The Trump administration is designating the Federal government’s Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer Council (CAIOC) as the “primary venue for interagency coordination and collaboration on AI adoption,” according to the White House’s AI Action Plan published on July 23.
The current status of the CAIOC, however, remains somewhat unclear, as current searches for information about the council come up empty as to its status, official functions, and membership.
According to reporting by the Government Accountability Office last year, the CAIOC was created and convened in 2024 by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in accordance with the Biden administration’s 2023 AI executive order. That order, however, was cancelled by President Trump earlier this year.
Since then, the administration has not announced a reconvening of the council, or anything about its leadership or membership. OMB did not respond today to an inquiry about the current status of the council.
The council, in whatever form it might take next, is being assigned a key coordination role in how the Federal government goes about adopting AI tech. The action plan goes into extensive detail on expectations for government to accelerate AI adoption and the policy recommendations necessary to achieve those goals.
“With AI tools in use, the Federal government can serve the public with far greater efficiency and effectiveness,” the action play says.
“Use cases include accelerating slow and often manual internal processes, streamlining public interactions, and many others,” it says, adding, “Taken together, transformative use of AI can help deliver the highly responsive government the American people expect and deserve.
The action plan says that the OMB “has already advanced AI adoption in government by reducing onerous rules imposed by the Biden Administration” – which issued its own AI executive order that was cancelled by President Trump in January” – and emphasizes that “now is the time to build on this success.”:
The White House plan recommends several policy actions toward that end, including formalizing “the Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer Council (CAIOC) as the primary venue for interagency coordination and collaboration on AI adoption.”
Through the CAIOC, the action plan calls for agencies to “initiate strategic coordination and collaboration with relevant Federal executive councils,” including the President’s Management Council, Chief Data Officer Council, Chief Information Officer Council, Interagency Council on Statistical Policy, Chief Human Capital Officer Council, and Federal Privacy Council.
The plan also calls for agencies to “create a talent-exchange program designed to allow rapid details of Federal staff to other agencies in need of specialized AI talent (e.g., data scientists and software engineers), with input from the Office of Personnel Management.”
Further, the plan calls for creation of an “AI procurement toolbox managed by the General Services Administration (GSA), in coordination with OMB, that facilitates uniformity across the Federal enterprise to the greatest extent practicable.”
“This system would allow any Federal agency to easily choose among multiple models in a manner compliant with relevant privacy, data governance, and transparency laws,” the plan says, adding that agencies “should also have ample flexibility to customize models to their own ends, as well as to see a catalog of other agency AI uses (based on OMB’s pre-existing AI Use Case Inventory).”
The plan also calls for implementation of an “Advanced Technology Transfer and Capability Sharing Program with GSA to quickly transfer advanced AI capabilities and use cases between agencies.”
It further mandates that “all Federal agencies ensure – to the maximum extent practicable – that all employees whose work could benefit from access to frontier language models have access to, and appropriate training for, such tools.”
Finally, the plan orders agencies to convene, under the auspices of OMB, “a cohort of agencies with High Impact Service Providers to pilot and increase the use of AI to improve the delivery of services to the public.”