Is The US Throwing Away Its Tech Dominance?
Chips, Tariffs, and Temper Tantrums. By attempting to blindly protect US industry, and pushing the Project 2025 agenda, is the Trump administration just handing China its tech leadership mantle?
I know I’m not alone in struggling to keep up with everything going on in the US over the previous three weeks. The absolutely insane volume of executive orders coming out of the newly-returned Trump White House, and the devastation almost all of them are attempting to inflict on the current system make it hard to lock down a story quite like this one.
There is a lot to unpack here, but the overall thrust of it is simply, like it or not: the US is currently the dominant power when it comes to global technological leadership. Also that this status is rapidly being ceded in the name of “making America great again™”.
The US is handing the future to China, and the Trump administration seems hell-bent on speed running this process despite its cantankerous posturing against it.
In three weeks, key cybersecurity initiatives have been gutted. The US’ national capacity for cyber defense has been hamstrung. Essential supply chains for semiconductors and strategically critical technologies are being threatened with misguided tariffs. Federal investments in microchip manufacturing are on the chopping block. Any government support for green energy and future tech in this field is out the window. Protectionism and technofeudalist ring-kissing are all but guaranteeing that the US has lost any sort of “AI race”, and that it’s now doubling down in this direction.
It’s my firm belief that the Trump administration, in trying to make the US “safer”, in securing loyalty to its nationalist causes, in empowering Elon Musk and his cadre of zoomers to “reduce waste”, and in attempting to somehow reassert itself on the national stage with displays of “independence” or “strength”, the US has effectively chosen to give the technological future to its adversaries.
I’ll leave that up to you to decide if you consider this a bad thing.
Let’s get started.
Cybersecurity Is Not A Concern?
On Trump’s first day in office, an Executive Order went out disbanding the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB). Established under the Biden administration in 2022, the CSRB was modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and responsible for conducting post-mortem investigations into major cyber incidents, providing recommendations to improve national cybersecurity resilience.
The board was in the process of coordinating with various other federal agencies in order to investigate the recent Salt Typhoon hacks—a Chinese cyber campaign that may be the most significant act of cyber espionage against the United States to date. The attacks successfully took control of the US government’s wiretapping capabilities, as well as successfully infiltrated the Treasury Department. Among the other agencies that the CSRB were collaborating with was the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which the Trump administration already attempted to dismantle in its first term.
The FCC’s new chair, Brendan Carr, during a time of record layoffs and instability in the federal workforce, is now being re-tasked to carrying out Trump’s personal vendettas against various news networks. This is apparently more worthy of the Commission’s time than shoring up the communications industry’s greatest security embarrassment. Carr has also re-tasked the agency from working on election interference and defense against foreign disinformation campaigns.
To a final point about the Intelligence Community and the US’ cybersecurity being impacted, let’s consider what’s happening in other relevant entities such as the NSA and the FBI.
If you haven’t heard, the federal workforce is in shambles. A notable initiative, led by Elon Musk, involves offering deferred resignation packages to federal employees across these agencies. The claim is that Musk aims to reduce the workforce and realign agency priorities (in other places, this is known as a “purge”). The real effect is that this depletes experienced personnel and politicizes intelligence operations. Anyone close to retirement has no reason not to take the buyout, and anyone not willing to be part of this MAGA-takeover will find themselves increasingly pressured in their workplace. This is assuming that they haven’t already been cut for other reasons by DOGE.
At the FBI, the appointment of Kash Patel, a known Trump loyalist, as the new director, has raised concerns about the agency's future direction. Patel's history of promoting conspiracy theories have led to fears that the FBI's efforts to counter far-right extremism will be weakened.
Oh yeah, and they forced a bunch of leadership to resign. Plus, a Trump-loyalist Attorney General took a roster of all of the FBI personnel responsible for investigating January 6th. Thankfully, this is being largely resisted by the accidentally-appointed, acting FBI director, Brian Driscoll. Driscoll will be in charge until Patel is confirmed.
Similarly, the NSA is undergoing significant changes, with the administration implementing a "fork in the road" buyout plan targeting agency employees, just like the FBI and CIA. The entire US Intelligence Community and its ability to coordinate the nation’s cybersecurity is in question.
Almost all of this was telegraphed in Project 2025, by the way. In fact, Brendan Carr is the one who wrote the section in it about how the FCC needed to be changed.
If you’re curious, Project 2025 has a prescription for national cybersecurity: It’s that individual businesses are responsible for it. You know, the same ones who allegedly weren’t forthcoming about their Salt Typhoon findings for possibly months.
Despite Trump’s tough talk on China, and Project 2025’s insistence on American exceptionalism in cyberspace, there is no room for a secure future of US networks under these policies. Strict regulations, strong bureaucracies, inter-departmental coordination, international cooperation, and an empowered public with strong privacy infrastructure are all necessary for this to happen.
They are completely antithetical to the spirit of Trump’s style of governance, and the mandate of Project 2025.
The Chips Trade Is Getting Weird
In a bizarre set of counter-intuitive moves, the new administration seems dead set on destroying the US’ ability to affordably acquire or develop substantial domestic capacity for manufacturing equipment essential to anything in computing.
One of the first sets of tariffs the administration set out to pursue were against, of all countries, Taiwan. The President threatened up to a 100% tariff of semiconductors and chips manufactured on the island.
This would absolutely devastate the US’ competitiveness in Generative AI, Cloud Computing, data processing and storage, and just about every other technology hyper-scaling market. This is, supposedly, to incentivize US tech firms to pursue domestic manufacturing. However, the current supply chain for the highest-tier chips is completely reliant on ASML in the Netherlands and TSMC in Taiwan. There is no domestic alternative, and that’s not for any lack of trying. Premier semiconductor manufacturing requires extremely sophisticated technologies that the US has failed to replicate at scale, State-side.
Does this sound like a perfect arrangement for the US? That’s a fair question. Does potentially doubling the price of nearly every GPU and CPU on the market seem like the best way to proceed in the immediate future? Probably not.
Knowing this, in an attempt to incentivize the growth of a domestic semiconductor industry, the previous Trump administration introduced the Chips and Science Act, and it was supported and moved along under Biden. While there have been numerous good-faith criticisms of CHIPS, the idea was to nurture domestic semiconductor manufacturing.
Trump has now confusingly made public statements to the effect of wanting to cancel CHIPS, and his federal funding freeze is stopping the money from flowing.
Oh yeah, and all of these potentially 100% tariff-inflated chips will continue to slow the US down in another sector that it’s recently been embarrassed in...
American AI Is In Some DeepSeek
Okay, I’m going to start this off by saying that I don’t entirely consider Large Language Models like DeepSeek and ChatGPT as “AI-proper”. The marketing around them has greatly overblown their ability to “think”, or how close they’ve come to coveted Artificial General Intelligence. I have my own issues with LLMs, though I don’t completely disavow them. DeepSeek actually addresses some of these in ways that makes what I’m about to say even more frustrating.
So at this point, many of you have probably heard about DeepSeek. The long and short of it is: it’s better in almost every way to the Silicon Valley-born generative AI models that had the market cornered up until now.
Fundamentally, it represents a major advancement in open-source AI. Its performance in coding, mathematics, and multilingual tasks suggests it could be a viable alternative to all of OpenAI’s models. It does it while using a fraction of the energy. Nearly 1/30th as much. Plus, it can be installed locally, which means it addresses many of my privacy concerns inherent to LLMs.
And it’s made in China.
DeepSeek’s launch of several new models last month fired a 1 Trillion Dollar Bullet into the US stock market. It absolutely embarrassed Silicon Valley. Numerous articles have already been written on this topic, (I linked to Ed Zitron’s incredible Deep Impact article above), you should check some out if you’re interested, it’s worth a deep dive.
I’ll try to keep it brief:
Possibly the greatest innovation so far in one of the most energy-hungry, expensive, unprofitable, and risky ventures that US-based investment capital has ever backed was developed by its technological rival for 3% of the cost. It was developed with old equipment (due to economic sanctions and restrictions on Chinese access to GPUs) presumably multiple generations behind the chips being utilized by OpenAI or Anthropic.
What many in the tech journalism press are insinuating is that the hundreds of billions of American dollars burned in venture capital, the massive environmental damage, and forced-implementation of a still highly unreliable technology was effectively for nothing—that Silicon Valley wasn’t even trying to make its models more efficient, as they thought they were untouchable and endlessly deserving of investor money.
It’s a cynical, vulgar version of David and Goliath, where a tech startup backed by a shadowy Chinese hedge fund with $5.5 billion dollars under management is somehow the plucky upstart against the lumbering, lossy, oafish $150 billion startup backed by a public tech company with a market capitalization of $3.2 trillion. — Ed Zitron
So that means that US companies have learned their lesson, and we’re about to see a rush to innovate, ever-lighter LLMs, right? OpenAI is now going back to its original stated mission to provide an “AI for everyone”?
Nah, the government is just going to try and ban DeepSeek, just like it tried to ban TikTok.
Now, just like TikTok, there are definitely reasons to be suspicious of software that handles this amount of data when it’s owned by a Chinese company. I ranted about it here on my other blog. DeepSeek is certainly no exception. Even if you run it locally, it can connect to the internet, and there have been notable examples of Chinese censorship when asked for context on historic questions:
Despite the security concerns, however, I think this is demonstrative of a pattern: that when the tech giants like Meta are out of ideas, they simply buy up other, better products. When they have no ability to control them in this way, they use the government to attempt to do their bidding.
This is an unrelated photo of the CEOs of Meta, Twitter, Amazon, and Google at Trump’s inauguration:
This is a clear example of protectionism covering up for the fact that US companies have, once again, failed to innovate. While there’s no denying that the Trump White House is going to be friendly to technology firms, it is in no way going to be friendly to improvements in technology.
Just a quick recap: the spearhead of the US “AI” industry just got shamed in front of the whole world, and the Administration wants to punish the people who provide that industry with its physical infrastructure out of jingoism.
A Chinese Future (And Present) For Climate Tech
The new Administration has officially pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement. A lot has already been said about how this is indicative of the US giving up its leadership role in further climate discussion. These same points were brought up during the previous Trump administration when he’d pulled the same move, however, something has substantively changed since then.
China is now the world’s largest producer of renewable energy tech. In 2023, they produced nearly 80% of the world’s solar equipment. Their global share of the electric vehicle market is right behind that. China controls the supply chain for these from end to end, securing raw materials, logistics, production, and sales (a topic Jacob Dickinson touched on in previous articles).
The only counter to this that the US and EU have introduced have been, once again, bans and tariffs. Also consider that Trump has issued another EO to end electric car mandates and subsidies. Another EO impacts development and research in sustainable nuclear energy, which will compound with the aforementioned one suspending research grants. This, just as China has progressed in its construction of the world’s newest fusion lab.
The US has effectively surrendered the two main entry points of future green technology—solar and EVs—to China, in order to realize short-term gains. The moonshot goal of nuclear fusion is still well within the grasp of US scientists and engineers, but they are now losing ground under an administration that seems uninterested in anything beyond the short term gains of “Drill baby, drill!”
China is now positioned to not only pull way ahead with future opportunities on this front (if you don’t accept that they already have), they’re also able to control the international conversation.
So What Does This Mean?
So here we are, staring at a brave new future the US is willingly handing to China. While I didn’t want to position this article as yet another “China bad”, or “US bad” oversimplification, I think it’s important to recognize that, in the various dimensions of security and global stability, the Trump Administration is doing potentially irreparable damage to the US’ ability to determine the course of our technological future.
The administration’s fixation on short-term posturing, combined with an all-too-familiar inability (or unwillingness) to foster genuine innovation, has basically placed America on a trajectory to tech irrelevance that is only being carried by generational wealth and military power.
Some might argue that’s good news—less technological dominance could mean less meddling abroad or fewer corporate bailouts and monopolies on the home front. Others might see it as a complete abdication of responsibility for shaping a safer, more open, and more sustainable global digital landscape.
Either way, let’s not kid ourselves: the rest of the world isn’t waiting around for the US to get its act together. China, and any other nation willing to invest in the future, are forging ahead. And the US, caught up in tariff wars, “DEI” purges, and some bizarre notion of “winning” by going it alone, seems content with watching its competitive edge slip away.
I want to leave this with a reminder that there are other forces in the world besides the United States and China.
If the world is looking to a direction that is more democratic, and more respectful to human rights than a Chinese vision of the future, Europe may have to take the reins with its own significant financial resources and substantial scientific capabilities, though it has its own significant struggles that are exacerbated by Russia’s expansionism.
East Asia is home to other similarly “advanced” economies and other rapidly growing countries that have been striking their respective balances between the US and China for decades.
India is on the rise and may even have more long-term economic potential than China. That said, it has its own issues with authoritarianism and human rights abuses.
Despite the continent being wracked with instability, its standards of living, education, and the potential for tremendous growth remain throughout much of Africa. Latin America has its own issues with political instability, but also continues along a similar trajectory with rapid technological adoption.
It’s my honest belief that these are all signs that the “multi-polar” future is already here, but the US is doing everything it can to keep us from realizing that, and is willing to burn all of its soft power and perceived moral authority to do so.
Let’s see how that works out for everyone.