Profile of US deputy CTO Michael Kratsios, who comes from Thiel-founded VC firm and oversees ~45 staff of director-less Office of Science and Technology Policy
Douglas MacMillan / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
When Ed Felten held this job in 2015, the deputy CTO was an academic complement to a Senate-confirmed director; coverage of Kratsios' March 2017 appointment as deputy CTO marked the inversion — a Thiel Capital chief of staff stepping into an Office of Science and Technology Policy that has no director above him, leaving him overseeing its roughly 45 staff.
The profile matters because it documents who is actually setting White House science and technology priorities in the interim, and because the arc since has validated the bet: Trump later moved to make him his first US CTO, and by 2025 Kratsios was a Senate-confirmed OSTP director profiled for lacking a STEM degree while leading AI strategy against Beijing.
First-order effects
- With no director in place, Kratsios is the de facto head of OSTP — hiring, agenda-setting, and interagency coordination run through a former VC chief of staff rather than a Senate-confirmed scientist or policy appointee.
- Tech companies and researchers seeking White House science-policy access now route through someone whose network comes from Peter Thiel's investment orbit instead of the academic pedigree of predecessors like Felten.
Second-order effects
- A director-less OSTP concentrates informal influence in the deputy seat, raising the stakes of who eventually gets nominated — and giving the administration flexibility to shape the office around Kratsios rather than around a yet-to-be-named director.
- Silicon Valley actors aligned with Thiel gain an unusually direct channel into federal technology policy at the staff level, shifting which voices frame issues like AI and innovation funding inside the White House.
Third-order effects
- The pattern that followed — deputy, then CTO nominee, then confirmed director — suggests the deputy CTO post can function as a pipeline for installing industry-and-capital figures atop federal science policy, a structural shift from the academic-appointee model.
- If leadership drawn from venture networks becomes the norm for OSTP, expect federal tech strategy to track investor priorities more closely, with congressional confirmation fights over qualifications (as seen in the 2025 profile) becoming routine friction.
The trend: US science and technology policy leadership is migrating from academic appointees toward figures from the venture-capital ecosystem, with the OSTP deputy seat serving as the entry point.