U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-government-has-lost-more-10-000-stem-ph-d-s-trump-took-office

by j_maffe • 6 months ago

576 349 6 months ago

science.org

stopbulying• 6 months ago

departures outnumbered new hires last year [2025] by a ratio of 11 to one, resulting in a net loss of 4224 STEM Ph.D.s

michtzik• 6 months ago

Yup, this inspires great confidence in the source.

10,109 ... left their jobs
departures outnumbered new hires last year by a ratio of 11 to one

That means that there were ~919 new hires, and thus it seems that 10,109 minus 919 equals

a net loss of 4224

It appears that the "11 to one" ratio is the average, across agencies, of each individual ratio. It's left as an exercise to the reader to determine whether that average has any meaning at all.

mekdoonggi4• 6 months ago

There have been a huge amount of cuts to the Veteran's Administration disguised. Hiring has been frozen, then people leave and their positions can't be filled, then they cut that position saying "it wasn't filled so wasn't needed".

BrenBarn2• 6 months ago

The scarier part is that a lot of people will see this as good news.

TacoCommander• 6 months ago

There's a good chance they'd have been put to use strengthening the advertisement-dopamine-corporate control cycle that humanity is currently suffering under.

zerof1l• 6 months ago

Why? If they instead move to EU, that's a win for EU.

Sharlin2• 6 months ago

GP’s point is that because being anti-science is on the rise.

hsuduebc2• 6 months ago

It is good for EU but I belive he was pointing to these hurr durr emigrants bad people. Usually the same people which conveniently always forget that they probalby come as much poorer people than these ones.

SJC_Hacker• 6 months ago

Scientists tell people things they don't want to hear

Braxton19805• 6 months ago

You know he means some US citizens who are anti- intellectual due to a combination of insecurities and propaganda by the Republican party

esalman2• 6 months ago

Because academia and University research is broken at best and leftist breeding ground at worst /s

ActorNightly3• 6 months ago

EU unfortunately doesn't have the economic investment in education like US for a lot to justify the move.

ixtli13• 6 months ago

I came here to see if the comments could explain to my why this obviously bad thing is actually good. Its somewhat comforting to see others worried about the implication. The fact is that governments (aka public funding) is really what drives the biggest most impactful sorts of scientific breakthroughs. Think: NASA spinoffs, the internet, rocketry, MRNA, etc.

I know that the US has been failing to fund important things like Fusion for more than 40 years now but its sad and scary to see it halting.

ccheney• 6 months ago

Is it not a good thing that these folks could do something more productive in the private sector?

Just on your Fusion example alone: https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/31/every-fusion-startup-that-...

Wouldn't it be better if companies like these had a larger pool of PhDs to pull from?

Private sector does some things better, see Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, SpaceX, et al.

This _is_ a good thing.

mecsred• 6 months ago

In the current social climate I would absolutely not trust public media to understand general consensus. Ask specific people you trust or seek out their opinions.

SoftTalker• 6 months ago

Not everyone agress that those things are necessarily good. I think the Apollo program for example was a massive waste of money that didn't improve anything for the average person. It was mostly just a dick-swinging contest with the USSR to see who had the biggest rocket and could get people to the moon first.

JuniperMesos4• 6 months ago

The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ, which I don't think is true. Academia is a badly broken system, and many people with formal credentials like PhDs have wasted huge amounts of time and effort on producing what is ultimately low-quality scientific work. This is a pretty uncontroversial statement among people I know in academia - or who were in academia but left - and this should absolutely affect the degree to which federal government agencies are willing to hire people who have formal credentials like a STEM PhD.

giraffe_lady2• 6 months ago

Do you think that's what is going on here?

sanskritical2• 6 months ago

In my experience legitimately talented people are staying, and the guy whose impressive education credentials seem to train him mostly how to write very wordy excuses for his shortage of actual work product is going back home. Maybe you have a different experience, but my experience is something that seems to be echoed among a lot of people in my social circle.

My experience is that people with talent are both driven and valued. Someone who might disagree with the current administration politically but is doing exactly what they want to do with their life in a role that generates measurable utility for the taxpayer is not packing up and leaving, nor losing their job. But many pieces of gristle are getting trimmed off the American government.

dtdynasty2• 6 months ago

Why wouldn't stem PhDs follow some bell curve of quality? I'm sure many PhDs that are leaving don't contribute but some of them do. I personally don't see a reason for it to be skewed for only PhDs which don't contribute to leave.

recursive• 6 months ago

These things are not in conflict. It's possible that PhD quality has a regular distribution, and that most of them aren't contributing much.

Retric4• 6 months ago

That’s a straw man argument. Losing 10 people becomes a question of their individual qualifications, losing 10,000 people and this is no longer about individuals.

Some of the people who left where underperforming but a significant percentage where extremely underpaid while providing extreme value to average Americans.

moduspol4• 6 months ago

The number seems arbitrary. Maybe we should be subsidizing until we have 100,000 more.

I'm always skeptical when something is presumed to be a universal good in a way that's unfalsifiable. What metrics would you expect to see if we had too many STEM PhDs? What metrics can we expect to improve if we had more of them?

bitshiftfaced2• 6 months ago

What's the correct level of STEM PhD employment in the government? Maybe those levels were way too high. But on a different note, we can't tell from the article what normal fluctuations look like. It only shows 2024 as the baseline, but ideally we'd look at a larger window than that as well as look at the percentage rather than nominal figures.

notahacker4• 6 months ago

One would also have to consider the calibre of the individuals hired to replace them, or not, and whether functions such as the National Science Foundation add more or less value to the government than functions the government has chosen to increase its spending on...

ixtli13• 6 months ago

It sounds like you're saying that this is a step in the direction of "fixing" academia. I don't see any evidence of that, all i see is fewer scientists receiving decreasing funding in a state where weve already been slashing basic research investment for generations. Also, there is no evidence that the ones that are leaving are the least productive. Intuitively it's likely the opposite: the ones who have the most potential will find work elsewhere and will be the first to leave.

EDIT: I would also like to say that i have never seen evidence that we can measure the performance of 10k PhDs in a single dimension at all. So a claim that this could be good for scientific research and development seems unprovable at best.

sheikhnbake4• 6 months ago

It also flies in the face of China's currently accelerating pace of research and breakthroughs by producing insane numbers of STEM majors and PhDs

JuniperMesos4• 6 months ago

I'm not claiming that this is a step in the direction of fixing academia; I'm claiming that, because academia is currently broken, we shouldn't assume that the ~10k people who got PhDs under the current system are people doing actually-valuable work for the federal government and ultimately the American people.

ReptileMan• 6 months ago

People start being inventive when tight on resources, so a bit of evolutionary pressure is not a bad thing.

yobbo• 6 months ago

You are assuming there is meaningful work for them in the federal government. There might be more productive work for them in industry. Their contribution to the workforce could put pressure on inflated salaries, if that is the case.

If their credentials exceed their defacto responsibilities in the government, they might be blocking someone else from being promoted or otherwise "growing" or whatever.

yodsanklai• 6 months ago

Academia may be broken, but a lot of bright students still pursue PhDs and it's better to have them in your pool of candidates rather than not.

imglorp2• 6 months ago

Can we agree academia is the worst system, except for all the others?

In the last century, the US led so many tech fields because of both academic and corporate research and the people to do it. Let's fix that system if needed and keep it well stocked.

The alternative is ignorance, leading to unskilled industries and an easily misled electorate.

Braxton19805• 6 months ago

Wouldn't an easily misled electorate benefit the political party that lies the most?

ixtli13• 6 months ago

10k PhDs lost isn't a step in the direction of fixing anything, though. There is little to no evidence that the people leaving aren't the top performers, let alone the bottom.

BurningFrog• 6 months ago

Academia critics usually think it was pretty great until the last 3-5 decades.

Braxton19805• 6 months ago

Do you believe that 100% of the people who left were useless?

thrance• 6 months ago

Usually, when a system is broken, the correct course of action is to fix it. Not destroy it utterly.

quietsegfault4• 6 months ago

The problem with this framing is that it treats a mass exodus as if it were selective pruning. Losing 10,000+ STEM PhDs in weeks isn’t a quality filter. We’re hemorrhaging institutional capacity. We lose researchers who understand decade-long datasets, technical experts who can evaluate contractor claims, and people who can actually critique scientific literature when making policy decisions.

Where’s the evidence these specific 10k were the low performers? The more likely scenario is that better performers left because they have options, while weaker performers stayed. If the issue is quality, you’d want systematic performance review, not mass departure driven by factors unrelated to competence.

bryanrasmussen• 6 months ago

hmm, I was thinking >The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption

that in a large enough set of something there should be considered to be a normal distribution of high quality, medium quality and lower quality members in the set, unless one can show the distribution is biased in some way.

morelandjs• 6 months ago

The tail of the distribution justifies the entire distribution. I agree that a large percentage of PhD research is inconsequential, but a small percentage is massively consequential. It’s ok to whiff on a thousand STEM PhDs if you pick up one Andrej Karpathy (for example).

ixtli13• 6 months ago

People have really messed up views about hiring in general. I wish more people understood what you are saying here.

cbb330• 6 months ago

The US doesn’t have enough money to fund the entire distribution

And as a tax payer I prefer discretionary spending for high performers.

JuniperMesos4• 6 months ago

Maybe this is true for academic institutions granting the PhDs (although even this I am skeptical of, training a PhD costs a lot in terms of time, money, and human effort). But that doesn't mean it implies that the federal government needs to employ a thousand STEM PhDs just to get someone like Karpathy - indeed, Andrej Karpathy does not work for the federal government! He made his name working in the private sector!

gopher_space• 6 months ago

The number of people capable of identifying potentially consequential research is smaller than the number of people performing consequential research. And they’re all busy with their own projects.

OGEnthusiast• 6 months ago

Maybe, let's see if AI overall is a net positive or net negative to the US overall. If AI turns out to be a net negative (which seems likely) maybe we don't want this type of AI research being funded by taxpayers.

clutchdude2• 6 months ago

Picking only the tail ends of the distribution also tells me you don't understand how the bulk of progress is made.

It isn't always Eureka moments but also a slow grinding away at assumptions to confirmations.

iammjm• 6 months ago

Ahh yes, clearly any government would greatly benefit by having way fewer highly educated conscientious people working for them /s

sdenton43• 6 months ago

We should round up and reeducate people with glasses. /s

giardini5• 6 months ago

Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B

tzs• 6 months ago

I fail to see how any of that is relevant to what the article is about, which is people who were already employed by the government leaving.

malfist2• 6 months ago

You don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because some PhD students make "low quality science" doesn't mean we end academia. After all, who is going to do the high quality science if you get rid of all the scientists?

mike_hearn2• 6 months ago

Lots of scientists work in industry. Look at AI, rocketry, semiconductors, drug design, robotics, anything related to manufacturing. Academics are in the minority in these fields. You could eliminate all such jobs and there'd be plenty of science being done.

BoredPositron• 6 months ago

Peter Gregory reincarnated.

foxyv2• 6 months ago

You're kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Sure, some PhDs are in underwater basket weaving and barely warranting the title. However, most PhDs are extremely valuable. They are pushing the boundaries of our knowledge to improve society.

Some part of the hatred for the current academic system stems from legitimate concerns about how it operates. However, I think this hate is mostly driven by rampant anti-intellectualism. Fueled in part by pseudo scientific scammers trying to sell you supplements on TikTok and religious demagogues.

giardini5• 6 months ago

foxyv says "most PhDs are extremely valuable"

Can you defend this statement?

jayd16• 6 months ago

Saying "oh these are just the bad STEM PhDs" seems like a ridiculous exercise in sour graping.

airstrike• 6 months ago

No, the implicit assumption is that losing these 10k PhDs is worse than not losing them.

biophysboy2• 6 months ago

People have tabulated the value of the academic pipeline, from grant to paper to patent to stock valuation. It is overall very valuable, even if you grant the very real issues with our hyper-competitive grant system.

This intellectual capital is valuable, despite whatever the latest populist memes about professors claim.

atonse• 6 months ago

You may be right in the general sentiment that not everyone with a PhD is a desirable candidate, but even if half of them were, that would be 5,000 fewer and that isn’t insignificant, especially in STEM fields.

paulpauper• 6 months ago

10k PhDs would mean 10k dissertations. I thought the popular narrative is that finding new knowledge has become too hard or much harder than in the past, so how are these grad students finding stuff that is new? Are these dissertations extremely incremental or just repackaging/regurgitating stuff?

cbsmith2• 6 months ago

I have yet to hear a criticism of academia where it sounds like we're better disproportionately losing people with PhDs than without them, particularly since most of those people got their PhDs quite a while ago.

PhDs seem to be quite employable by private industry, where competency is still valued.

gizzlon• 6 months ago

The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ

No, not really? That would be true if we were talking about hiring anyone with a STEM PhD. Or 1 random person.

In this case we have people leaving, and it's a group. So it's more like: The assumption that 10k PhD's, that we saw fit to hire in the first place, as a collective, are worth the cost.

Seems likely that they are: The cost is low, let's say $2 billion per year? For reference, Trumps Big Bill includes $300 billion in new defense spending and "over a ten-year period is estimated to add roughly $3 trillion to the national debt and to cut approximately $4.46 trillion in tax revenue".

Also, let's say there were too many, and you should get rid of 10 000 of them. I doubt the guy who keeps rambling for 1 and a half hour [1] and keeps getting "Greenland" and "Iceland" mixed up, is going to do a good job with it.

1: Seriously, I dare you to try to watch it, I tried. At least hes "draining the swamp" /s https://www.youtube.com/live/qo2-q4AFh_g?si=Hwu3MSXouOfEfJCa...

TheOtherHobbes2• 6 months ago

Most PhDs don't move the needle because the point of a PhD is to learn how to do research, not to produce ground-breakingly original work that reinvents the entire scientific order.

That's orthogonal to domain expertise and general ability.

If you can survive a PhD there's an adequate chance you know more about your subject than an undergrad and are more capable of focused independent work.

That's what employers are buying. Which is why STEM PhDs still get more attention from the private sector than generic mass-produced undergrads.

epistasis• 6 months ago

The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ,

No, you're making a completely illogical jump there, that is absolutely not assumed in any way.

The assumption, if there is one, is that the position that the work PhD was doing in the government served the public good, more than they were being paid.

US Government science positions are not academia, so your second sentence does not even apply to this! Unless your assumption is that if the person was trained with science that did little then their training can not be applied to anything that is worthwhile, which is an obviously false assumption.

Arguments with these sorts of gaping logical holes are the only defenses I ever see of cutting these positions. I have searched hard, but never found a defense that bothered to even base itself in relevant facts, and connect through with a logically sound argument.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it sure is damning when in a democracy there's not even a fig leaf of an intellectually sound argument backing a drastic and massive change in policy.

ActorNightly3• 6 months ago

Academia is a badly broken system,

Why do you feel like you can state this like its fact?

Just to save you energy, state that you are conservative first before writing fan fiction fantasy like that, because it will save people a lot of time assuming that you are speaking some sort of facts.

retired13• 6 months ago

We are seeing the same in The Netherlands:

https://delta.tudelft.nl/en/article/fewer-phd-positions-and-...

https://www.sciencelink.net/features/its-not-just-about-mone...

ixtli13• 6 months ago

I believe the opposite is happening in China. I saw an article the other day ( https://fortune.com/2026/01/14/china-graduates-1-3-million-e... ) that showed how the amount of engineers being produced there is orders of magnitude greater than the US. Way above what you'd expect given the different sizes of population. Now, i realize an engineer isn't the same as a PhD but i think we're seeing a dramatic brain drain happening in the west.

amelius• 6 months ago

It is because China has a meritocratic system.

retired13• 6 months ago

I’m not a PhD, just an engineer and I moved out of The Netherlands. It was no longer economical feasible to live there. I am very pessimistic about the future Western Europe. Right now it offers the one of the best QoL in the world for the average worker but who knows for how long. With the current brain and wealth drain there will no longer be enough people to support the social system.

logicchains• 6 months ago

And since China cracked down on the tech industry there aren't enough jobs for those new STEM graduates, so many are stuck doing gig work: https://asiasociety.org/policy-institute/19-percent-revisite... .

CharlieDigital• 6 months ago

There was an interesting Freakonomics podcast a few months back that pointed out an interesting divide in how the US and China thinks about its leaders[0].

    > China is a country that is run by engineers, while the U.S. is a country run by lawyers. Engineers, he explains, are driven to build while lawyers are driven to argue, and obstruct.

Even Trump:

    > And even though Donald Trump is not a lawyer by any means, I think he is still a product of the lawyerly society, because lawsuits have been completely central to his business career. He has sued absolutely everyone. He has sued business partners, he has sued political opponents, he has sued his former lawyers as well. And there is, I think, something still very lawyerly about Donald Trump in which he is flinging accusations left and right, he’s trying to intimidate people, trying to establish guilt in the court of public opinion

Very interesting take and I think insightful on why the US is the way it is today and sidesteps the democracy vs autocracy debate.

[0] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/china-is-run-by-engineers-a...

pasquinelli• 6 months ago

good thing i can talk myself in a circle to pretend everything bad is good. yes, in years past i touted the fact that all the best minds in the world want to come to america as a reason america no. 1, but now thst that doesn't seem to be the case as much, america still no. 1 somehow. see how i'm moving around electons on the internet? i'm really thinking, aren't i?

jeron• 6 months ago

anyone else think the infographic is absolutely awful? why put number of employed instead of number of people hired?

seems like it was made to fit a specific narrative...

jleyank2• 6 months ago

STEM people in science (used to) populate places like NIH, NSF and other granting agencies. Theh were project managers responsible for funding decisions, or actual researchers. Remember that people used think that pharma just did marketing with all the new drug ideas coming from academia or government labs? Well, these people were either the ones paying the academic labs or actually generating what pharma marketed.

They also were the project managers and researchers in places like NRL and ARL, the premier research labs in the Navy and Army. Guiding weapon development along with the blue/green suits. They staffed DOE labs doing funding and research for things that went bump in the night, cleanup, energy development, etc.

PhD's are the psychologists on staff in the VA helping glue veterans back together. They're also the -ologists (immune, endocrine, ...) who work with the MD's to diagnose and treat people. They also review new drug proposals to make sure they're tested for safety and effectiveness.

There's probably some salted through the other departments doing things like agronomy, geology, ... Things that help food and energy production. There's more than you think in the various security agencies - people were surprised why the government was hiring for computational linguistics back in the 80's. They also handle funding for things that turned into that Net/Web thingie you're using to read this.

Is it useful to have these kind of people on the public purse? Depends on whether you think funding research, regulating drugs, weapon research and cleanup, treating patients, ... are important. They're cheaper than the corresponding private individuals would be if they were contractors or being paid externally.

giraffe_lady2• 6 months ago

I think, for the VA specifically at least, this isn't accurate. I'm sure they have some phd psychologists around for other things but the bulk of the work you mentioned will be done by counselors with masters degrees and some psychiatrists overseeing them. Psychiatrists, as well as "the -ologists" you mentioned, are specialized medical doctors. They all get the same schooling and then specialize through the residency system.

An MD is a doctorate-level degree and MD + residency is generally considered enough education for even research within a speciality, certainly patient care within it. MD/PhDs are rare, usually doing policy/leadership or extremely specific technical R&D. Almost never see them doing patient care, when you do it's normally because they misunderstood their own career interests in their 20s and now have to live with it.

This thing is real bad but psych treatment at the VA isn't why.

jleyank2• 6 months ago

the -ologists can be both, then. My academic experience in ancient times had them as medicine related PhD's, but I guess MD's can specialize in that area from a treatment rather than a research area. MD/PhD's are rare but quite valuable for research projects because they can see patient records wearing their MD hat, but interact with the research teams with their PhD hat. They tend to have mediocre bedside manners cuz they rarely see a bed, and they're sorta burned out coming of all that schooling.

dmoy• 6 months ago

NRL et al do a lot more than just weapons research too.

esalman2• 6 months ago

My wife is a PhD in recycled asphalt materials and pioneered the use of such materials in New Mexico.

Under her PhD supervisor she directly worked with the NM department of transportation as a consultant. She did all that as an international student besides her graduate studies while being paid at 50% FTE (+tuition).

It takes between $10m (rural) to $100m (urban) to build a mile of interstate. Recycled materials can reduce the cost by 15-50% while still being equally as sustainable for decades.

Fortunately she is no longer at risk (or minimal risk) job/immigration wise. But others are not as fortunate. Just yesterday I learned that a PhD student from my alma mater was turned back from port of entry and his student visa denied. Reason? He traveled with his University provided laptop without written authorization. I understand that there are embargos and sanctions and trade restrictions, but really?

lynndotpy2• 6 months ago

This is a tale as old as time. Anyone who's followed AI research has seen this happen.

Take Geoffrey Hinton and his students, for one example. Moved from the USA to Canada in the Regan era. Hinton (and Canada in general) saw an influx of otherwise USA-bound students from 2016 on. And it's just happening again.

I was a PhD student in deep learning ("AI") in the US from 2018 through 2022. The "Muslim ban" at the time saw so many students who had their eyes set on the United States look elsewhere. During the 2020 election cycle, a fellow PhD student of mine (I was the only English student in an all-Chinese lab) thought Trump would win the election, and expressed that as, "I am so so so so so sad". (Anyone who has tried expressing their feelings in a language new to them will recognize this pattern of using intensifiers like this.)

But the Project 2025 changes we saw were unique. In my perspective as a former academic, I don't think people outside academia generally appreciate the extent to which the reputation the United States had for research has been damaged.

mmooss4• 6 months ago

This is a tale as old as time.
But the Project 2025 changes we saw were unique.

I'm not sure what you're saying. Until the last paragraph, you seem to say that it's just the same thing continuing.

As an academic you know that such claims are irrelevant without quantifying them. For example, the US has had inflation continuously for decades; does that mean recent inflation is not significant? How about 1980 compared with 1960? If my town is washed away by a flood, I don't say, 'we've always had rain'.

lynndotpy2• 6 months ago

As an academic you know that such claims are irrelevant without quantifying them.

This is a principle which means nothing and it's not one I share, and I don't think you share it either. HackerNews is not academia, and academia does not deal exclusively in quant, (even though my corner of academia was indeed 100% numbers 100% of the time). I'm only expressing the impression I have from my perspective as someone who still has ties to academia.

I'm not sure what you're saying.

It's already been common for the allure of the United States shift depending on the politics of the country and the politics of the specific academic. But that hadn't been enough to shake the crown off our head, so to speak. I am saying that I believe we are no longer number 1.

If my town is washed away by a flood, I don't say, 'we've always had rain'.

To extend this analogy, I am saying "We've always had rain, we've even had floods. This is the first flood to wash away much of my town. I am sad about that and I don't think it will recover."

giardini5• 6 months ago

tl;dr summary:

- "a net loss of 4224 STEM Ph.D.s"

Far less than the headline "10k"

- "departing Ph.D.s took with them a wealth of subject matter expertise and knowledge about how the agencies operate".

Whether such "expertise and knowledge" is worthwhile or exclusive to these Ph.D.s, or even useful at all, remains to be seen.

Every time I've seen a PhD enter a private organization they've gummed up the works and left only after bollixing things up. While possibly excellent for hard science research, PhDs can have a POV incompatible with solving problems quickly.

What this means is that even MORE than the usual STEM PhDs will be entering the private sector, possibly further gumming up the works, as bosses try to fit PnDs (round pegs) into private jobs (square holes).

goodluckchuck• 6 months ago

If 14% of the PhDs employed by the U.S. Government was 10,109, then there were about 72,207 total. That's about 3.2% of the civilian government, compared to 2.1% in the public workforce (and 1.3% of population).

So, the government tends to employ PhDs at a substantially higher (~50%) rate than the public workforce.

Edit: Yeah, oops, people generally use public / private the other way around.

cbsmith2• 6 months ago

...and unfortunately it is letting them go at a substantially higher rate than the public workforce.

titzer2• 6 months ago

It's harder to recruit PhD students and it's harder to fund them. NSF budget was cut 55% in the first year. The administration is doing everything possible to make it clear that no foreigners are welcome here. America is stabbing itself directly in the brain.

guywithahat• 6 months ago

It's harder to recruit PhD students and it's harder to fund them

If it’s harder to fund them then it should be easier to recruit them. I don’t think both can be true at the same time, unless you’re saying it’s harder to fund foreign PhD’s with US tax dollars in which case I think you’ll find limited sympathy for your cause.

BeetleB• 6 months ago

unless you’re saying it’s harder to fund foreign PhD’s with US tax dollars in which case I think you’ll find limited sympathy for your cause.

As your sibling pointed out, the end result is China benefiting from that void.

jaredklewis• 6 months ago

Maybe I’m missing something, but why can’t it be true? If I’m a PhD deciding what to do with the next few years of my life, the fact that government jobs currently seem very unstable might make PhDs hesitant to choose this path. There’s probably also at least some PhDs (given the overwhelmingly left leaning politics of grad students) that don’t want to be involved with this administration. So maybe more PhDs are going into the private sector.

On the other side, budget cuts might mean that you have less money to spend on the PhDs that are interested.

So it doesn’t seem inherently contradictory to me.

bauldursdev• 6 months ago

It's not a fixed size of PhD candidates competing. A future PhD candidate may choose to not become a future PhD candidate because of changes. For example, a high school or undergraduate student might read all these articles and statistics about how funding is getting pulled and research is becoming more difficult and choose to take another path. They are no longer a competitor to be a PhD candidate, they do not bid down the prices.

UncleMeat• 6 months ago

The NSF buys research. PhD funding is not a gift, it is payment for a job. Buying research from citizens or noncitizens is not meaningfully different.

adev_7• 6 months ago

European researcher here.

There is an other thing that should make America worry.

Research grants have been cut everywhere in the US. That cuts deep and terminated many scientific collaborations between USA and the EU Horizons projects in many STEMs research fields.

That created a void.... and sciences is like nature: it hates void (and the lack of money...)

My perception in the domain is that the resulting void is been fulfilled everywhere by new collaborations with China. Because China has the money, the infrastructures, the will to progress and a shit ton of smart engineers/PhDs.

There is today 10x more conferences in China... more exchange with China... more common projects with China than 10y ago.

So congratulations to the Trump team: your anti-intellectualism is actually directly fueling new technologies and research breakthroughs to the country you consider 'your enemy'.

kevinsync• 6 months ago

You being an outside observer of my country, what do you think the mid-term (next ~decade) looks like if the US is somehow able to flush the toilet and do a complete 180 from a policy and administration perspective? I imagine even if people we need are welcomed back with open arms, they're not going to want to come. I sure wouldn't want to go back to a bar where the bouncer kicked the shit out of me!

Just curious, it's hard to see things clearly from inside the carnival.

Intralexical• 6 months ago

So congratulations to the Trump team: your stupidity and your hate for intellectualism is directly fueling new technologies to the country you consider 'your enemy'.

Do we have any evidence that they actually consider China (or Russia) to be "the enemy"? They are fellow authoritarians, with a shared goal of normalizing domestic political suppression.

somethingsome• 6 months ago

Hi, I looked into joint collaborations between many countries and EU, but honestly I didn't really find anything EU-China that was interesting, most funding agencies do not fund collaborative projects EU-China, or maybe I'm missing something, in any cases it didn't strike me. If you have some examples I would be curious.

There are way more opportunities with other countries that I'm aware of, mostly EU-EU.

WinstonSmith84• 6 months ago

I certainly believe you, but you're missing the point of the current administration goals. Trump wont be around in 10 years when the consequences of their actions become clear. In fact, he is gone in 3 years, and the admin is only concerned within that timeframe. Their strategy is quite clear: please their base while simultaneously positioning the family for influence on a global scale.

seanmcdirmid• 6 months ago

China is definitely the big winner of the second Trump administration here. America alienating its friends like Canada just pushes them closer to China, and retreating from the stage of world science means China can fill the gap.

I guess it is actually going to happen, in 10 years, 20 years max, no one will think the world super power is America anymore, it will clearly be behind China by then.

john_moscow• 6 months ago

Unpopular opinion: there has been a steady decline of standards in the research community in the past decade or two. First reproducibility crisis. Then, some topics becoming political taboo where the unorthodox opinion would get you fired and canceled. The credibility of the science in the West has been falling, and the recent change of administration is predictably axing something that has a perceived strong bias in the opposite direction.

An optimist in me hopes that we can get back to unbiased science, where it doesn't have to agree with the current side, but both sides perceive it as fair and agree to leave it alone for common good. A realist thinks that it will happen in China, and the West has just run out of steam.

munificent2• 6 months ago

back to unbiased science

Science has always struggled with biases. There was no perfect time in the past that you are imagining where that wasn't an issue.

If it seems worse today, it's largely because the systemic biases that were already there are becoming more visible, which is a sign of progress.

adev_7• 6 months ago

Then, some topics becoming political taboo where the unorthodox opinion would get you fired and canceled

This is garbage.

What you describe might be the case in some social-sciences circles but never has been the case in most STEMs fields.

If you have a (sensical) unorthodox idea that displease a research director, 10 other research directors will be very happy to dig up this exact idea in a slightly different context.

This is how sciences progress.

Hammershaft• 6 months ago

The %55 budget cut is proposed, it fortunately hasn't happened yet and it might not survive congress.

huxley• 6 months ago

You’re not wrong that it hasn’t been passed by congress but just the proposal has already led to a massive decrease in grants. I am not as optimistic that Congress would go against admin policy

ModernMech3• 6 months ago

They can cut budgets without Congress by reappropriating money now, it's one of the powers they've managed to usurp. But they don't have to cut anything, they manage to curb spending by throwing a wrench in the whole machine and watching awards crawl to a halt. They cancel grants, fire or drive out reviewers to increase review times, or delay follow-up funding. Maybe the funding comes through eventually but students need to be funded continually; the government will pull their visas if they don't have funding to enroll.

They're also straight up harassing and arresting foreign students for no reason, so they don't even have to muck with the budget at all to materially ruin things.

cyanydeez• 6 months ago

Half of the admins goals are met simply by creating uncertainty.

yndoendo• 6 months ago

Damage has been done. I working on de-investing in the USA companies and investing in the EU. USA executive branch, legislative branch, and judicial branch are a complacent in stupidity. There is no stability in the USA and no longer rule of law.

gdilla• 6 months ago

plenty of tech bros voted for this.

dmix• 6 months ago

Science’s analysis found that reductions in force, or RIFs, accounted for relatively few departures in 2025. Only at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where 16% of the 519 STEM Ph.D.s who left last year got pink RIF slips, did the percentage exceed 6%, and some agencies reported no STEM Ph.D. RIFs in 2025.
At most agencies, the most common reasons for departures were retirements and quitting. Although OPM classifies many of these as voluntary, outside forces including the fear of being fired, the lure of buyout offers, or a profound disagreement with Trump policies, likely influenced many decisions to leave.

So similar to most of the other federal agency reductions, around 5-10% were formally let go but the majority left voluntarily.

alecco• 6 months ago

US Academia will struggle to keep their current PhDs in administrative positions. If it quacks like a Ponzi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_bubble_in_the...

https://students.bowdoin.edu/bowdoin-review/features/death-b...

https://www.reddit.com/r/highereducation/comments/13rno6w/wh...

b00ty4breakfast• 6 months ago

Competency holds less regard than sycophancy and loyalty. Who can kiss ass the best? who is least likely to question the Führerprinzip?

It is no coincidence that these kinds of personality-based dictatorships often devolve into dysfunction as time goes on.

shevy-java• 6 months ago

Well - I would not want to work under the orange king either. The guy kind of tries to have some revival of the 1930s era with the hipster TechBros. I think they need to compensate everyone else with their wealth - just redistribute their wealth at once, equally. Many people will be happy. Few superrich oligarchs will not be happy. That's the way to go. Everything else just a weak distraction.

thegreatpeter• 6 months ago

That exodus was only 3% of the 335,192 federal workers who exited last year but represents 14% of the total number of Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) or health fields employed at the end of 2024 as then-President Joe Biden prepared to leave office.

Would be interesting to see the age of these STEM or health fields employees. What if they were all over the age of 70? Would that still bother everyone?

Do you think this article was framed to cause outrage and frustration?

layer82• 6 months ago

Unless a comparable number of younger PhDs were hired to compensate, it’s a reduction of PhD-level federal workers in either case.

mekdoonggi4• 6 months ago

What if they were all over the age of 70? Would that still bother everyone?

Why should anyone consider this hypothetical? Are you advocating for an age limit of 70 for working for the government?

Do you think this article was framed to cause outrage and frustration?

No.

periodjet• 6 months ago

My heavens!

Because we don’t need to focus on getting people into government who we can trust to represent our interests as their prime duty. No, what we really want to focus on is finding MORE PEOPLE WITH DOCTORATES. Yes.

mekdoonggi4• 6 months ago

Would you say that the number of people you can trust to represent our interests as their prime duty has gone up recently?

Hizonner• 6 months ago

It turns out that there are some government jobs in which it is necessary to know what the fuck you are doing.

Herring8• 6 months ago

The problem with these threads is everyone wants to complain about Trump, but support drops drastically when you talk about policies that actually help buffer against the far-right. Eg implementing robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance. How many of you software engineers want to sign up for high taxes? It's basically tragedy of the commons.

Economics on its own is probably not sufficient either. You probably also need widespread unionization, a Cordon Sanitaire, and probably German-style intelligence surveillance of the far-right too.

yodon• 6 months ago

This isn't a taxes issue. The assault on higher education and the sciences by this administration is inseparable from the assault on minorities and free speech. This is the authoritarian playbook 101. Mao went as far as locking up all the PhD's and sending them to work camps.

Not taxes. Authoritarianism.

Herring8• 6 months ago

Yes it's a taxes issue, because that's how you pay for European-style safety nets. And again that's probably not enough either, cause Denmark/Netherlands are having issues with housing causing the far-right to surge. So you probably need Vienna-style public housing too. The US is so far from the correct solutions you're not even on the same planet.

relaxing2• 6 months ago

You’re right to be thinking of second- and third-order solutions to these problems, which unfortunately the commenters in these threads aren’t prepared to engage with.

But the “economic anxiety” angle is well debunked at this point. Grievance, stoked by the right wing takeover of the media, is the answer. And we’ll need to go a lot further along the vector of solutions you’ve started down to fix that.

Herring8• 6 months ago

Any sources on that debunking? I can't say I've seen anything like that, but I'm open to read about it. Intuitively any societal problems like cost of living will feed into the far-right recruitment narrative that the elites are incompetent. All kinds of incumbents lost ground worldwide after Covid. And last I read the consensus is housing is a big contributor to the far-right issues in Denmark and the Netherlands.

But sure, if you want to add "break up big tech" and "regulate social media" to the shopping cart I'm absolutely up for it.

insane_dreamer6• 6 months ago

How many of you software engineers want to sign up for high taxes?

it's not about taxes -- that is a false narrative. Trump did not reduce the budget, he just redirected money from science to "border security" (aka an unaccountable domestic paramilitary force aka ICE) and the military. Taxes were cut yes, but primarily on the very wealthy.

but yes, you are correct that Americans from both parties support high military spending instead of investing in the wellbeing of its citizens (education, healthcare, housing, etc.), and _that_ is a significant problem that I don't see us getting away from any time soon. very sad.

Herring8• 6 months ago

I meant taxes to pay for the “robust safety nets”. I could have phrased that more clearly.

SideQuark3• 6 months ago

All other first world countries tax their low and middle classes at much higher effective rates than the US to pay for those nets. Google stuff like effective tax rate by decile or quintile country name historical, and dig till you find solid sources with proper methodology.

There’s a reason OECD ranked the US tax system as most progressive some years back.

Yoric2• 6 months ago

How many of you software engineers want to sign up for high taxes?

FWIW, I do. I don't live in the US, though.

Herring8• 6 months ago

Cheers, mate.

tehjoker• 6 months ago

These are the wages of nationalism. A stupid but powerfully attractive idea.

aw124• 6 months ago

And this is only the beginning. Once the U.S. fully transforms into a China-like totalitarian state, complete with a social rating system and cameras for automatic payments everywhere, we will witness the collapse of educational institutions, the downfall of innovative companies, and an inability to address external multi-trillion dollar debt.

mekdoonggi4• 6 months ago

China-like is too complimentary to the intelligence of US leadership at the moment.

awacs• 6 months ago

Are we great yet?

tsoukase• 6 months ago

Scientists of >=PhD level sacrifice their lifetime to a low-profit goal. They could very well be occupied in the industry and earn millions (granted not all of them) with their talent. Instead they demand and enjoy social respect and at the moment Europe respects them more than the USA.

Yoric2• 6 months ago

Note that it's hard for researchers in Europe, too.

But as far as I can tell, not nearly as hard as in the US. I don't think that any PhD student in Europe has been deported by masked agents, for instance.

cratermoon• 6 months ago

I'm sure it's fine. There couldn't have been any Einsteins, Hugo Grotrians, Ingrid Francks, Wilhelm Westphals, James Francks, Otto von Bayers, Lise Meitners, Peter Pringsheims, Fritz Habers, Gustav Hertzs, and Otto Hahns, Hans Bethes, Max Borns, Eugene Wigners, Leo Szilards, Edward Tellers, or John von Neumanns among them.

thoughtstheseus• 6 months ago

That’s the goal. The current USA admin wants the 10k STEM PhDs to move into the private sector.

SideQuark3• 6 months ago

Except they’re destroying those places too, and the places producing those skilled people, and breaking the pipelines that created innovation.

This past year top US talent entering college left the US at 5x the rate they did before. Europe, pacific rim, china, all have massive recruiting programs to suck talent out, and it’s working.

Trumps Gift will surpass Hitlers Gift.

insane_dreamer6• 6 months ago

lol, no that is definitely not why they were cut

water9• 6 months ago

If you’ve ever work for the US government, you know that it’s not exactly a high-pressure job if you know what I mean

Aqua03• 6 months ago

China welcomes talented people, come here!

MetroWind• 6 months ago

I love how Americans still dip their heads in the sand and pat themselves on the back by saying China produces low quality stuff.

* It's low quality stuff that you buy everyday * It's not merely low quality stuff, but low quality stuff in astonishing quantity... * ... and among them, occasionally there are some high quality stuff. It might be a small ratio, but the base number is there.

Friedduck• 6 months ago

I had two friends (both PHDs, both worked for the CDC) leave the US this week.

In addition to the tumult at the agency, they were being monitored for what they did on their own time. Truly draconian stuff.

Want to collaborate with the WHO? Forbidden. Speak at a conference abroad on vacation time? Nope.

I don’t blame them. The autocratic push at the top feels different when it extends beyond work, and touches causes you feel deeply about. It’s a huge loss for the US.

U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

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