Trae Stephens, co-founder of defense technology firm Anduril Industries, sharply criticized American lawmakers on Tuesday, warning that congressional dysfunction and Silicon Valley arrogance were handing China a strategic opening in the race for military and technological supremacy.
Speaking at the Hill and Valley Forum in Washington, Stephens told hundreds of executives and policymakers that the United States had no one but itself to blame for falling behind in what he called a “high-tech arsenal of autocracy” race with Beijing.
“Our federal government is not doing its job,” Stephens said. “It does not help us build great things. It does not solve hard problems. Frankly, it has abandoned its post.”
Stephens is a partner at San Francisco-based venture capital firm Founders Fund and the chairman of Costa Mesa, California-based Anduril, one of the largest defense tech companies backed by Silicon Valley.
At the conference, he ticked through what he called a generation of U.S. legislative failure. On immigration, he said that 70 to 80% of Americans support comprehensive reform and yet Congress has passed nothing meaningful in 40 years.
On healthcare, he said the United States spends roughly double what peer democracies spend, with worse outcomes. On education, he said the U.S. has fallen out of the top 10 in educational attainment and is “lagging far behind competitors in math and science” just as artificial intelligence is upending the labor market for recent graduates.
He was particularly withering on infrastructure spending, telling the audience that more than a trillion dollars allocated under recent chip and green-energy legislation had produced little more than “a handful of lousy EV charging stations and not a single fully built chips fab.”
“We haven’t even sent a man to the moon in my lifetime,” Stephens said. “‘It’s too hard’ or ‘someone else is going to do this’ aren’t excuses that cut it anymore in the 21st century.”
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Stephens argued that lawmakers were structurally incapable of keeping pace with technological change, saying that Facebook had 2 billion users before the first platform regulation was put in place, that drones became weapons of war before any laws governed their use against domestic threats, and that trillions of dollars in cryptocurrency changed hands before the government could agree on what it was.
“If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail,” he said. “When your main tools are investigations and the bully pulpit, the rules they write are often already obsolete by the time they take effect.”
But Stephens was equally sharp toward the technology industry, arguing that Silicon Valley’s years of resistance to Pentagon work had helped adversaries grow stronger. He recalled how software engineers pushed back against projects like Project Maven in the 2010s while parts of the technology establishment helped enable China to become “stronger, richer and more capable.”
“There is no moral neutrality in that decision,” he said.
His remarks came as Anduril this week began production at its new $1 billion Arsenal-1 manufacturing campus south of Columbus, Ohio, which is expected to employ more than 4,000 people over the next decade. The facility will initially produce the company’s FURY autonomous combat drone, Anduril’s entry for the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, which pairs uncrewed platforms with human fighter pilots.
