White House releases 'Winning the Race: America's AI Action Plan' — 90+ federal policy initiatives across innovation, infrastructure, and international diplomacy pillars; companion to datacenter permitting EO

Opening

On July 23, 2025, the White House released Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan — a roadmap document containing more than 90 federal policy initiatives across three pillars: accelerating innovation, building AI infrastructure, and leading in international diplomacy and security. The plan was published alongside three executive orders signed the same day: the datacenter permitting EO, an EO establishing the “American AI Exports Program” under Commerce, and an EO on AI ideological-bias in federal procurement.

What Happened / Key Facts

The Action Plan was drafted under the direction of David Sacks (White House AI & Crypto Czar, Founders Fund / Craft Ventures) with implementation responsibilities distributed across:

• Department of Commerce / Howard Lutnick — financial support for datacenter Qualifying Projects; the American AI Exports Program; the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), Lutnick’s June 2025 reconstitution of the former U.S. AI Safety Institute as a pro-innovation rather than pro-safety body
• Department of Energy / Chris Wright — federal-land site selection (announced one day later); the DOE-FERC large-load-interconnection rulemaking (October 23, 2025 ANOPR direction); coal-plant retention via DOE §202(c) emergency orders
• Department of the Interior / Doug Burgum — federal-land authorization; National Energy Dominance Council chairmanship; Secretary-level review hold on wind/solar projects (Secretary’s Order, July 17, 2025)
• Council on Environmental Quality — NEPA categorical-exclusion coordination
• EPA / Lee Zeldin — CAA / CWA / CERCLA / TSCA regulatory modifications to expedite Qualifying Project permitting; Brownfield/Superfund reuse guidance

The Plan’s three pillars functionally map to: (1) “accelerate innovation” = deregulate (preempt state AI laws, eliminate safety review); (2) “build AI infrastructure” = the datacenter-permitting EO operational stack; (3) “international diplomacy and security” = the AI Exports Program (Lutnick) plus the May 13, 2025 BIS rescission of the AI Diffusion Rule that opened the Tahnoon-UAE / G42 chip pipeline.

Why This Event Matters

The AI Action Plan is the doctrine document for the federal regulatory-design layer of the AI-datacenter buildout. The companion executive orders are the operational instruments. Read together, they constitute the most rapid administrative reorientation of federal energy, environmental, and procurement policy toward a single industrial buildout since the New Deal — and the most consequential since the 1980 Bayh-Dole / Stevenson-Wydler / 1981 Reagan-deregulation cluster.

The structural significance: every datacenter “build vs. don’t build” decision through end of decade now operates inside a federal policy environment that has administratively removed the friction triggers that environmental, public-utility, and procurement law would otherwise generate. The buildout proceeds inside a deregulatory envelope where NEPA review is presumptively inapplicable for projects below 50% federal financing share (which is essentially all of them), where CX adoption / new-CX creation by CEQ is on a 10-day clock, and where EPA is directed to rewrite Clean Air Act, CERCLA, and TSCA implementing regulations specifically to expedite the buildout.

This is the regulatory complement to the financial-disclosure rollback wave (administrative-capture-2025-rollbacks): same operational template (identify friction surface, neutralize administratively, bypass Congress), different friction surface (environmental and energy permitting rather than beneficial-ownership and ethics disclosure). The two streams are siblings, not duplicates — one operating on capital architecture, the other on industrial buildout.

Broader Context

The Action Plan was preceded by:

• January 20, 2025: EO 14156 declaring a national energy emergency under the National Emergencies Act — the umbrella authority under which subsequent Interior, DOE, and EPA fast-tracking is justified
• January 23, 2025: Trump’s revocation of Biden EO 14110 (the 2023 AI safety order)
• February 18, 2025: National Energy Dominance Council established with Burgum (chair) and Wright (vice-chair)
• March 6, 2025: Sacks’s presidential memo formalizing his AI & Crypto Czar role
• May 13, 2025: BIS rescission of the AI Diffusion Rule (Tahnoon-UAE / G42 chip-export liberalization, same-day as Trump’s Gulf departure)
• June 2025: Lutnick reconstitutes AI Safety Institute as Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI)

The Plan and its three companion EOs are the consolidation pass that puts the prior six months’ actions into a single doctrinal frame.

Research Gaps

• Full enumeration of the 90+ policy initiatives in the Action Plan document — only ~15 have been independently traced to subsequent agency actions
• Sacks’s drafting team composition (Founders Fund / Craft Ventures alumni vs. career OSTP staff)
• Industry comment / lobbying record on the Plan’s development — likely FOIA-reachable via OSTP records
• State-AG challenges to the AI-state-law preemption language in the December 2025 follow-on EO

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