The Trump administration’s artificial intelligence (AI) initiative, Genesis Mission, is falling under House Democrats’ skepticism for its potential to increase energy costs and risks to data privacy.
During a House Science, Space, and Technology hearing on Wednesday, lawmakers questioned the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Under Secretary for Science, Darío Gil, on whether the program is feasible and if it would maintain data privacy and a diverse range of public-private partnerships.
“The Genesis Mission has the potential to double American research productivity within a decade by connecting national labs, universities, and industry to develop powerful AI platforms for science,” Energy Subcommittee Ranking Member Deborah Ross, D-N.C., said in opening statements.
“However, it is very important to acknowledge the severity of the Trump administration’s federal funding cuts to the Department of Energy,” Ross added, saying, “These cuts have created conflict between the mission’s ambitious goals and the simultaneous termination or freezing of billions of dollars of existing energy and research projects.”
The Genesis Mission, announced in late November, aims to unite a network of the DOE’s 17 national labs, industry, academia, and other scientific institutions on a digital platform powered by AI that will be used for scientific discovery.
Yet that ambitious mission may lack the funding it needs to be feasible, Ross and other Democrats pointed out during Wednesday’s hearing. President Donald Trump’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposed a $3.5 billion cut to the DOE compared to FY 2025.
On Tuesday, the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration said it will receive an over $28 million investment from the Technology Modernization Fund to help make some progress toward those goals. And while DOE is getting funding help, multiple lawmakers warned that the project’s push for the development of data center capacity may drive up already increasing energy bills.
“The reality is, what’s happening in Virginia is that utility rate payers are paying those costs for that energy infrastructure, and that’s increasing their utility bills,” Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., told Gil, adding, “My energy bill has gone up because of data centers.”
To power the Genesis Mission and other AI-related plans, Gil told representatives that the DOE is working to create a “renaissance” in nuclear and fusion energy. He said that the DOE is “in the process right now working collaboratively with all the stakeholders, meaning private sector and academia, to lay out an integrated roadmap of all the things we need to do as a country to deliver fusion power plants in the early 2030s.”
The variety of private partnerships under the Genesis Mission received attention from Reps. Bill Foster, D-Ill., and April McClain DeLaney, D-Md., who urged Gil to ensure that the project’s partnerships are not with just a select group of companies, which Gil agreed with.
On how DOE will ensure privacy and security for data used in the project’s AI, Gil told lawmakers that access to AI models will be restricted based on what data they’re trained on.
For example, open models trained only on public scientific data may be shared, but models incorporating classified information will not be exportable to private companies. Gil also clarified that Genesis would rely on multiple domain-specific models, not a single all-purpose system, to limit cross-contamination of sensitive information.
“We are not going to allow … confidential data from a specific area or a partner … to go and flow in … an uncontrolled manner to a party that should not have access to the data. We know that models represent data, so we will treat [AI models] like we treat [data],” Gil said.