President Joe Biden has yet to appoint a US CTO after 20 months in office, a position Barack Obama filled within three months
Cristiano Lima / Washington Post : Tweets: @viacristiano Tweets: Cristiano Lima / @viacristiano : So, where is Biden's chief technology officer? 20+ months into his term, Biden has yet to fill a role that helped cement Obama's status as a “tech-savvy” president One campaign advisor said it's not for a lack of referrals. I dug in for today's Tech 202: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
The vacancy is not an isolated miss but the latest data point in a long-running staffing gap. Reporting from the campaign showed Biden [[a:953983|entered politics without a top tech policy adviser or the policy infrastructure of his Democratic predecessors]], and once in office the pattern repeated: the empty fifth FCC commissioner seat sat unfilled for months, FCC and NTIA leadership went unnamed into year one, delaying items like net neutrality reinstatement.
The contrast with Obama is structural, not just stylistic: Obama installed a US CTO within three months as part of building a tech-savvy administration, while Trump moved early too, nominating Michael Kratsios as his first CTO. Biden's White House instead has leaned on enforcement-flavored moves — a National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Unit, a planned cybersecurity executive order — while the innovation-side coordinator role stays open.
First-order effects
- The White House's technology coordination function runs headless: with no Senate-confirmed CTO at OSTP, agencies like the FCC and NTIA have no single administration counterpart pressing the tech agenda their vacancies have already stalled.
Second-order effects
- Tech companies and advocacy groups lose a defined interlocutor, pushing them to shop issues across Commerce, the FTC, and the crypto-enforcement apparatus instead — fragmenting an industry's access into whatever regulator will take the meeting.
Third-order effects
- If the role stays empty through the term, the US CTO risks becoming a legacy position of the Obama era, with presidential tech policy permanently restructured around enforcement units and agency-by-agency regulation rather than a central innovation office.
The trend: Presidential tech policy is drifting from a centralized, innovation-focused CTO office toward distributed enforcement bodies, with Biden's vacancy streak across the CTO, FCC, NTIA, and cyber director posts marking the shift.