The man turning the Pentagon into a venture capital firm Emil Michael is one of several Pentagon leaders who have embraced a Silicon Valley ethos and an investor’s tool kit, sparking a frenzy among defense tech firms.
Michael is using money from the One Big Beautiful Bill to deploy up to $200 billion in federally backed loans to companies working in mineral mining, AI and biotechnology.
But the new approach is also causing concern among some former Defense Department officials, lawmakers and experts, who worry that appointees of President Donald Trump may be ushering in their chosen firms and taking on risks with taxpayer dollars — while placing fewer guardrails on new technology. “The big problem is the lack of transparency in how they choose to work with private firms,” said Darrell West, a senior fellow in the Brookings Center for Technology Innovation. “It’s not clear where they choose to invest or for what reason.”
Biotechnology is the use of living systems, organisms, or biological processes to develop products and technologies that improve health, agriculture, and the environment
Validation left and right. This has been true for decades now but hidden behind private individual fronts like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, etc...Thus the cause of concern is mostly baseless. Maybe thats why this is now becoming official instead of working behind individuals. Also the companies that the Pentagon has been funding is usually led by people it chose to run the business...even more reason to replace Olson as the Pentagon should be sending some of that money to Sintx for its anti-pathogenic & agricultural uses.
The only problem with Roosevelt was that he was a card-carrying CIA agent and if he'd been caught, the ramifications could have been pretty serious. So very quickly, at that point the decision was made to use private consultants to channel the money through the World Bank or the IMF or one of the other such agencies, to bring in people like me, who work for private companies. So that if we got caught, there would be no governmental ramifications.
Like what Perkins describes here, I believe Musk and Thiel were recruited to be private consultants to funnel investment money into companies of national security interest outside the purview and in addition to that of In-Q-Tel. So instead of economic hitmen they work as private investment fronts to fund and/or lead businesses of national security interests without ramifications to the government. Dr Griffin was a major investor into SpaceX through his positions at NASA and a Director at the Pentagon under Trump.