markup in the Senate Banking Committee was postponed after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the company could not support the bill as written, and no new date for the markup has been announced.

The gap between executive action and legislative paralysis remains one of the defining tensions in U.S. digital asset policy. PCAST’s crypto-adjacent membership could add pressure to move stalled bills forward, though the council’s advisory-only mandate limits its direct influence on the legislative calendar.

For now, the message from the White House is unmistakable: the architects of America’s largest technology companies, and increasingly its largest crypto companies, are being invited to help shape the policy environment in which they operate. Whether that proximity to power produces durable regulatory frameworks or simply entrenches incumbent advantages will depend on what PCAST actually recommends — and whether anyone on Capitol Hill is listening.