Foundation for American Innovation

The Foundation for American Innovation (FAI) is a Washington, D.C. technology think tank. It describes itself as "a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, established in Silicon Valley in 2014 as Lincoln Labs/Lincoln Network, and refounded in 2023 as FAI," now "a national technology think tank headquartered steps from the U.S. Capitol Complex" at 408 C Street NE. It lists its fields as "technology and statecraft; frontier artificial intelligence; governance futurism; energy and infrastructure; and science and innovation," and states that it "does not adhere to a one-voice policy" and "generally does not take positions as an institution."¹

Lincoln Network and the Rename

On April 25, 2023, Lincoln Network announced that it had become the Foundation for American Innovation. The letter, signed by Zach Graves as executive director and Garrett Johnson as "Co-Founder & Chairman of the Board," stated: "When we began in 2014, our goal was to host events bringing together D.C. and Silicon Valley, two worlds that often misunderstand each other. But today, thanks to our Labs (previously Studio) and Policy Research teams, we're not a network, but a central hub, or Foundation." It gave the organization's mission as developing "technology, talent, and ideas that support a better, freer, and more abundant future," and listed its research subjects as "government modernization, R&D in breakthrough technologies, and U.S.-China strategic competition."²

Graves sat, with Tamara Winter of Stripe Press and Dan Correa of the Federation of American Scientists, on the external board of the Institute for Progress, another Washington think tank.³

Funding

FAI names as "major philanthropic supporters" Arnold Ventures, the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation, the Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, Coefficient Giving, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, DonorsTrust, the Doris Duke Foundation, the Ethereum Foundation, the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Miles Foundation, the Proton Foundation, Recoding America Fund, Renaissance Philanthropy, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Stand Together Trust, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, the Walton Family Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.¹ Coefficient Giving, the name adopted in November 2025 by Open Philanthropy, the grantmaker of Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, is also a listed supporter of Americans for Responsible Innovation, a lobby for AI regulation.⁴

Its "corporate supporters and event sponsors" include a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Astro Mechanica, Boom Supersonic, Cognition AI, DuckDuckGo, ExxonMobil, First Solar, Hadrian, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Meta, Microsoft, Mozilla, Narya Capital, New American Industrial Alliance, NRG Energy, Oklo, OpenAI, Paradigm Capital, Playground Global, Qualcomm, Rainmaker, Reflection AI, Shopify, Southern Company, T-Mobile, Uber, Ulysses, Variance, Waymo, XYZ Venture Capital, YCombinator, Yelp and Zanskar Geothermal. Under a "National Interest Gift Policy" it refuses gifts from foreign governments and from "entities with substantial ties to any country listed as a U.S. foreign adversary under 15 CFR 791.4 (China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela)."¹

The organization is registered with the Internal Revenue Service as The Foundation For American Innovation, EIN 47-2239840, with tax exemption issued in March 2015. Its returns show the following (in dollars):⁵

FAI Action and Lobbying

For "legislative advocacy and policy lobbying," FAI partners with "our affiliated sister organization, FAI Action, a 501(c)(4) entity," which it calls "a separate legal entity."¹ In the second quarter of 2026 two firms registered to lobby for the two organizations. Mission Strategies LLC registered FAI Action, Inc., described as "Advancing policies to drive effective energy and AI policy," reporting 40,000 dollars for the quarter on "Energy issues," with the lobbyist Yogin Kothari, a former professional staff member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Acorn Consulting registered the Foundation for American Innovation itself, reporting 10,000 dollars for "Permitting reform," with the lobbyist James Kungel, former chief of staff to Senator Joe Manchin.⁶

Staff in the Second Trump Administration

In September 2025 the reporter Caleb Ecarma wrote in Oligarch Watch that FAI had ties to Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Charles Koch, whom he called "right-wing billionaires," and that "the Trump administration installed staffers from FAI in key positions." He identified Michael Kratsios, a former FAI board member, as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, "where he co-authored the administration's 'AI Action Plan,'" and wrote that Kratsios had helped staff the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), "interviewing the engineers who wanted to join the team." Ecarma reported that Dean Ball, who had served with Kratsios in the White House on AI policy, was returning to FAI as a senior fellow; that Alexei Bulazel, a former FAI senior fellow, was senior director for cyber at the National Security Council; and that Jon Askonas, another former senior fellow, was on the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department. FAI did not respond to his request for comment.⁷

Ecarma wrote that "one current and two former FAI board members have worked at Thiel's venture capital firms." He described Kratsios as a former chief of staff and principal at Thiel Capital and chief financial officer of Clarium Capital Management, whose most recent employer, Scale AI, counted Thiel's Founders Fund among its investors; the board member Mike Solana as a vice president at Founders Fund; and the former board member Trae Stephens as a Founders Fund partner, co-founder and executive chairman of Anduril Industries, and an early employee of Palantir Technologies. He wrote that Thiel had spoken at FAI events at least twice, and that one of those events and several FAI podcast episodes featured David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto adviser, with the event also featuring the PayPal co-founder Luke Nosek.⁷

Policy Papers

In October 2024 FAI published "Efficiency Agenda for the Executive Branch," a roadmap for a future Trump administration calling for using "AI to streamline operations and reduce bureaucracy," including by "reducing the federal workforce for positions that can be automated." It stated that occupations "within the realm of administrative and knowledge labor," including accountants, auditors, legal secretaries and data managers, could be replaced by existing large language models, and that Biden-era restrictions on government use of AI were "much too risk-averse." A section on "eliminating waste" called for an executive order requiring agencies "to reduce improper payments and fraud" and to identify data-sharing needs and legal barriers. Ecarma wrote that Trump "implemented FAI's recommendation in his executive order creating DOGE," which granted DOGE "full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems."⁷

In March 2025 FAI's chief economist, Samuel Hammond, submitted a comment to OSTP's request for information on the AI Action Plan. According to Ecarma, Hammond asked the administration, "and DOGE in particular, 'to drive AI adoption within the Federal government'" by taking the "opposite approach" of the Biden administration's approval processes; urged a review of FedRAMP and "broader IT procurement guidelines" to "reduce compliance burdens" that he said "benefit Big Tech incumbents"; cited a federal recall of Tesla's self-driving software for rolling through stop signs, "something drivers do every day," as an example of excessive enforcement; and recommended removing clean-energy goals from a Biden executive order on AI infrastructure and granting AI data centers categorical exclusions from the National Environmental Policy Act. Ecarma noted that about three months later the administration weakened NEPA regulations at several agencies.⁷ Hammond also sits on the board of advisors of Americans for Responsible Innovation.⁸