David Sacks told Bloomberg on Thursday that he has “used up” his 130 days as a special government employee and is stepping down from his role as the White House’s AI and crypto czar, and instead of leaving government entirely he is moving to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology alongside Michael Kratsios, who served as the Chief Technology Officer during Trump’s first term and is not new to this space.
No replacement for the czar position has been named, and based on current reporting none is planned, though Sacks predicted that Congress could pass bipartisan AI legislation within months.
Before running with the obvious “policy vacuum” angle, it is worth understanding the structural reality of what happened here. The 130-day limit on special government employees is a known legal constraint that has existed for decades, and Sacks’ departure was not a resignation, not a firing, and not the result of a policy disagreement. His tenure had an expiration date from the day it started, and everyone involved knew when that clock would run out.
The question that matters is not whether Sacks left but whether anyone planned for what happens after he did.
What Sacks Did and Did Not Accomplish
On the crypto side of his portfolio, Sacks helped advance stablecoin legislation and a digital asset regulatory framework, though key legislation remains in limbo without a clear advocate carrying it forward inside the White House.
On the AI side, the most visible output was the White House AI framework published earlier this month, which proposed preempting state AI regulations while explicitly opposing the creation of a new federal AI regulatory body. Our editorial position when that framework came out was that it read more like a liability shield for tech companies than a governance blueprint, and nothing that has happened since has changed that assessment, but it was at least a document that showed someone in the building was thinking about AI policy.
The 78 Bills That Are Not Waiting
While the federal government has been operating without a dedicated AI regulatory agency, and will now be operating without even a designated policy coordinator, state legislatures have been doing what state legislatures do when Washington leaves a vacuum. As of this month, 78 AI-related bills are alive in 27 states, covering healthcare AI, synthetic media, neurological rights, algorithmic bias, children’s online safety, and employment decision-making.
New York’s AI law takes effect this month. The Take It Down Act’s enforcement provisions kick in during May. California, Illinois, Colorado, and Texas all have active proposals moving through their legislatures at various speeds.
The White House framework attempted to preempt this state-level activity by asserting federal primacy over AI regulation, but a framework without someone to negotiate it through Congress, defend it to regulators, or even explain it consistently to industry stakeholders is just a document on a website. With Sacks gone and no replacement coming, the practical AI regulatory environment in the United States is whatever 27 state legislatures decide it is.
The PCAST Question
Sacks’ new role on PCAST lets him advise on a wider range of technology topics including AI, advanced semiconductors, quantum computing, and nuclear power, alongside council members that include Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and his co-chair Kratsios has genuine policy experience from his time as CTO during the first Trump administration. But PCAST is an advisory body that publishes recommendations, it does not write executive orders, coordinate agency action, or serve as the day-to-day point of contact between the AI industry and the White House.
There is an argument to be made that the czar role was always somewhat performative, that real AI policy coordination happens through the Office of Science and Technology Policy and through individual agency actions at Commerce, NIST, and NSF, and that losing a single coordinator does not actually break the system because the system was never built around one person. That argument has some merit and it would be dishonest to ignore it.
But there is a counter to it as well, which is that every previous administration knew the 130-day SGE limit existed and the fact that this administration did not have a succession plan in place, or at least has not announced one, suggests either that they do not think federal AI coordination matters enough to staff continuously or that the structural limitations of the SGE framework make continuity in these roles genuinely difficult to maintain. Neither explanation is a good look but they are very different problems, one is a policy choice and the other is a structural constraint, and the coverage should distinguish between them.
What This Means Right Now
The timing is not great. Anthropic is in federal court over its Pentagon dispute. The EU is actively treating AI as a competition issue. China is deploying AI export controls and expects to have its own post-quantum cryptography standards within three years. SoftBank just borrowed $40 billion to invest in OpenAI. The AI industry is moving at a speed that makes quarterly policy reviews feel like archaeological timescales.
The honest assessment is that the day-to-day impact of not filling the czar role will be hard to notice in the short term, because AI companies are going to keep shipping products and state legislatures are going to keep passing laws regardless of who does or does not sit in that office. But the next time there is an AI incident that requires a coordinated federal response, or an international negotiation that demands someone speak for U.S. AI policy with actual authority, the call is going to go to a desk that nobody occupies, and the 78 state bills marching through 27 legislatures are not going to wait for Washington to figure out who is supposed to be in charge.