Biotech Needs Its Own David Sacks

One question from 2025 has consistently frustrated me:

Why did AI and crypto become top strategic priorities in the first year of the Trump Administration while biotech was largely ignored?

Trump’s core issues over the last decade have been immigration, trade, energy dominance, border security, China, and re-shoring of US manufacturing. It was not obvious that “Artificial Intelligence” and “digital assets” would rise to the top of his domestic policy agenda. Crypto, in particular, is surprising: Trump publicly dismissed Bitcoin and crypto as volatile and “not money” in 2019.

And yet, by 2024–2025, AI and crypto had moved beyond being interesting technologies to become explicit strategic national priorities. During the post-election transition period in December 2024, Trump announced David Sacks as the White House “AI & Crypto Czar.”

This served to elevate the importance of AI and crypto inside the administration, and delegated significant responsibility to a capable and experienced Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Within weeks, the administration issued executive orders that created real initiatives and deadlines: a new AI executive order directing an AI Action Plan, and a crypto executive order establishing the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets to coordinate agencies and deliver a formal policy blueprint.

The White House signaled its commitment through senior-level meetings, including a crypto summit, and followed through with landmark legislation. For example, Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law, creating a federal framework for payment stablecoins.  

Whatever you think of the substance of these policies, the lesson for biotech is that it needs to do a better job of competing for attention at the highest levels of the federal government, and it needs a strategy to better stand up for its interests. AI and crypto earned that attention because they built a political interface.

The AI and crypto business communities had people who could navigate the administration and speak its language, as well generate real political capital. In 2024, Trump was courted directly by tech and crypto operators who raised serious money and built political alliances and infrastructure.

David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya hosted a San Francisco fundraiser that raised millions of dollars in one night, with senior figures from crypto and tech in the room. Trump used the setting to pitch himself as the “crypto president.” 

At the same time, facing a hostile regulatory posture from the previous administration, the crypto industry moved aggressively into electoral politics. The Fairshake network of super PACs and its affiliates raised and deployed substantial resources in 2024 to support crypto-aligned candidates, making crypto policy consequential at the ballot box.

By 2025, AI began following the same model, with Silicon Valley backing a $100+ million pro-AI political spending effort designed to influence who gets elected—and, in turn, what policy gets made.

The AI and crypto industries didn’t just advocate from the outside. They embedded themselves in the electoral and policy-making process. They invested in operators, institutions, and political machinery capable of translating industry priorities into executive orders, interagency coordination, and legislation.

David Sacks is the clearest example. By naming him AI & Crypto Czar, Trump gave the AI and crypto agenda a single point of execution inside the administration, someone who could turn ideas into policy.

This is the part biotech misses. Policy is not persuasion alone. It isn’t memos, panels, or moral arguments. Policy is execution. Biotech has nobody in a position of influence in the Trump Administration with the know-how, the networks, and the capability to wield power.

What’s missing is the ability to turn ideas into influence and power: securing executive mandate, motivating agencies to act with urgency, and converting that work into law and funding. AI and crypto had operators who could run that playbook, and the legislative results speak for themselves. That’s why Sacks matters.

After his appointment, the administration stood up an internal machine by executive order, produced a formal policy blueprint, and translated it into concrete outcomes, including stablecoin legislation and an AI action plan.

Which brings us to the real gap in biotech. The industry doesn’t just need better arguments or louder advocates. It needs someone who can operate inside the government and actually execute—someone who can translate scientific progress into policy, align a fragmented ecosystem, and make the case for biotech as a strategic national priority rather than a niche technical field.

What has made the lack of progress in biotech policy in the new administration especially frustrating is that the rationale driving urgency in AI policy applies almost word-for-word to biotech: Competition with China. National security. Domestic manufacturing capacity. Strategic dependence on foreign supply chains. 

You could literally replace “AI” or “rare earths” with “biotech” in many of the recent EOs, and the logic would still hold. These should be obvious, bipartisan reasons to invest in and accelerate the biotech ecosystem. The opportunity is there. 

Biotech hasn’t built a capable political interface for two structural reasons. First, Washington still often conflates “biotech” with “big pharma,” which renders biotech politically invisible. It’s hard to make progress on innovation-driven policy when startups are treated as incumbents, and therefore dragged into debates on pricing, reimbursement, and market power rather than scientific advancement. 

Another issue is fragmentation. AI and crypto accelerated because the community acted like a movement. There was a center of gravity pulling together founders, operators, investors, and policymakers.

Biotech, by contrast, is spread across academic labs, NIH, the FDA, startups, pharma, state governments, and a long tail of investors. Large pharma and small biotech sometimes have conflicting priorities and incentives. There is no unifying node that turns these pieces into a coherent whole.

Biotech needs more coordination, not innovation. We need someone who can align founders, investors, scientists, and patient communities around a coherent agenda, translate it into policy and legislative language, and make biotech a clear strategic priority in Washington.

So who could fill the role?

Maybe it’s one person. More likely, it’s a pairing: scientific legitimacy paired with political execution. Biotech has credibility in abundance. What it lacks is a unifying operator who can sit with regulators, legislators, and founders in the same week, and align them around a single agenda.

Here are some suggested candidates to get the conversation started:

• Peter Kolchinsky: Rare credibility across science, capital, and policy, and one of the most gifted communicators in our industry.
• Jim O’Neill: Already embedded in the administration, aligned with pro-innovation and regulatory reform, and capable of moving policy at a pace more typical of startups than government.
• Vineeta Agarwala: Full-stack expertise across the healthcare continuum (from early-stage discovery through care delivery), and is a general partner at a16z which already has an established pathway into government. 
• Daphne Zohar: Strong proponent of the need to engage more directly in DC to strengthen the US biotech ecosystem. 
• Zach Weinberg: Serial entrepreneur, builder mindset with political instincts.
• Vivek Ramaswamy: Love him or hate him, he’s proof that biotech can produce political operatives, not just scientists and CEOs.
• Jason Kelly and Chris Gibson: nobody articulates the future of AI in drug discovery more effectively.
• Bruce Booth: The industry’s most consistent communicator, and understands every dimension of biotech including science, financing, policy, and culture.
• David Sacks: he’s doing it with AI and crypto, why not biotech too?  

Biotech will keep producing world-class science. The question is whether it will also build the political and institutional capacity to match its strategic importance, or whether it will continue to let other sectors define the national agenda.

Priorities in Washington are rarely set by abstractions or white papers. They are set by people, often one or two individuals inside the government who have the credibility and mandate to mobilize institutions.

AI and crypto found those people, but biotech has not. Until it does, biotech will remain insular, failing to make its importance known beyond its own ecosystem.