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The White House is working to strengthen safeguards against biological attacks after staffing cuts early in the second Trump administration depleted expertise in a field where officials increasingly fear artificial intelligence could make it easier to create deadly pathogens.

By the end of President Joe Biden’s term, the White House had built a team of as many as 30 people focused on biological security, according to three former government officials who worked on the issue — two for Biden and Trump, and one just for Biden — and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional retaliation.

This specialized staff was charged with coordinating the web of federal agencies that deal with biohazards and provided scientific guidance to top officials.

That team rapidly dwindled after Trump returned to office amid cuts and reorganizations, said the three former officials, as well as a fourth former official, who also worked for both administrations. At times, nobody at the White House was dedicated solely to biosecurity, according to three of the former officials.

The losses have come as the administration has delayed replacing key Biden-era directives. It revoked a 2023 executive order on AI calling for stronger biological safeguards and cast doubt on a policy issued the following year designed to require companies to screen buyers seeking genetic components that could be used to create biological agents — widely seen by experts as a basic pillar of the nation’s defenses.

Trump directed officials to produce a revised version by August 2025. More than a year later, it has yet to appear, even as AI companies say their most advanced models are gaining increasingly sophisticated biological capabilities alongside the hacking skills that have alarmed officials this year.

“They have kneecapped themselves in their ability to create any policy that would have staying power,” said one of the former experts, who recently worked directly on outbreak response policy. “That’s the risk, they’re not playing the long game. The whole purpose of having the technocrats there is to advise political leaders on the nuanced tradeoffs of taking one path or another.”

In the absence of a large team, the White House has relied on a small revolving cast of employees. They have included a junior fellow without a security clearance; a part-timer from the research organization Rand; a pair of CIA staffers with little expertise in the field; and an Air Force doctor who had been a consultant to the White House medical office, according to the three experts.

A White House official said the administration was working to strengthen the Biden-era policy, calling it inadequate and technically limited despite the staff devoted to developing it, and did not address questions about the staffing changes.

“The Administration’s commitment to addressing AI and biological safety risks is clear and ongoing,” the official said in an email. “The White House has been developing policy for over a year, including in our AI Action Plan last summer.”

The Trump administration has acknowledged the biological security risks AI poses while touting the potential for the technology to help keep the nation safe. Trump told foreign leaders gathered at the United Nations last year that he wanted to prevent biological weapons disasters and said AI was a tool to help.

At the Pentagon, a former health official who led Operation Warp Speed — the effort during the first Trump administration to rapidly produce a vaccine for the coronavirus — is involved in efforts to use AI to speed the development of new defenses against future pandemics and to deter biowarfare. Part of the work involves analyzing billions of tweaks to antibodies to assess how to respond to new forms of the coronavirus.

But that work is taking place in a government that analysts and the former experts say has been drained of expertise amid broader cuts to federal public health and science funding.

The White House removed all the staff from the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, an organization created to lead the nation’s response to the kind of major outbreak that the most dangerous kind of bioweapon could trigger. The office was resurrected as Ebola spread in Africa this spring.

A National Security Council unit dedicated to health security was also shut, two of the former experts said, and parts of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Department of Homeland Security responsible for biological threats were broken up as part of broader reorganizations.

A scientist who worked on biotechnology and national security issues in both the first Trump and Biden administrations said the federal government is not taking a leading role in coordinating a response to the risks posed by the rapidly evolving technology.

“Every time an administration changes over there’s a lot of continuity that just gets disrupted,” said the scientist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized by their employer to speak publicly. In the transition from Biden to Trump, they said, “when it comes to biosecurity, that happened in a very disruptive way.”

There has never been one federal agency responsible for biosecurity, a sprawling field that encompasses efforts to secure research labs, aspects of public health work, and international diplomacy, and which is increasingly focused on the role of AI. But an analysis of Trump’s most recent budget request by the Council on Strategic Risks, a Washington-based security-policy think tank, concluded that the administration’s rhetoric on biosecurity was not matched by its funding proposals. In a separate analysis, the group found that spending across multiple government departments peaked in 2024, before declining slightly in Trump’s first year — with the administration proposing further cuts.

“General programmatic cuts and agency-specific reorganizations have restricted and eliminated key programs, clouding budgetary transparency and weakening US deterrence efforts,” the council wrote in a blog post.

When Trump returned to office last year, his team was focused on eliminating barriers to the development of AI technology. That approach began to shift this spring when a new generation of models proved to be capable of hacking into computer networks, leading administration officials to embrace the kind of government oversight of yet-to-be released tools that they had once spurned.

There are now signs that officials are taking additional interest in the potential dangers. That has included a recent string of briefings on biological risks between OpenAI, the White House, and half a dozen government agencies, according to a person familiar with the meetings, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe their private nature. Politico reported this month that the White House was launching a new initiative involving its cybersecurity office and a top official at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Leaders in the AI industry have long said that their tools being used to enable a biological attack ranks among their top fears.

“I’m getting very frustrated,” said David Relman, a professor of medicine at Stanford University who worked on pandemic response in the Biden White House.

The newest AI models, such as Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6, have continued to get better at high-level biological research. But just as the models’ ability to write computer code has made them good at hacking, their biological capabilities have stoked fears that they could be used to help build a new bioweapon, set off a new pandemic, or aid even a relative amateur in carrying out a biological attack. This month, the journal Science published the results of a successful effort to use AI to engineer new viruses. They were designed to infect bacteria rather than humans, but the outcome was a clear sign of what is becoming possible.

As early as last summer, researchers at OpenAI determined that they were close to reaching “high” levels of capability in biology, which the company defines as capabilities that “significantly increase existing risk vectors for severe harm.” The company briefed the Trump administration and hosted more than 50 government experts for a summit at its San Francisco headquarters last July to discuss how its systems could be used for biological defense. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

The company said it has continued to work with the administration, aiming to provide officials with access to a special version of GPT for biological defense that it calls Rosalind.

“The Administration has increasingly prioritized this important issue as AI capabilities have expanded, and we welcome their partnership,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in an email.

Despite the growing concern, scientists remain divided on how serious the risks are, how soon they might materialize, and how the nation should prepare. Large language models that power chatbots could be helping terrorists to do tricky lab work, and specialized biological design tools could aid in the creation of new kinds of deadly pathogens not readily recognized by current methods of surveillance.

In October, researchers at Microsoft detailed how they had patched gaps in detection systems after using AI to engineer digital versions of thousands of toxins that were not caught by the existing safety net.

A report by Rand concluded that attackers have a significant advantage over defenders when it comes to biological incidents. Someone carrying out an attack could make multiple efforts, while authorities need to be able to tackle every threat because even one “could result in catastrophic consequences.”

Leading American AI firms have sought to lock down their models, blocking them from answering questions about risky biological research and providing more capable systems only to trusted partners. But AI guardrails are imperfect and OpenAI said in July that its testing of leading Chinese models, which are made freely available, indicates that they do not have the same kinds of protections built in.

“I think we have a massive collective-action problem in front of us,” said Relman, the Stanford professor.

AI systems have gone on runaway hacking sprees in recent months but, for now, experts say the barrier between the digital world and the biological one presents a major hurdle — and an important line of defense. Yet that could begin to change as companies seek to automate laboratories.

“The ultimate fears are a ways out,” said Crystal Grant, a researcher at the Council on Strategic Risks. “We have a lead time before they’re here to prepare ourselves.”

Because the same abilities can allow AI to be used for dangerous and helpful biological research, many scientists also fear their work becoming too tightly regulated.

The Trump administration recently released a new policy on what it calls dangerous gain of function research. It’s a long-standing approach involving tinkering with pathogens in order to better understand how to defend against them. But it has become increasingly controversial in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The Trump administration has embraced the theory that the virus escaped from a Chinese lab that was undergoing gain of function work. Some scientists say the new policy is vague and could impede legitimate research.

In the private sector, researchers complained that biological guardrails Anthropic put on its most powerful model were too strict. The company loosened the restrictions this month.

Paul Friedrichs, a retired Air Force general, said the need to get the balance of safety and progress right underscored the need for strong leadership and expertise in the federal government.

Friedrichs, who ended his government career leading the White House pandemic office under Biden, said the cuts in the Trump administration have “unquestionably” left the nation less well prepared and at risk of squandering an incredible opportunity.

“We’re on the cusp of curing some of the banes of humanity,” Friedrichs said.

Heather Smith stood before the tattered portrait of Abraham Lincoln, holding a fine-tipped sable brush and a small plastic palette smeared with dabs of conservation paint.

Wearing special magnifying glasses, she peered at the edge of the unframed portrait where paint was missing and pieces of old canvas remained.

Lincoln, shown in the portrait resting his chin on his right hand, seemed to be watching.

“He’s been through a war of his own,” she said of the painting of the nation’s Civil War president. “It’s terrifying to think about.”

The 6-foot-2-inch portrait of a contemplative Lincoln sitting in a chair was painted in 1887. Time has weathered it and pocked it with flaws: Its original canvas was removed, probably with a scalpel. The surface of the painting was abraded, perhaps with an iron. And spots dotted the portrait where the paint was gone.

But the Baltimore art conservator, working for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, which owns the painting, has now embarked on a months-long effort to restore the majestic portrait to its original look.

The effort is part of the portrait gallery’s project to assess 110 of its presidential portraits and repair those in need. The work has been funded, in part, by a grant from Bank of America.

Smith is the owner of Maryland Art Conservation, which is based in a former Baptist church in northern Baltimore.

She has already worked on the gallery’s 1785 portrait of George Washington by English artist Robert Edge Pine. And she is scheduled to work on gallery portraits of presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Benjamin Harrison, Woodrow Wilson, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

She is also working on another Lincoln — known as the penny portrait, which resembles the image of Lincoln on the coin.

But the large portrait of Lincoln seated is, perhaps, the most dramatic and well-known of the group. He is shown wearing a dark suit, white shirt and bow tie. He is leaning forward, his left hand gripping the arm of the chair, as if listening.

The painting is too big to fit on an easel, Smith said, so it leans against a wall, flanked by two large windows. It was last on view at the portrait gallery in 2022.

It is one of four similar Lincoln portraits painted by the prolific American artist George Peter Alexander Healy, said Mindy Farmer, a portrait gallery historian.

“This has been an iconic work since it was created,” she said.

Another version, painted in 1869 and once owned by Lincoln’s son, Robert, is in the White House, according to the White House Historical Association.

The portraits are based on The Peacemakers, a painting Healy did in 1868 depicting Lincoln meeting with Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, and Rear Adm. David D. Porter near the end of the Civil War, according to the association’s website.

The gallery’s 1887 portrait was commissioned by Lincoln’s longtime friend and political ally Elihu B. Washburne, who wanted it for his home, art historian Alba Campo Rosillo wrote in Smithsonian Magazine in 2021.

Healy painted the portrait in the winter of 1887 in his studio in Paris, where he was living, Rosillo wrote.

Washburne died in Chicago later that year, and the painting passed to his brother, William, who died in 1912.

It was purchased in 1934 by the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust. It was given to the National Gallery of Art in 1942 and transferred to the planned portrait gallery in Washington in 1965, according to the gallery. The gallery opened in 1968 with the Lincoln portrait on display.

In the early 1940s, during conservation at a now-defunct gallery in New York, the painting underwent what Smith said was a radical treatment procedure.

“I’ve never encountered this before,” she said in an interview in her conservation lab. “They put [it] face down, removed the canvas from the back of the paint layers, which is extremely unusual.”

“They would have protected the front with something called a facing, which is paper glued to the front of the painting to keep everything intact, and then worked on the back,” she said.

The old canvas was probably scraped away little by little, except for a small ridge along the edges of the painting, she said. “I would not be surprised if that is how some of the painting’s numerous tears and holes were inflicted.”

The old canvas was replaced with a new backing, Smith said. The portrait also shows evidence of “abrasion,” where the paint has been worn down. What probably happened was that a prior conservator, assumably in the 1940s, used an iron to try to fix cracks in the paint surface, she said.

“When they ironed them, they didn’t put anything protective between the iron and the painting,” she said. “And I’m guessing they just wore down the paint.”

The painting’s last major conservation was in 1966, Smith said, and the portrait was in poor shape when she got it earlier this year.

She has since removed dirt and old varnish and reattached bits of paint that were loose.

She plans to soon begin comprehensive inpainting — adding paint to places where it’s missing. In her lab, she keeps books, paint brushes, picture frames, lighting equipment, jars of pigment, and a bed for her dog, Charity.

Across the room from the large Lincoln portrait, his penny portrait rests on a table. The work on it requires using bits of cotton on the end of a bamboo skewer to clean off dirt and soot.

The 1864 portrait, by the Boston artist William Willard, may have hung above someone’s fireplace, she said. The painting was given to the gallery in 1976 by Mr. and Mrs. David A. Morse, the gallery’s website says. It was last exhibited in 2009.

Smith, a native of Westminster, Md., has been an art conservator for more than 20 years, taking over the business in the small wood-shingled church when her employer retired.

She said she feels a sense of responsibility adding paint to damaged works of historic art.

“Early in my career … I would have conversations with the artist — ‘I’m sorry this happened to your painting,’” she said. “Over time, you treat enough paintings, you’re more looking at it as the materials, you kind of break it down in your head to the raw materials.”

She said that there is a sense of gravity to the work, a realization that the person restoring the art is part of its history.

“Obviously, you want to do no harm but make it look as good as possible,” she said. “Eventually, you won’t see any damages any more and will focus on what we’re here to see.”