The Trump administration is preparing a major push to accelerate the development of robotics technologies, according to a report on the Politico website.
Five months after unveiling a national plan for artificial intelligence, the administration is now shifting its attention to autonomous systems and advanced manufacturing.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has been meeting with robotics industry CEOs and is “all in” on accelerating the industry’s development, Politico reports, citing “three people familiar with the discussions who were granted anonymity to share details”.
The administration is also considering issuing “an executive order on robotics next year”, according to the Politico report.
A Department of Commerce spokesperson told the publication: “We are committed to robotics and advanced manufacturing because they are central to bringing critical production back to the United States.”
However, leading computer scientists say federal policy is moving in the opposite direction when it comes to the foundational research that makes robotics and AI possible.
According to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), recent funding cuts to the National Science Foundation and other agencies are undermining the very system that produced the breakthroughs the US now hopes to commercialize.
A special report published in Communications of the ACM warns that “Federal funding of basic research sparked and sustained the modern technological revolution”, and that the achievements of the past 50 years “didn’t materialize in a vacuum”.
Instead, says the ACM, they emerged from publicly funded research that seeded trillion-dollar industries including microprocessors, networking, reinforcement learning and modern AI systems.
Turing Award winner Andrew Barto writes that “Applied research is necessary to use discoveries to achieve a goal… The funding that supported the research that led to Richard Sutton and I receiving the 2024 ACM AM Turing Award… was for purely curiosity-driven basic research.”
Former Stanford president John Hennessy adds that “The birth of the Internet is a prime example” of federal agencies providing crucial early-stage capital.
Section co-editor Eric Horvitz says the stories highlight “how federally funded, curiosity-driven research led to breakthrough computing technologies that transformed how we communicate, work, learn, discover, and heal”.
Margaret Martonosi notes that “our future depends on these strategic investments”.
While the Trump administration signals new enthusiasm for robotics deployment, the ACM warns that without renewed support for upstream research, the innovation pipeline that fuels US leadership in AI and robotics may continue to erode.
