As a federal contractor within NIH, I can tell you that the damage has already been done to the United States' dominance in science. Even if every action taken by current administration is reversed, the uncertainty for foreign scientists is too much. Many that I have spoken to are looking for their exit from either gov or academic research, or looking to leave the United States completely.
The Trump admins cuts are not likely to be reversed until at minimum 2029 if Democrats are able to take the White House. But the entire scientific pipeline has been disrupted. Science has always had "passion profession" tax, but at this point I would strongly recommend anyone pursuing life sciences or government research to either consider another field, or realize that you will most likely end up in industry.
You are entirely correct. The massive investment in science (and the culture of valuing scientific knowledge) that started with the cold war is coming to an end. It turns out that destruction is far easier to do than creation.
I was a PhD student in machine learning during the first Trump administration, and even then things were on very shaky grounds. The Muslim ban alone hit really hard, and was a boon for research institutions outside the US. (Look at Canada's Google Brain branch, for instance.)
But, until recently, there was still the plausibility that the whole Trump thing was a flash in the pan. When Trump lost in 2020, there was a sigh of relief that science would continue in the US.
This is on top of plummeting educational attainment in the US and the as-of-yet uncertain ramifications of students widespread reliance on LLMs.
It is very difficult to imagine a path of returning to the good reputation we had in science.
I'm increasingly sympathetic to the perspective that universities cannot both exclude any questioning of their ideological leaning while also expecting republican administrations and voters to continue funding them. I've seen this best expressed here: https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-beatings-will-conti...
It's one thing to want public funding, but it's quite another to want that funding while expecting nakedly partisan purity testing like "DEI statements" for faculty.
I am not sympathetic to this, simply because it is a long standing weapon to attack education.
If you believe, truly, in the market place of ideas, then the question is why you dont have wildly successful conservative universities springing up, to take advantage of the inefficiency this so called purity testing is taking up.
If professors are going to leave the country whole sale, thats a pretty clear sign of preferences which can’t be faked.
——
A point I raise on the DEI angle. We are at a stage where, with better ways to allocate resources, humanity could become (or be on its way to) a post scarcity species. This used to be the dream.
The question is how we spend our time. Part of that journey is the existence of role models from communities where there is a low diversity of examples of careers to take one through life.
DEI doesn’t mean that this is anti-majority. I’ve heard this particular assault in more than one country now. Fundamentally, the issue is never DEI.
The issue, stripping past the politics, is always resource distribution, AKA jobs.
> I'm increasingly sympathetic to the perspective that universities cannot both exclude any questioning of their ideological leaning
Well, they don't do that. The myth that universities are liberal monocultures is propagated by the right as an excuse to attack them.
Let's turn your argument around: most police departments employee conservative voters. Would you be comfortable with the government requiring "viewpoint diversity" among police offices? After all, why should liberal politicians fund non-liberal institutions?
The government should not discriminate based on political orientation. Government services, including government-funded universities, should serve all Americans.
> It's one thing to want public funding, but it's quite another to want that funding while expecting nakedly partisan purity testing like "DEI statements" for faculty.
Universities are, and should be, free to choose their own values and hiring practice.
The qualitative definition, that of practically every major technological breakthrough of the last half century having emerged from America, even if it was later capitalised on by others, more than suffices.
From his comment I think he just means the attractiveness of moving to the US to do research. US science is probably majority completed by foreign born scientists
Do you work in industry? I do and the notion that all or most science will be coming from MBA driven decision making makes me want to throw up. Industry does the wrong thing for a higher return on a regular basis. That's not what I want driving science.
Industry researchers are less likely to release their findings to the public, because their bosses choose that way. They are also doing research, but the outcomes of the research are fundamentally different.
I hate to be a contrarian right now, and it’s hard to disagree that an entire generation of science progress will be severely slowed because of this incompetence.
However, deep scientific cultural do roots exist here and won’t be stamped out by some fearmongering. The entire western world is under populist pressure right now, not just here. So even if you imagine someone moving out and studying in a different country, it’s not a guarantee they will find stability there either.
Have you ever applied for a grant? Do you understand how science in the USA is funded? How it is unique?
Will the rest of the world absorb the scientists in the US? Probably not, that is honestly their mistake and missed opportunity, but all the same probably not. Fine, so you're right? Scientists just stick it out? No.
The best scientists will definitely leave. Those are the very ones we always wanted to attract. They could have always left, but didn't because the US was the best place for them. Now they leave. Everyone else will try and leave or leave for industry. Even if you only lose 20% of your scientist to other countries and sectors where they are no longer doing productive scientific work, that is a massive blow to progress.
Worst case scenario is China wakes up from its xenophobia and uses this opportunity to replay the US science strategy. Suddenly 20-50% of US scientists can leave for China.
> even if you imagine someone moving out and studying in a different country
the problem is not students moving and studying elsewhere, it's PIs accepting a position to run a lab at an institution in another country that will fund their research; and many will definitely accept that given the prospects in the US for the next ?? years.
> However, deep scientific cultural do roots exist here and won’t be stamped out by some fearmongering
So, cutting off real funding is now considered "fearmongering"?
Sure, scientists wont move and decades of research goes down the drain and/or will never exist. Science progress will slow down but lets be contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.
> you think it's bleak that one's research now has to be profitable rather than being subsidized by people paying taxes?
I honestly don't understand why people don't get this - Government is not supposed to be "profitable". The whole reason to collect taxes is for good of the society. It sounds like your view is that rural towns, which are already in crisis, should be left to rot away because it isn't "profitable". The callous and lack of empathy is seriously astounding.
> you think it's bleak that one's research now has to be profitable … ?
The connection between new knowledge and profit is often indirect and cannot be clearly predicted beforehand. And, why must something be profitable in order to justify it? Are there no valid outcomes other than profit?
If I could legally hypothecate my entire tax payment to science funding, I would. Science research has a high overall economic multiplier and frankly I'm sick of how one political tendency in the US has chosen to clothe itself in ignorance for political gain. It's contemptible.
Why does research have to be profitable? There are many, many smaller diseases and cancers which affect a small subset of the population which will never be 'profitable', but it's important to research for the sake of scientific progress. I fundamentally do not understand how one can be so enthralled by capitalism that they believe we should not research anything unless a shareholder can generate a profit somewhere along the way.
> the damage has already been done to the United States' dominance in science
Why should my tax dollar subsidize for the dominance of US in science? How has US dominance in science helped the average American taxpayer in last decade other than funneling billions to arms or pharma industry or funding academians being out of touch with the rest of the country?
Other than, say, the GPS on your phone, the internet that you're posting on, or anything like that--you want to know what government-funded basic science has done to benefit you lately, not any of these decade-long timeline projects that are best funded by institutions with long time horizons, such as governments. Yes, we must have results that are brought to market this quarter, so the government-funded research justifies itself in the free market.
> Why should my tax dollar subsidize for the dominance of US in science?
This is a fair question.
For one thing, the US dominance in science has allowed us to dominate many profitable products and new industries that were derived from that science. I'm not sure I believe the commonly-given estimate that every $1 spent on basic research yields $8-20 in economic return, but I do believe that the return has been positive.
If other countries become the preferred target for the best and the brightest scientists then the US is unlikely to continue to dominate new research-dependent industries as we did for the last ~4 generations.
I don't necessarily think this is bad for the world -- concentrating too much wealth, talent, and power in one country has had corrosive effects. But this decline may ultimately be bad for the average US resident, even if their taxes go down.
> other than funneling billions to arms industry?
As someone who has worked on several military research projects, for better or worse my sense so far is that US military research budgets will be the only ones to come out of this administration largely unscathed.
it's not dominance, it's scientific achievement in general that benefits US citizens as well as the rest of the world
whether you care to admit or not, you've benefitted immensely from US investment in science, the entire digital & technological economy is downstream of basic scientific research
(the irony of a hacker news user and American taxpayer wondering how they've benefitted from tax dollars spent on science is not lost on me)
If I remember correctly Moderna is USA company and without their research on vaccines who knows how many millions more people would have died of COVID.
Did your precious tax dollars help Moderna directly or indirectly... Most probably. Are you happy to be alive? Most probably...
“Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health ... what have the Romans ever done for us?"
Good read; too long to sway public opinion though.
The most convincing and interesting thing I’ve read about the US’s science standing is just a reminder that it wasn’t always considered a global science leader. A few people saw the opportunity created by Nazi ideological purges of scientists and built, among other things, Princeton’s IAS.
Considered most charitably, the current administration sees itself as trying to return to an era of imperialism for the good of the country. In this area I wonder how resilient and immobile the scientific community is to these stresses. If I were in charge of science in a wealthy country right now I would be working overtime to brain drain US researchers.
Our founders were aware of the perils of letting public opinion write public policy. We’ve spent a lot of the post-Cold War era dismantling that anti-populist infrastructure.
To the extent I see a guiding light out of this mess, it’s in reducing the electoral fetishism that has dominated post-90s democratic discourse. There is more to democracy (and more pointedly, republics) than popular will. To the extent there is a silver lining in MAGA, it’s that the numpties have given us the tools with which to accomplish this if we choose to.
You're broadly right, but I would argue that the "anti-populist infrastructure" is specifically responsible for electoral fetishism.
The thing to remember is that in the 1950s and 60s the US government was basically running a censorship regime and had manufactured an anti-Communist consensus. They had to do this because democratic politics back then meant political parties actually listening to their constituents. In other words, America had populist infrastructure, which the state had to carefully commandeer to maintain the illusion of a unified society willing to fight a Cold War against a country which, at least on paper, was promising a better America than America.
This broke in the 70s, when the Vietnam War pitted young Boomers against old[0]. A lot of the civic institutions that were powering democracy in that era got torn apart along age lines, and fell apart completely. Politics turned from something you made with your voice to something you purchased with your vote. This is how we got the Carter / Reagan neoliberal consensus of "free trade and open borders for me but not for thee". The state was free to dictate this new public policy to its citizens because the citizenry were too busy fighting to mount an effective opposition to it.
[0] Recall that "Baby Boomer" is actually two generations of people, both because the baby boom was so long and because America's access to birth control was on par with that of a third world country. There's a never-ending wellspring of parental abandonment in that generation.
The US has (almost by design?) a system the favors tyranny of the minority. I'd argue the opposite: that the majority of voters are not well represented. Our two party system with capped Congress member count (which is reflected in the executive branch) and useless Senate only serve a minority of (monied) interests in the country.
I asked ChatGPT, it thought for 3 minutes and 36 seconds. You can see the Q&A here [1].
Assuming that a one year salary of the average scientist is 100K euro's [2] then that means you're trying to attract an extra 1250 scientists that will work for 4 years.
That doesn't sound like a lot on a continental scale.
Audience. This will only reach people who agree. It's a lesson Dems just haven't learned yet about where America is in discourse:
Hillary: "This great economy, based on the new globalization means that we will with the help of economists transform Pennsylvania's economic infrastructure away from dirty fuels."
Donald: "I'm going to save coal."
Kamala: "My macroeconomists say this is the best economy the US has ever seen, and they say my plan to help will put money back in American pockets"
Honestly, yes. To sway public opinion, you have to meet your audience where they get their information. I know that my mother gets most of her news from TikTok unfortunately. Reaching out to the public through as many avenues as possible is absolutely necessary at this point.
It's a common characteristics of states that start consolidating enough power to nationalize science funding. They often eventually use it to wield power.
> If I were in charge of science in a wealthy country right now I would be working overtime to brain drain US researchers.
European universities would love to do so, the problem is that our model of funding is just as braindead as it is in the US (if not worse, like in Germany) and our politicians are too braindead or unwilling to fix the circumstances.
There are no free countries wealthy enough to do that. European salaries in the academia are laughable even by American academic standards, including supposedly rich countries like Germany and Netherlands. Switzerland is too small, and cut her scientific funding recently as well. UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia etc are authoritarian petrostates.
One country that will actually drain American researchers will be China.
IMHO America's success as a scientific powerhouse had more to do with the research infrastructure spun up to win the war than Nazi scientists afterwards.
Honestly way more with just being the one super power standing after the war. We were basically untouched, even accounting for dead and wounded we only lost ~1 million people and practically zero manufacturing infrastructure so we came out of the war roaring and flush with cash. That catapulted the US to where it has been for the whole of the time since but a lot of people seem to have believed we were owed that or earned it through some special property of the US and the come down from it is not going well socially.
Parent comment says "the opportunity created by Nazi ideological purges of scientists" , which is not the same as "Nazi scientists".
Did you see the "Oppenheimer" movie? Check the real physicists depicted working on the Manhattan project. A large number of them were European Jews who left before or during the war. Einstein, Teller, Szilard, Hornig.
Even some others left Europe because of this: Niels Bohr (Jewish Mother) and Enrico Fermi (Jewish Wife).
To be sure there was Wernher von Braun and co as well.
In fact, it would be quicker to list the Manhattan project physicists depicted in that movie who were not Jewish at all:
>Considered most charitably, the current administration sees itself as trying to return to an era of imperialism for the good of the country.
I mean there's charitable interpretation, then there's being an emu and pretending that the transfer of massive wealth to Trump and his cronies through stock market manipulation (after removing checks on said manipulation, apparently) isn't just wide scale theft. $3.4B to only two of Trump's circle {Trump bragged in a recent video} direct from the pockets of regular investors through market manipulation - I could well imagine the total is trillions.
respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself.
secondly, sitting in California, this repeated cool-kid refs to Nazis is just more knee-jerk polarization. Serious topics are at hand. Excess and overly-optimistic polarizing rhetoric with smug bank accounts are a root cause of this recent extreme swing in Federal powers. IMHO
I think your perspective on this matters a lot less than that of the researchers. Their perception is that what’s happening at Harvard and NSF is fascism.
The perception is that we have a gestapo in ICE arresting mayors and judges, an admin talking about suspending habeas corpus, going after scientists who come to conclusions they don’t like, and just gutting funding for research in general.
You can say, “oh this is hyperbole” and “these people are wrong to leave,” but all that really gonna matter is that they were terrified and left.
> respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself.
I have very bad news for you re: the last ~70 years of research on voter behavior in democracies.
The story of the field is, if I may paint it a bit poetically, researchers hiding under their desks and rocking back and forth going "it can't be that bad... it can't really work like that..." until they gin up the courage to look again, find it's even worse than they thought, and repeat the cycle.
I'd say the swing in Federal powers comes from the real income dropping for most Americans over the last 30 years. Nobody wants to be told "this is great!" when it is not. Especially when it's "Macroeconomists say this is great!".
Bread and circuses -- the prior administrations, regardless of political camp, have delivered neither the circus nor the bread. People want to try something else.
That's in my opinion totally orthogonal to the aims of those digging in Federally right now; those aims are fairly diverse in my opinion, if themed.
This is not a knee jerk mention of Nazis, it is a well known fact that after world war II the US changed strategy to invest in research and pull the best talent from around the world. That was in part motivated by German scientists fleeing Nazi Germany.
> respectfully disagree on several points.. if "public opinion" is only legitimate in 240 characters or less, then you have doomed yourself.
That's the problem of the tiktokification of public discourse. Attention spans of the wide masses are really, really low, everything longer than a tiktok or youtube short just gets dismissed as "too long, didn't read". Trump, for all his faults, is a master of that - each of his speeches is not designed to be appealing to the audience, but to be cut into very short "soundbites" that just convey the core message.
> If I were in charge of science in a wealthy country right now I would be working overtime to brain drain US researchers.
My perception (probably skewed by overly negative media) is that the US is leading a global trend (emphasis on leading). It feels like the world is too busy preparing for war or economic gloom than trying to poach scientists.
Counterpoint via anecdotes… this week I am at the International Symposium for Green Chemistry. >600 chemists from all over the world. They are all psyched to advance safer and sustainable solutions to a wide variety of problems. You see all their funding sources from the UN to EU to country to city to local, as well as private companies. You see their collaboration and enthusiasm.
Of course the US comes up… but it seems that the rest of the world is just moving on without us (I am American). Our government is simply an unreliable partner. Some US PhD candidates here are looking for post-doc labs in the EU.
A speaker for Dow Chemical was talking about their Year 2050+ plan for net-zero CO2 and circular economy. I was surprised to learn (news was last month) that Dow cancelled their $9B net-zero ethylene processing facility in Canada because US tariffs will make it too expensive (to build it and long term it’s the source of ethylene). Imagine the jobs lost, contracts lost, US exports lost, and environmental damage.
This morning I had this conversation (before seeing OP): “If all the US university research funding disintegrates, how does that affect the primacy of US science education? How should somebody applying to college now think about this?” Perhaps focus on a teaching-focused college and then try to do the research abroad? Of course such choices are more easily available to the wealthy. US higher science education and industry will just naturally decline?
Random: Only one talk I’ve seen so far included a GitHub repo.
Separately, I have multiple friends who lost their US lab funding and/or jobs. I also have a friend who was being poached via Dutch Visa fast-track. I think the science brain drain is real.
Sabine highlights the problem with scientific funding in this video and it should be required watching before posting on this thread. Reform is needed. Some good will be tossed with a lot of bad. Its a cycle, a pendulum, and it will eventually tip to excess again sometime in the future. For now... fixing what is broken ought to be the priority.
I got to the point where he says the email she made a video about is probably her own making and stopped. It is a >1.5h response to a 10-minute video, and at minute 7 (of 1.5h) he proceeds to basically call her a liar in a fundamental way without having any strong evidence for it. Mind you the first 7 minutes were spent claiming she put forall quantifiers where she just implied strong prevalence and telling how much better the guy is for the society than her. From these things I would say you'd waste your time watching this unless you want to practice fishing for fallacies. The 3 I mentioned so far are: the leaky bucket fallacy (weak evidence for liar claim), straw man (arbitrary adding forall), and ad hominem (attack character instead of presenting argument).
"The field" in her case is "particle physics". And she's been making a very good case against the non-science being done in that field. Unfortunately, like physicists tend to do, for some reason, she's branched out into criticizing "not her field" as well, sometimes even non-science topics, to far worse effect. She's become an excellent example of audience capture, a loss to us all (and a loss to credibility she earned within particle physics).
I think there may be a language issue here; to use her own words as best as I can remember them, excusing her bluntness under "perhaps I'm just German" — a messy kichen here in Germany would be described with the word "Chaos", and a mistake that a Brit would call "dropping the ball" would be described as "eine totale Shitshow".
But that means I don't put too much credence to her summary of climate science or trans stuff: when it's the topic of inclusivity attempts, she's got the direct personal experience to play the "here's how well intentioned policies backfire" card; when it's the internal politics within science, honestly that reminds me a lot of software development's cycle of which language, framework, design pattern, and organisational orientation pattern (objects, composition, functional, etc.) is a code smell or the smell of coffee that one should wake up to, so it rings true even if I can't verify it.
> The NSF’s investments have shaped some of the most transformative technologies of our time—from GPS to the internet—and supported vital research in the social and behavioral sciences that helps the nation understand itself and evaluate its progress toward its democratic ideals. So in 2024, I was honored to be appointed to the National Science Board, which is charged under 42 U.S. Code § 1863 with establishing the policies of the Foundation and providing oversight of its mission.
> But the meaning of oversight changed with the arrival of DOGE. That historical tension—between the promise of scientific freedom and the peril of political control—may now be resurfacing in troubling ways. Last month, when a National Science Board statement was released on occasion of the April 2025 resignation of Trump-appointed NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, it was done so without the participation or notice of all members of the Board.
> Last week, as the Board held its 494th meeting, I listened to NSF staff say that DOGE had by fiat the authority to give thumbs up or down to grant applications which had been systematically vetted by layers of subject matter experts.
> Our closed-to-the-public deliberations were observed by Zachary Terrell from the DOGE team. Through his Zoom screen, Terrell showed more interest in his water bottle and his cuticles than in the discussion. According to Nature Terrell, listed as a "consultant" in the NSF directory, had accessed the NSF awards system to block the dispersal of approved grants. The message I received was that the National Science Board had a role to play in name only.
I can't sum up everything that's wrong with this moment better than that.
This is not some necessary pain that comes with shaking up the system.
This is a hostile takeover of the federal government by embarrassingly ignorant goons who think they know everything, just because they can vibe code an almost functional app. This is what happens when you have VCs huffing their own farts in their Signal echo chamber: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t.... Congratulations, you buffoons, you have demonstrated there are scaling laws for footguns.
that semaphore article is pretty interesting, there is a whole body of work being developed by folks like Gil Duran, Naomi Klein, Emil Torres, etc. right now diving into the Tech Right and characters like Andreessen
one thing I'm struck by is the willingness of people who greatly benefitted from the downstream effects of basic research (ex: the entire internet economy being downstream of DARPA, CERN, etc.) to tear down basic research, to .... unleash science?
take Peter Thiel for instance, across Youtube, blogs, and articles you can hear him railing against science and how it's stuck in the 70s...there almost seems to be this Silicon Valley disdain for science & scientific research and I'd love to understand why engineer/innovator characters are so antagonistic to researchers
(aside: there is a strong chance these characters are hyper interested in race science, eugenics, and gene modification and they are simply upset about ethics which they euphemistically refer to as "dogmatism")
:100: the fact that these technofascists are willing to amputate the hand that feeds them (NSF, DARPA, NIH) tells you everything you need to know about how deluded they are. It's literally Terminal Engineer Brain.
Very much agree we need to make and shame these dufuses who think they'll be the God kings of federated techno states, like Thiel and his ersatz court philosopher Moldbug.
Readit News
The Trump admins cuts are not likely to be reversed until at minimum 2029 if Democrats are able to take the White House. But the entire scientific pipeline has been disrupted. Science has always had "passion profession" tax, but at this point I would strongly recommend anyone pursuing life sciences or government research to either consider another field, or realize that you will most likely end up in industry.
Things are quite bleak right now...
I was a PhD student in machine learning during the first Trump administration, and even then things were on very shaky grounds. The Muslim ban alone hit really hard, and was a boon for research institutions outside the US. (Look at Canada's Google Brain branch, for instance.)
But, until recently, there was still the plausibility that the whole Trump thing was a flash in the pan. When Trump lost in 2020, there was a sigh of relief that science would continue in the US.
This is on top of plummeting educational attainment in the US and the as-of-yet uncertain ramifications of students widespread reliance on LLMs.
It is very difficult to imagine a path of returning to the good reputation we had in science.
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It's one thing to want public funding, but it's quite another to want that funding while expecting nakedly partisan purity testing like "DEI statements" for faculty.
If you believe, truly, in the market place of ideas, then the question is why you dont have wildly successful conservative universities springing up, to take advantage of the inefficiency this so called purity testing is taking up.
If professors are going to leave the country whole sale, thats a pretty clear sign of preferences which can’t be faked.
——
A point I raise on the DEI angle. We are at a stage where, with better ways to allocate resources, humanity could become (or be on its way to) a post scarcity species. This used to be the dream.
The question is how we spend our time. Part of that journey is the existence of role models from communities where there is a low diversity of examples of careers to take one through life.
DEI doesn’t mean that this is anti-majority. I’ve heard this particular assault in more than one country now. Fundamentally, the issue is never DEI.
The issue, stripping past the politics, is always resource distribution, AKA jobs.
Well, they don't do that. The myth that universities are liberal monocultures is propagated by the right as an excuse to attack them.
Let's turn your argument around: most police departments employee conservative voters. Would you be comfortable with the government requiring "viewpoint diversity" among police offices? After all, why should liberal politicians fund non-liberal institutions?
The government should not discriminate based on political orientation. Government services, including government-funded universities, should serve all Americans.
> It's one thing to want public funding, but it's quite another to want that funding while expecting nakedly partisan purity testing like "DEI statements" for faculty.
Universities are, and should be, free to choose their own values and hiring practice.
However, deep scientific cultural do roots exist here and won’t be stamped out by some fearmongering. The entire western world is under populist pressure right now, not just here. So even if you imagine someone moving out and studying in a different country, it’s not a guarantee they will find stability there either.
Will the rest of the world absorb the scientists in the US? Probably not, that is honestly their mistake and missed opportunity, but all the same probably not. Fine, so you're right? Scientists just stick it out? No.
The best scientists will definitely leave. Those are the very ones we always wanted to attract. They could have always left, but didn't because the US was the best place for them. Now they leave. Everyone else will try and leave or leave for industry. Even if you only lose 20% of your scientist to other countries and sectors where they are no longer doing productive scientific work, that is a massive blow to progress.
Worst case scenario is China wakes up from its xenophobia and uses this opportunity to replay the US science strategy. Suddenly 20-50% of US scientists can leave for China.
the problem is not students moving and studying elsewhere, it's PIs accepting a position to run a lab at an institution in another country that will fund their research; and many will definitely accept that given the prospects in the US for the next ?? years.
So, cutting off real funding is now considered "fearmongering"?
Sure, scientists wont move and decades of research goes down the drain and/or will never exist. Science progress will slow down but lets be contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.
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you think it's bleak that one's research now has to be profitable rather than being subsidized by people paying taxes?
I honestly don't understand why people don't get this - Government is not supposed to be "profitable". The whole reason to collect taxes is for good of the society. It sounds like your view is that rural towns, which are already in crisis, should be left to rot away because it isn't "profitable". The callous and lack of empathy is seriously astounding.
The connection between new knowledge and profit is often indirect and cannot be clearly predicted beforehand. And, why must something be profitable in order to justify it? Are there no valid outcomes other than profit?
If I could legally hypothecate my entire tax payment to science funding, I would. Science research has a high overall economic multiplier and frankly I'm sick of how one political tendency in the US has chosen to clothe itself in ignorance for political gain. It's contemptible.
Why should my tax dollar subsidize for the dominance of US in science? How has US dominance in science helped the average American taxpayer in last decade other than funneling billions to arms or pharma industry or funding academians being out of touch with the rest of the country?
This is a fair question.
For one thing, the US dominance in science has allowed us to dominate many profitable products and new industries that were derived from that science. I'm not sure I believe the commonly-given estimate that every $1 spent on basic research yields $8-20 in economic return, but I do believe that the return has been positive.
If other countries become the preferred target for the best and the brightest scientists then the US is unlikely to continue to dominate new research-dependent industries as we did for the last ~4 generations.
I don't necessarily think this is bad for the world -- concentrating too much wealth, talent, and power in one country has had corrosive effects. But this decline may ultimately be bad for the average US resident, even if their taxes go down.
> other than funneling billions to arms industry?
As someone who has worked on several military research projects, for better or worse my sense so far is that US military research budgets will be the only ones to come out of this administration largely unscathed.
whether you care to admit or not, you've benefitted immensely from US investment in science, the entire digital & technological economy is downstream of basic scientific research
(the irony of a hacker news user and American taxpayer wondering how they've benefitted from tax dollars spent on science is not lost on me)
If I remember correctly Moderna is USA company and without their research on vaccines who knows how many millions more people would have died of COVID.
Did your precious tax dollars help Moderna directly or indirectly... Most probably. Are you happy to be alive? Most probably...
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The most convincing and interesting thing I’ve read about the US’s science standing is just a reminder that it wasn’t always considered a global science leader. A few people saw the opportunity created by Nazi ideological purges of scientists and built, among other things, Princeton’s IAS.
Considered most charitably, the current administration sees itself as trying to return to an era of imperialism for the good of the country. In this area I wonder how resilient and immobile the scientific community is to these stresses. If I were in charge of science in a wealthy country right now I would be working overtime to brain drain US researchers.
Our founders were aware of the perils of letting public opinion write public policy. We’ve spent a lot of the post-Cold War era dismantling that anti-populist infrastructure.
To the extent I see a guiding light out of this mess, it’s in reducing the electoral fetishism that has dominated post-90s democratic discourse. There is more to democracy (and more pointedly, republics) than popular will. To the extent there is a silver lining in MAGA, it’s that the numpties have given us the tools with which to accomplish this if we choose to.
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The thing to remember is that in the 1950s and 60s the US government was basically running a censorship regime and had manufactured an anti-Communist consensus. They had to do this because democratic politics back then meant political parties actually listening to their constituents. In other words, America had populist infrastructure, which the state had to carefully commandeer to maintain the illusion of a unified society willing to fight a Cold War against a country which, at least on paper, was promising a better America than America.
This broke in the 70s, when the Vietnam War pitted young Boomers against old[0]. A lot of the civic institutions that were powering democracy in that era got torn apart along age lines, and fell apart completely. Politics turned from something you made with your voice to something you purchased with your vote. This is how we got the Carter / Reagan neoliberal consensus of "free trade and open borders for me but not for thee". The state was free to dictate this new public policy to its citizens because the citizenry were too busy fighting to mount an effective opposition to it.
[0] Recall that "Baby Boomer" is actually two generations of people, both because the baby boom was so long and because America's access to birth control was on par with that of a third world country. There's a never-ending wellspring of parental abandonment in that generation.
Here's an article from a European perspective: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/usa-scientists-lo...
I asked ChatGPT, it thought for 3 minutes and 36 seconds. You can see the Q&A here [1].
Assuming that a one year salary of the average scientist is 100K euro's [2] then that means you're trying to attract an extra 1250 scientists that will work for 4 years.
That doesn't sound like a lot on a continental scale.
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/682376a6-5c68-8005-89ab-2bedd453c7...
[2] It's definitely lower than 100K, but it allows for unexpected hidden overhead that ChatGPT potentially didn't account for.
Maybe they should have done a TikTok or a YT short? Would that be the right length?
Hillary: "This great economy, based on the new globalization means that we will with the help of economists transform Pennsylvania's economic infrastructure away from dirty fuels."
Donald: "I'm going to save coal."
Kamala: "My macroeconomists say this is the best economy the US has ever seen, and they say my plan to help will put money back in American pockets"
Donald: "No taxes on tips."
It's a common characteristics of states that start consolidating enough power to nationalize science funding. They often eventually use it to wield power.
European universities would love to do so, the problem is that our model of funding is just as braindead as it is in the US (if not worse, like in Germany) and our politicians are too braindead or unwilling to fix the circumstances.
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One country that will actually drain American researchers will be China.
Did you see the "Oppenheimer" movie? Check the real physicists depicted working on the Manhattan project. A large number of them were European Jews who left before or during the war. Einstein, Teller, Szilard, Hornig.
Even some others left Europe because of this: Niels Bohr (Jewish Mother) and Enrico Fermi (Jewish Wife).
To be sure there was Wernher von Braun and co as well.
In fact, it would be quicker to list the Manhattan project physicists depicted in that movie who were not Jewish at all:
* Ernest Lawrence
* Luis Walter Alvarez
Bit of A, bit of B, with B encompassing the Nazis and the British.
I mean there's charitable interpretation, then there's being an emu and pretending that the transfer of massive wealth to Trump and his cronies through stock market manipulation (after removing checks on said manipulation, apparently) isn't just wide scale theft. $3.4B to only two of Trump's circle {Trump bragged in a recent video} direct from the pockets of regular investors through market manipulation - I could well imagine the total is trillions.
'I'm stealing from you for your own good'!
Hmm.
secondly, sitting in California, this repeated cool-kid refs to Nazis is just more knee-jerk polarization. Serious topics are at hand. Excess and overly-optimistic polarizing rhetoric with smug bank accounts are a root cause of this recent extreme swing in Federal powers. IMHO
The perception is that we have a gestapo in ICE arresting mayors and judges, an admin talking about suspending habeas corpus, going after scientists who come to conclusions they don’t like, and just gutting funding for research in general.
You can say, “oh this is hyperbole” and “these people are wrong to leave,” but all that really gonna matter is that they were terrified and left.
I have very bad news for you re: the last ~70 years of research on voter behavior in democracies.
The story of the field is, if I may paint it a bit poetically, researchers hiding under their desks and rocking back and forth going "it can't be that bad... it can't really work like that..." until they gin up the courage to look again, find it's even worse than they thought, and repeat the cycle.
Bread and circuses -- the prior administrations, regardless of political camp, have delivered neither the circus nor the bread. People want to try something else.
That's in my opinion totally orthogonal to the aims of those digging in Federally right now; those aims are fairly diverse in my opinion, if themed.
That's the problem of the tiktokification of public discourse. Attention spans of the wide masses are really, really low, everything longer than a tiktok or youtube short just gets dismissed as "too long, didn't read". Trump, for all his faults, is a master of that - each of his speeches is not designed to be appealing to the audience, but to be cut into very short "soundbites" that just convey the core message.
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My perception (probably skewed by overly negative media) is that the US is leading a global trend (emphasis on leading). It feels like the world is too busy preparing for war or economic gloom than trying to poach scientists.
Of course the US comes up… but it seems that the rest of the world is just moving on without us (I am American). Our government is simply an unreliable partner. Some US PhD candidates here are looking for post-doc labs in the EU.
A speaker for Dow Chemical was talking about their Year 2050+ plan for net-zero CO2 and circular economy. I was surprised to learn (news was last month) that Dow cancelled their $9B net-zero ethylene processing facility in Canada because US tariffs will make it too expensive (to build it and long term it’s the source of ethylene). Imagine the jobs lost, contracts lost, US exports lost, and environmental damage.
This morning I had this conversation (before seeing OP): “If all the US university research funding disintegrates, how does that affect the primacy of US science education? How should somebody applying to college now think about this?” Perhaps focus on a teaching-focused college and then try to do the research abroad? Of course such choices are more easily available to the wealthy. US higher science education and industry will just naturally decline?
Random: Only one talk I’ve seen so far included a GitHub repo.
Separately, I have multiple friends who lost their US lab funding and/or jobs. I also have a friend who was being poached via Dutch Visa fast-track. I think the science brain drain is real.
NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43935913
Sabine highlights the problem with scientific funding in this video and it should be required watching before posting on this thread. Reform is needed. Some good will be tossed with a lot of bad. Its a cycle, a pendulum, and it will eventually tip to excess again sometime in the future. For now... fixing what is broken ought to be the priority.
While there are certainly problems within science, Sabine has the most nihilistic view of the field.
https://youtu.be/nJjPH3TQif0
"The field" in her case is "particle physics". And she's been making a very good case against the non-science being done in that field. Unfortunately, like physicists tend to do, for some reason, she's branched out into criticizing "not her field" as well, sometimes even non-science topics, to far worse effect. She's become an excellent example of audience capture, a loss to us all (and a loss to credibility she earned within particle physics).
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This doesn't render her immune to the lifecycle of physicists, of course: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556 and https://xkcd.com/793/
But that means I don't put too much credence to her summary of climate science or trans stuff: when it's the topic of inclusivity attempts, she's got the direct personal experience to play the "here's how well intentioned policies backfire" card; when it's the internal politics within science, honestly that reminds me a lot of software development's cycle of which language, framework, design pattern, and organisational orientation pattern (objects, composition, functional, etc.) is a code smell or the smell of coffee that one should wake up to, so it rings true even if I can't verify it.
> The NSF’s investments have shaped some of the most transformative technologies of our time—from GPS to the internet—and supported vital research in the social and behavioral sciences that helps the nation understand itself and evaluate its progress toward its democratic ideals. So in 2024, I was honored to be appointed to the National Science Board, which is charged under 42 U.S. Code § 1863 with establishing the policies of the Foundation and providing oversight of its mission. > But the meaning of oversight changed with the arrival of DOGE. That historical tension—between the promise of scientific freedom and the peril of political control—may now be resurfacing in troubling ways. Last month, when a National Science Board statement was released on occasion of the April 2025 resignation of Trump-appointed NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, it was done so without the participation or notice of all members of the Board.
> Last week, as the Board held its 494th meeting, I listened to NSF staff say that DOGE had by fiat the authority to give thumbs up or down to grant applications which had been systematically vetted by layers of subject matter experts.
> Our closed-to-the-public deliberations were observed by Zachary Terrell from the DOGE team. Through his Zoom screen, Terrell showed more interest in his water bottle and his cuticles than in the discussion. According to Nature Terrell, listed as a "consultant" in the NSF directory, had accessed the NSF awards system to block the dispersal of approved grants. The message I received was that the National Science Board had a role to play in name only.
I can't sum up everything that's wrong with this moment better than that.
This is not some necessary pain that comes with shaking up the system. This is a hostile takeover of the federal government by embarrassingly ignorant goons who think they know everything, just because they can vibe code an almost functional app. This is what happens when you have VCs huffing their own farts in their Signal echo chamber: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t.... Congratulations, you buffoons, you have demonstrated there are scaling laws for footguns.
one thing I'm struck by is the willingness of people who greatly benefitted from the downstream effects of basic research (ex: the entire internet economy being downstream of DARPA, CERN, etc.) to tear down basic research, to .... unleash science?
take Peter Thiel for instance, across Youtube, blogs, and articles you can hear him railing against science and how it's stuck in the 70s...there almost seems to be this Silicon Valley disdain for science & scientific research and I'd love to understand why engineer/innovator characters are so antagonistic to researchers
Thiel on Science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbk5Lccr_e0
(aside: there is a strong chance these characters are hyper interested in race science, eugenics, and gene modification and they are simply upset about ethics which they euphemistically refer to as "dogmatism")
Very much agree we need to make and shame these dufuses who think they'll be the God kings of federated techno states, like Thiel and his ersatz court philosopher Moldbug.
To your list of names I would also add Paris Marx
https://techwontsave.us/
and Robert Evans has done a lot of great series on Elon et al as well
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MLizYdfQT-Y
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mYrPNvVhKLU
Superb, take a bow!
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