Is President Trump Eliminating the White House Science and Tech Office?

President Donald Trump has yet to fill many key science and technology positions at the White House, and it's not clear when he will. Under President Barack Obama, the White House chief technology officer's staff included about 24 people. As of the week of March 27, President Trump has named only one person to that office—Michael Kratios, formerly chief of staff to Trump's tech adviser and tech investor Peter Thiel.

The CTO's office is housed within the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, which also doesn't have a director yet. “The impression this leaves is that Trump isn’t interested in science and that scientific matters are a low priority at the White House,” said Vint Cerf, the Google technologist known as the "father of the internet". President Trump's budget blueprint, released earlier this month, proposed slashing federal research funding at agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and, at the Energy Department, eliminating a research and development unit altogether. Some of President Trump's advisers have recommended eliminating OSTP, which the administration is free to do. White House structure isn't set in law, said Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project.