Make America the Biopower

• To make the United States the 21st-century biopower, the administration should harness emerging biotechnologies to expand the nation’s economic, military, and scientific leadership. This will require concerted investment, policy reform, and prioritization.
• The administration should develop a national security strategy for biotech to maintain America’s biotechnology edge.
• The incoming team should expand the first Trump administration’s efforts to build a robust U.S. biomanufacturing industrial base.
• Streamlining federal bureaucracy, definitions, and codes for biotechnology would harmonize applications, guidance, and regulatory requirements.
• The Trump administration should unleash the power of biodata, while ensuring its safe and responsible use.

The second Trump administration coincides with an accelerating biorevolution. Breakthroughs in biotechnologies such as gene editing, synthetic biology, and human-machine interfaces are rapidly converging to produce powerful tools that could boost defense capabilities, revitalize domestic manufacturing, reshore critical supply chains, and boost food, energy, and health security. As biotechnologies mature, they will combine with increasingly abundant biodata and powerful machine-learning tools to unlock even greater capabilities.

The United States now stands as the global biotechnology leader, propelled by an unmatched innovation ecosystem of risk, capital, talent, and research infrastructure. The question is whether it can become the 21st-century biopower—the nation best able to harness emerging biotechnologies to expand its economic, military, and scientific leadership. No country has a better hand to achieve this ambition, but it will require concerted investment, policy reform, and prioritization from the new administration. Specifically, the Trump administration should:

Develop a national strategy for biotechnology. Even as biotechnologies accelerate, the U.S. government still lacks a comprehensive, long-term strategy to secure its biotechnology leadership. The 2022 Biotechnology Executive Order is the closest such document, but it does not identify long-term goals, policies, or plans for implementation. Forty-nine foreign governments have produced detailed strategies related to the bioeconomy.¹ America should join them. Following a national biotechnology strategy, the administration should direct key agencies to develop detailed implementation plans and designate a chief biotechnology officer with a direct reporting line to the undersecretary level.

Build America’s biomanufacturing defense industrial base. The Department of Defense (DoD) has come to recognize the potential of biotechnologies to enhance military capabilities, improve service-member health and performance, and fortify vulnerable supply chains. For instance, biotechnologies could provide domestic, renewable sources of jet fuel.² They could enable the reshoring of defense manufacturing for explosives and replace foreign-sourced critical chemicals and other materials. Biotechnologies could even self-repair airfields with bacteria-filled “living concrete” that regenerates to fill cracks as they emerge or protect soldiers with “dragon silk” armor that is both lighter and up to three times tougher than Kevlar.³ Unlike the conventional defense industrial base, however, there is no robust U.S. biomanufacturing industrial base today.

To build one, the first Trump administration launched one of the most significant biotechnology efforts to date: the Bioindustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem (BioMADE).⁴ With an initial DoD investment of $87 million, BioMADE seeks to foster a domestic bioindustrial manufacturing ecosystem with initiatives to bridge the research-manufacturing gap, boost collaboration between industry, academia, and government, and derisk critical infrastructure, among other goals.⁵ The DoD also created the Tri-Service Biotechnology for a Resilient Supply Chain (T-BRSC) program, which provides more than $270 million over five years to accelerate research and development (R&D) of defense-relevant supply chains.⁶ Finally, the DoD has allocated $1 billion for a new Distributed Bioindustrial Manufacturing Investment Program (DBMIP), which will expand domestic biomanufacturing capacity for products with both defense and commercial applications.⁷

The Trump administration should focus, streamline, and prioritize these efforts and leverage the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Biological Technologies Office and the DoD’s new Office of Strategic Capital, which combines public and private investment to fortify defense-critical technology supply chains.⁸ It also should work with Congress to increase the DoD’s total current spending from $1.27 billion over five years to $5 billion over 10 years, assuming T-BRSC and DBMIP spend current funds strategically. Inaction risks ceding potentially transformative defense applications to foreign competitors.

Streamline biotechnology bureaucracy. Biotechnology’s cross-cutting applications from pharmaceuticals to agriculture have produced a complex and inefficient federal regulatory structure. Since 1986, the federal government has regulated biotechnology through the Coordinated Framework, a tri-agency regulatory mechanism jointly led by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.⁹ Although the Coordinated Framework sought to consolidate and clarify federal regulation, in practice, the three lead agencies maintain their own tangle of rules, definitions, and requirements that stifle innovation and especially burden smaller biotech ventures and independent researchers.¹⁰ The Trump administration should replace the Coordinated Framework with a single, consolidated office that collapses the existing oversight functions of the three agencies. This would provide a single entry point for biotech researchers, ventures, other federal agencies, and international partners. The administration should empower this consolidated office to harmonize applications, guidance, and regulatory requirements.

Streamline federal definitions and codes for biotechnology. The Trump administration should continue the Department of Commerce’s effort to update the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) and the North American Product Classification System (NAPCS) codes for biotechnologies and the bioeconomy as part of its 2027 revision process. These codes provide a uniform method to track and measure economic activity for different sectors and products. To date, there are no such codes for biotechnology due to its cross-sectoral nature. Commerce should propose NAICS and NAPCS code revisions to include biotechnology, which the administration should consider requiring federal agencies to adopt to promote uniform measurement and analysis.

At the same time, the administration should consolidate the varied definitions for biotechnology across the interagency.¹¹ The existing tangle of definitions impede federal coordination, measurement, and policy. They also burden researchers and the private sector—especially smaller biotech ventures. The administration should task the National Institute of Standards and Technology with developing uniform federal definitions for biotechnology and the bioeconomy, drawing on the recent lexicon and in coordination with the 2027 NAICS and NAPCS revision process.

Unleash the power of biodata. Just as data fueled the information revolution, biodata will fuel the biorevolution. This includes conventional biodata describing genes, proteins, and metabolites to broader nutrition, agricultural, and environmental data.¹² Today, biodata exists across an archipelago of public and private databases, each with its own intake, storage, and retention protocols that are rarely interoperable. In effect, this leaves United States sitting on a wealth of biodata it struggles to fully access. By contrast, China has proactively amassed vast biodata from its population—including through coercive collection practices against the Uyghur minority and deceptive collection through commercial genetic test kits sold abroad.¹³ Unlike the United States, concerns about privacy and civil liberties do not inhibit the Chinese government’s ability to seize, store, and analyze its growing troves of biodata.

The value of biodata only will grow as machine learning tools improve. To avoid the United States falling farther behind, the Trump administration should pursue an all-out effort to unleash the power of American biodata while preserving the country’s commitment to privacy and civil liberties. Specifically, the new administration should fund the National Institute of Health’s All of Us Research Program, which aims to create a voluntary database of health information for internal and legitimate third-party research. It also should clarify existing laws and regulations for using health and genomic data for biotechnology research, invest in privacy-preserving technology to encourage responsible biotechnology R&D, direct relevant federal agencies to make their existing biodata AI-ready; and boost cybersecurity support at biodata repositories such as hospitals, clinics, and labs. A more ambitious goal would be to seed an American BioBank, modeled after the highly successful UK Biobank, which would consolidate and secure diverse biodata for use by vetted biotechnology researchers and ventures.

No country has a better biotechnology hand than America. The administration has a historic opportunity to play it wisely and secure the United States’ position as the 21st-century biopower.