“It became very difficult, even under [president Joe] Biden, to get any papers out,” says a source who was at NIST at the time. “It felt very like climate change research or cigarette research.”

Before taking office, President Donald Trump signaled that he planned to reverse Biden’s Executive Order on AI. Trump’s administration has since steered experts away from studying issues such as algorithmic bias or fairness in AI systems. The AI Action plan released in July explicitly calls for NIST’s AI Risk Management Framework to be revised “to eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.”