SCSP recommends national robotics strategy to new administration

With a new administration in the White House comes an opportunity for new technology and economic policies. The Special Competitive Studies Project, or SCSP, last month released a memorandum for President Donald Trump to address critical technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence.

“Securing U.S. leadership in AI and robotics is crucial for America’s economic competitiveness and national security,” said the SCSP. “Through coordinated action across government, industry, and academia, the United States can build a robust domestic robotics ecosystem while accelerating adoption across critical sectors.”

In its memorandum, the Arlington, Va.-based organization listed three objectives:

• Set national-level technology goals for robotics that ensure U.S. leadership in development, deployment, and responsible use, driving economic growth, enhancing national security, and improving quality of life.
• Accelerate the adoption of robotics and embodied AI across U.S. industries to enhance competitiveness and strengthen the American workforce.
• Achieve strategic independence for the U.S. robotics industry, ensuring a resilient domestic ecosystem capable of leading innovation, production, and deployment without undue reliance on any country of concern, especially China.

SCSP noted that AI and robotics can help U.S. manufacturing, logistics, agriculture, and aerospace be competitive while mitigating job shortages and trade dependencies.

---

Now accepting session submissions!

---

SCSP discusses recommendations

Abigail Kukura, director for future technology platforms at SCSP, replied to the following questions from The Robot Report about the memorandum:

Did the Special Competitive Studies Project work with or represent anyone in the robotics industry or user sectors on these recommendations?

Kukura: We spoke with a range of actors across the private sector, academia, government, and investors. Part of the genesis of the memo was our AI+Robotics summit in October 2024. You can see the agenda on our website, and it included speakers and demos from many organizations:

• Companies including Boston Dynamics, ANYbotics, Anduril, Agility Robotics, Divergent, Farm-ng, Forterra, Machina Labs, NVIDIA, and Bright Machines
• U.S. government (USG) and labor organizations including the White House, DARPA, AFL-CIO, NASA, NIST, DoD, and the ARM Institute
• Investors/incubators including a16z, MassTech Collaborative, Construct Capital, SoftBank Robotics, and Eclipse Ventures

Does the organization expect the new administration to be more open to its recommendations than its predecessors?

Kukura: SCSP is nonpartisan in our work and bipartisan in our approach. We have had a receptive audience in government dating back to our team’s previous work via the National Security Commission on AI.

The U.S. government has become increasingly focused on technology policy and the U.S.-China strategic competition in recent years, and one of the Trump administration’s policy priorities is to bring manufacturing back to the USA. Robotics can and should be an important part of that.

Given the White House’s push to scale back the federal government, how would these initiatives be funded and managed?

Kukura: Many of SCSP’s recommendations do not require significant government funding and are more about interagency coordination and strategy at the White House level, as well as empowering state and local governments to be first movers in building and adopting technologies.

Our recommendations also center on improving mechanisms for the USG to coordinate with private-sector leaders via public-private partnerships. The locus of innovation today is squarely in the private sector, and there are structural challenges that make it difficult for the government to conduct long-term tech strategy.

We therefore recommend establishing a small tech strategy cell – we call it a Technology Competitiveness Council (TCC) – at the White House in the Office of the Vice President, the purpose of which is to voluntarily convene private-sector leaders who can help the government horizon scan to identify the most important emerging technologies, develop national strategies for specific technologies/sectors that include ambitious technology goals or moonshots, and mechanize both public and private resources around executing these strategies.

Was SCSP aware of similar efforts by the Association for Advancing Automation (A3) and the National Robotics Roadmap? Are you in contact with the authors?

Kukura: We incorporated a number of similar ideas while offering higher strategic and geopolitical framing. Our goal was to contextualize the need for the U.S. to step up its efforts in robotics within the broader technology competition between the U.S. and China.

We agree with the authors’ conclusions that, while several government agencies have ongoing robotics efforts, most of these programs are uncoordinated. Without a strategy, we continue to fall further behind.

Memo says challenges are urgent

Reshoring production, reskilling the workforce, and building up both robotics manufacturing and usage is a multi-year effort. Does SCSP have any goals or timelines?

Kukura: SCSP’s work has since 2021 focused on ensuring that the U.S. is positioned and organized for the U.S.-China tech competition between now and the end of the decade.

China’s robotics strategies call for the PRC to become the world’s leading humanoid manufacturing hub by 2027. That is coming up very soon.

Given the competitive nature of AI development and recent advances in China, how would a data foundry for robotics and industrial AI encourage both participation and security? How would it work with open-source efforts such as that for the Robot Operating System (ROS)?

Kukura: China’s data ecosystem for robotics is poised to be more organized than that of the U.S. as a result of extensive data from sources like CCTV networks, connected vehicles, and smart city infrastructure.

Moreover, the CCP can force companies to share data that Beijing deems strategic thanks to its National Security Law. In the U.S., the government cannot use state power to break those siloes.

While U.S. companies had an upper hand in large language models [LLMs] due to the English-language Internet, it may find itself behind the curve on the data needed to power robotics. One way to support a robust U.S. robotics data ecosystem could be a tiered-access data foundry that gathers relevant data for the robotics ecosystem and organizations have access to certain layers based on the amount and type of data that they contribute.

The data foundry could contain fully open-source datasets that build on and integrate existing efforts like ROS, as well as more sensitive or proprietary datasets that are anonymized and/or selectively exchanged among organizations.

As evidenced by DeepSeek, open-source will be an important vector for AI progress, and this will extend to embodied AI and robotics. Ultimately, a thriving U.S. robotics ecosystem will include a mix of open-source, hybrid, and closed-source approaches.

The U.S. Department of Defense already has programs supporting robotics and AI development, from DARPA and the ARM Institute to SBIR grants, and it has worked to streamline procurement processes. How would DoD create factories more directly?

Kukura: Building on existing programs, we argue that the DoD can send a demand signal to support the growth of domestic factories in the form of guidance, requirements, incentives, and purchase agreements.

One area where this is needed is shipbuilding. The U.S. maritime industrial base has atrophied badly, but U.S. firms deploy very few robots. Deploying more automation will be essential to boost productivity and bridge the workforce shortage.

Have you received any reply from the administration? Are you working with any industry groups or any members of Congress?

Kukura: The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission held a hearing earlier this month on China’s “Made in 2025” initiative that featured SCSP testimony and included humanoid robotics as one of the briefing topics.

Trump administration officials have articulated policy priorities that align with the report. In his confirmation hearing a few weeks ago, USTR nominee Jamieson Greer listed industrial robotics as one of five priority sectors for U.S. supply chain reshoring.