The race to dominate artificial intelligence is the defining competition of our era. The country that leads in AI will lead the world in economic output, military strength, and technological innovation for decades to come. President Trump understands this. His administration revoked the Biden-era executive order on AI, rescinded the heavy-handed AI Diffusion Rule, and has committed to an “America First” strategy that puts U.S. companies and allies first.
But a problem persists. Despite the President’s clear directive, unelected career bureaucrats—holdovers from the Biden era entrenched deep inside the U.S. federal government, together with their allies in Big Tech —are quietly sabotaging that mission.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the AI export controls arena. Though the Biden administration’s disastrous AI Diffusion Rule was rescinded by President Trump in May 2025, the bureaucrats it left behind have stalled the replacement rule, paralyzed export licensing approvals, and kept a version of Biden’s anti-innovation architecture alive. America’s AI companies are still paying the price, and America’s AI dominance hangs in the balance.
The Biden administration literally used its last days to rig the regulatory apparatus. In the final week before the transition ended in January 2025, the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security issued a flurry of sweeping new rules targeting AI chips, semiconductor fabrication, and biotechnology—timed deliberately to ensnare the incoming administration. The most consequential was the AI Diffusion Rule. It created a global license requirement for advanced AI chips and divided the world into three tiers, treating most U.S. allies as second-class technology partners and effectively capping how much U.S. AI compute could flow around the world.
In another example, career bureaucrats at the Bureau of Industry and Security carried Biden’s anti-innovation agenda into the Trump presidency. The agency, with enormous power over U.S. technology exports, had become a command center for expansive, ideologically driven restrictions under the previous administration. Its senior career officials shaped the very framework that strangled the U.S. AI chip exports. It took months into the Trump presidency—and the arrival of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick—before any real house-cleaning began. But the damage was done: the institutional culture and regulatory inertia remained.
Although the AI Diffusion Rule was rescinded, in practice it lived on. The Trump administration correctly called it “overly complex, overly bureaucratic” and said it would “stymie American innovation.” But rescinding the rule was not the same as replacing it. More than a year later, no replacement rule has been published. A regulatory vacuum took its place, costing American companies billions of dollars. The earlier Biden-era chip restrictions remain fully in effect.
This bureaucratic sabotage of AI policy is not confined to the Commerce Department.
Biden-era holdovers are undermining President Trump’s broader America First agenda across the federal government. In the Department of Defense, career officials continue to slow-walk the integration of AI into weapons systems and procurement reforms, prioritizing outdated globalist procurement rules over rapid innovation that would give our military a decisive edge. At the Department of Health and Human Services, entrenched bureaucrats obstruct reforms to unleash AI-driven medical breakthroughs and streamline healthcare delivery, clinging to Biden-era regulatory thickets that stifle life saving innovation. The Department of Veterans Affairs faces similar resistance, with holdovers dragging their feet on AI tools that could transform veterans’ diagnostics, benefits processing, and care—leaving America’s heroes waiting while the bureaucracy protects its turf. And at the Department of State, diplomats from the prior administration quietly push back against Trump’s policies, complicating alliances and supply-chain security essential to AI dominance.
The anti-Trump export control ideology did not die when Biden left office. Besides the deep state within the federal government, it also found a new home in Anthropic, an AI company whose CEO Dario Amodei hired former Biden officials who helped design the very policies President Trump is trying to undo. These individuals brought their ideology into the private sector, where they continue to advocate for the same restrictive approach.
America’s window to lead global AI is not unlimited. While Biden holdovers shape policy from the shadows, President Trump’s America First vision goes unexecuted. The President has shown decisive leadership. But leadership at the top is undermined when the bureaucratic machinery executing it is staffed by those who built the opposite framework.
The President’s supporters and allies in Congress must hold the line: no new export controls that replicate Biden’s failed tiered system, no regulatory capture of the AI policy space, and no more patience for licensing backlogs that have become the deep state’s most effective weapon against American innovation. Deep state anti-Trumpers within the government must go.
