Comparing the Genesis Mission to the Manhatten Project

Introduction

The Manhattan Project had a specific mission. To end the war by building a nuclear bomb. There was no time to waste on bureaucratic nonsense. Nobody had the goal of soaking up federal dollars. Money needed to be spent on building tools and infrastructure to achieve specific goals. There was a war to win, and the Manhattan Project was created to get the job done. Either that nuclear bomb detonated with the intensity of a fucking star, or it didn't.

What is The Genesis Mission?

On November 24, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order launching the Genesis Mission, described as a "dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI-accelerated innovation [...]".

The order draws a lofty, tone-deaf comparison to one of the most ambitious and momentous projects in American history.

In this pivotal moment, the challenges we face require a historic national effort, comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project that was instrumental to our victory in World War II [...]

Making this comparison is at best nonsense, and at worst, an insult to the scientists, military personnel, and politicians who pulled together in a moment of true crisis. The Manhattan Project was a wartime crash program with the specific intent to build a nuclear weapon before the Nazis could. Nations were facing a kill-or-be-killed moment.

How is this comparable to today?

No one is opening ChatGPT and thinking of Oppenheimer's "I am become death".

Instead, the Genesis Mission is more like a vehicle for funneling federal dollars from your pocket into the coffers of the technology companies feigning some sort of artificial intelligence existential crisis. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, has no qualms sounding the alarm about China "winning the AI race", and that America "must race ahead". No doubt, as the virtual monopoly of AI-capable GPUs, Huang's company would be a key beneficiary of government funded artificial intelligence infrastructure.
source cnbc

The Manhattan Project Comparison

Maybe we should put the true wartime crisis into perspective.

The Manhattan Project was a physically enormous, total-war mobilization effort involving the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. Nearly 130,000 workers were active at peak, with about 500,000 employees involved including turnover. That represented roughly 1% of the entire US civilian labor force. Physicist Niels Bohr remarked that the project could not be done "without turning the whole country into a factory". Three entire secret cities were built to support the effort, including Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos.

The project cost taxpayers nearly $2 billion - about $30 billion in today's money. The effort produced thousands of patent claims as it drove research in nuclear reactor technology, radioisotope production, materials purification, and diffusion plant design. All of these investments continue to have material impact long after the war.

The Manhattan Project was not some nebulous research initiative. It reshaped the American industrial landscape, built entire towns, and consumed the focus of the American military. The nation had to come together in a moment of need and get stuff done. To that end, project leader Major General Leslie Groves was granted the discretionary use of AAA military priority status - giving the project absolute top priority over all other matters. He had the authority to commandeer any material, labor, or transport in the country on demand.

Drawing a comparison between the Genesis Mission and the Manhattan Project is not a matter of apples and oranges, it's more like comparing a lame chatbot to a damn nuclear bomb.

The Ultimate Cash Grab

The Genesis Mission mandates that the Secretary of Energy shall set priorities and implement key objectives.

The secretary shall establish and operate the Platform to serve as the infrastructure for the Mission [...]

The order goes into detail, listing what the federal government will implement.

• High-performance computing resources, including DOE national laboratory supercomputers and cloud-based AI computing environments, capable of supporting model training, simulation, and inference [...]
• AI modeling and analysis frameworks, including AI agents to explore design spaces, evaluate experimental outcomes, and automation workflows [...]
• Secure access to appropriate datasets, including proprietary, federally curated, and open scientific datasets, in addition to synthetic data generated through DOE computing resources [...]

The Secretary is given 90 calendar days to "find federal computing, storage, networking resources available to support the Mission, including both DOE on-premises and cloud based high-performance computing systems and resources available through industry partners"

That last bit is important. It opens the door for federal funding (i.e. taxpayer money) to start flowing into companies like OpenAI, CoreWeave, Oracle, and Nvidia. Ostensibly, spending money in the federal government requires congressional approval. But the executive in the past decade has been given great leniency in "emergency" conditions, which in many cases it has the power to declare unilaterally. All those tariffs that went in place this year? Those were due to national "emergencies" as well. Stay tuned to hear about the upcoming national security concern of allowing China to develop artificial intelligence capabilities faster than the best and brightest businesses in the United States. Someone should set up a Polymarket for that announcement.

Bet on Corruption

Companies like Oracle and OpenAI are in desperate need of money. They have bet the farm on artificial intelligence becoming the core of the American economy, and they have done so long before existing AI tools have proven profitability or even relevancy. There is no evidence whatsoever that these companies will find a way to become successful on the investments already made into AI infrastructure. Maybe they will. Maybe they won't.

Why take the risk? Because what better way to make ends meet than to have the government step in and bail you out.

As written about previously, OpenAI's CFO Sara Friar has already floated the idea of government backstopping loans for AI infrastructure. What is the Genesis Mission if not an even more direct form of pilfering unwitting citizens. OpenAI is a perfect "match" for the demands outlined in the Mission plans. Oracle and CoreWeave would be only too happy to supply the federal government with billions of dollars worth of compute, all paid for by you and me, the taxpayer. Oh and don't think we forgot about Thinking Machines Lab, that $50 billion boondoggle still flying under the radar - also a perfect fit for Genesis Mission funding.

Conclusion

Americans should be furious about events taking place. Trump's Genesis Mission is not going to save the country from a literal imperial invasion. China is not knocking on our doorstep with T100 terminators ready to take us out. We're talking about chatbots, "agentic" tools, and Sora. These products should compete in the open marketplace. Let capitalism do its thing.

This program is going to take money out of my pocket and out of your pocket, give it to Silicon Valley tech monsters, and if they succeed in their ultimate goals will replace you in your own job.

Comparing the Genesis Mission to the Manhattan Project does nothing but incite delusions of grandeur among those who need idolization the least. It's inaccurate, it's slimy, and the people behind the mission - the politicians and visionary businessmen - are pathetic.

Take the money and invest it into educational or job training programs. Pay teachers a fair wage. Build some better roads and train tracks. Hell, maybe even build some housing for the generation of Americans that have been priced out of ever owning a home.

Just don't take our money and blow it on god damn Nvidia GPUs.