President Donald Trump’s decision to fire or reassign the White House’s dedicated biological defense experts has hollowed out the nation’s frontline defenses at the precise moment when artificial intelligence is making it easier for adversaries to engineer deadly pathogens, according to current and former officials.
The administration eliminated a specialized team of roughly 30 scientists and policy coordinators early in Trump’s return to office, replacing them with a rotating cast of part-timers and junior staff lacking security clearances, according to four former government officials.
The firings, which insiders described as a self-inflicted wound, came as the administration missed its own deadline to replace key Biden-era biosecurity orders—leaving the country without updated safeguards even as AI capabilities rapidly advanced.
“They have kneecapped themselves in their ability to create any policy that would have staying power,” said one former expert who recently worked directly on outbreak response policy. “That’s the risk, they’re not playing the long game.”
By erasing institutional knowledge, officials said, Trump has effectively provoked a crisis of preparedness, transforming a manageable threat into a critical national exposure.
The staffing purge stripped the National Security Council of dedicated biosecurity personnel and shuttered a health security unit, while the White House also eliminated the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy—only resurrecting it this spring when Ebola spread in Africa.
The timing has alarmed security analysts and it mirrors the blunder during his first term, when Trump eliminated the White House’s global health security unit just before the coronavirus pandemic started.
While Trump was sidelining the very experts needed to craft defensive policies, leading AI companies determined their most advanced models were approaching “high” levels of biological capability, defined as abilities that “significantly increase existing risk vectors for severe harm.”
OpenAI briefed the Trump administration on these findings last summer, but the White House has yet to issue the revised biosecurity directive Trump ordered by August 2025—more than a year ago.
“It’s unquestionably left the nation less well prepared,” said Paul Friedrichs, a retired Air Force general who led the White House pandemic office under Biden, referring to Trump’s cuts.
The administration has acknowledged biological risks while touting AI’s potential for defense, but analysts say the rhetoric does not match the funding or staffing.
A Rand Corp. report concluded that attackers have a significant advantage over defenders in biological incidents, warning that even one successful attack “could result in catastrophic consequences.”
Trump revoked a 2023 executive order on AI that called for stronger biological safeguards and cast doubt on a policy requiring companies to screen buyers seeking genetic components that could create biological agents—widely seen by experts as a basic pillar of national defense.
The administration promised a replacement but has not delivered.
“Every time an administration changes over there’s a lot of continuity that just gets disrupted,” said a scientist who worked on biotechnology and national security in both the first Trump and Biden administrations. In the transition from Biden to Trump, they said, “when it comes to biosecurity, that happened in a very disruptive way.”
The White House has relied on a small revolving cast of employees to fill the void, including a junior fellow without a security clearance, a part-time Rand researcher, two CIA staffers with little field expertise, and an Air Force physician who had consulted for the White House medical office, according to the former officials.
A White House official said the administration is working to strengthen the Biden-era policy, calling it inadequate, but did not address questions about the staffing changes.
David Relman, a Stanford University medicine professor who worked on pandemic response in the Biden White House, expressed mounting frustration.
“I think we have a massive collective-action problem in front of us,” Relman said.
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