American science to soon face its largest brain drain in history

128 pointsposted 20 hours ago
by yowzadave
(bigthink.com)

118 Comments

JSR_FDED

18 hours ago

The value destruction is mind blowing. The fact that it’s deliberate I just can’t wrap my head around.

msgodel

18 hours ago

[flagged]

galangalalgol

18 hours ago

The echo chambers of social media donthat to us. The fewer interactions we have with those holding opposing viewpoints the more difficult it becomes to rationalize their views as anything but malicious. In that spirit can you explain what you mean? From my perspective it looks like the attack on academia that always occurs during populist coups. I don't doubt that biased science is done out pf greed, but I would need exceptional evidence that it was the norm, or even common enough to warrant this. Healthcare workers including doctors are leaving now too. This all mirrors what was seen in Hungary andany places before that.

rybosome

18 hours ago

I cannot for the life of me think of what you are referring to.

If it’s COVID-related mandates like vaccines and lockdowns, then surely it’s obvious that NASA had nothing to do with that?

There is no single issue that I can see linking all of these science organizations together. Even if it’s about budget, there are bigger targets.

SailingCactus33

18 hours ago

They went off mission. Here is a NASA example that might help linking it together: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11457489/

dahart

5 hours ago

I’m confused by this comment, do you want to elaborate? Only the thirteenth author has an association with NASA at all, and that author lists two associations. This paper is primarily from U. Maryland and MIT. Why do you feel like this paper reflects to any significant degree on NASA’s mission?

What is NASA’s mission in your mind? What is the point of what they’re doing if not to use science and the knowledge resulting from practicing science to benefit humanity? NASA’s web pages, for one, do happen to say exactly that in multiple ways. Is there some congressional funding agreement you’re aware of that limits or prevents NASA from engaging in certain scientific topics?

Also what problem do have with this paper? It seems like it’s saying something that’s widely known and non-controversial. It maybe adds new kinds of data and support to the thing we already knew, but it’s largely a meta review of many other papers that also demonstrate what we already know, that it’s common for poorer people to live in worse conditions than richer people.

IAmGraydon

18 hours ago

Please…elaborate. How were they “weaponized against most of the country”?

dotnet00

18 hours ago

This has definitely been my feeling too as a fresh postdoc. For a while it has been feeling more and more like the US isn't worth the effort and stress.

Sure, I make more money here, but is it worth dealing with nonsensical immigration policies, haphazard funding cuts, crumbling infrastructure, completely random rulemaking, and demoralized colleagues facing severe and nonsensical budget cuts when various other countries with a good standard of living and competitive research labs make immigration very easy for skilled people like scientists?

It isn't specifically a Trump thing, but he's certainly proving to be the straw that broke the camel's back, and it's likely I'll go elsewhere once my postdoc appointment ends.

I can imagine that the decision is even easier for people from countries like China. Why deal with the stress of the government suddenly deciding that you aren't allowed to work at your institution anymore regardless of track record or background, (many chinese colleagues have been worried about the proposed legislation and it comes up often), when you can work at a similarly cutting edge institution back home? You just have to determine if the US being less authoritarian on certain things is valuable enough to put up with the awful treatment through the long immigration process.

senectus1

16 hours ago

I see Trump as being a socially acceptable widening of this sort of behavior.

AI is just an enabling of the the imagination of the now widened bracket of behavior.

As has been often remarked on. this is a really shit timeline to exist in.

givemeethekeys

19 hours ago

Are institutions elsewhere massively increasing funding and positions?

Aren't all the non-bankruptible tuition fees providing plenty of funding already? Where's that money going? The football team?

magicalhippo

19 hours ago

The gov't here in Norway put $10 million on the table[1] for 2026 as a response to what's going on in the US. Due to reasons they can't direct it solely at US researchers, but the intent is there:

The minister has followed the recent developments in the United States closely:

"Academic freedom is under pressure in the United States, and it is an unpredictable situation for many researchers in what has been the world's leading research nation for many decades. We have had close dialogue with the Norwegian knowledge communities and my Nordic colleagues about the development. It has been important for me to find good measures that we can put in place quickly, and therefore I have asked the Research Council to prioritize grant funding schemes that we can implement rapidly," says Aasland.

The program is meant to last years, we'll see how it goes.

Now I know, $10m ain't much in the grand scheme of things, but we're just 5 million folks over here.

[1]: https://www.forskningsradet.no/en/news/2025/100-million-nok-...

linotype

18 hours ago

That’s like a couple of DoE grants in the US.

i_cannot_hack

18 hours ago

It's an example showing that institutions elsewhere are actually responding to this (a question asked by the parent post), and Norway will very likely not be alone here.

magicalhippo

18 hours ago

Yeah I just mentioned Norway since I'm Norwegian. Other EU countries are doing similar, like France[1].

[1]: https://www.politico.eu/article/meet-first-academic-refugees...

whatshisface

18 hours ago

100M NOK is a 1% increase to Norway's annual research budget, but to replace what the current US administration is asking Congress to cut the whole of Europe would have to raise its funding level by 300-400%.

dotnet00

17 hours ago

It's worth considering that there's still a chance that the cuts end up being more limited than proposed.

Kind of like the tariffs or the Tiktok ban that's totally going to go into effect after the most recent extended grace period ends.

So it makes sense that the current raises aren't big enough to make up the shortfall. They're aniticipatory in nature, with the assumption that the actual cuts will be a lot less crazy, and increases to take advantage of a talent exodus will take some time to ramp up.

ViscountPenguin

18 hours ago

Norway is a small (albeit wealthy) country. For conparables, you want to keep an eye on EU and Chinese science funding, and see if they're taking advantage of it. Norway is a good existence proof of countries reacting to this though.

foxglacier

18 hours ago

Yea that's practically nothing, even accounting for your population. It's $2/person compared to NASA's pre-cut budget of about $80/person/year. Where are all these other countries that might pick up the slack? Seems nobody else in the world wants to pay for science. They might complain about American science funding cuts but are happy to keep their already tiny science budgets tiny.

Norway's overall science budget is $1 billion per year, or $200/person/year. US's was $200 billion/year or $600/person/year. So Norway isn't really pulling its weight.

the_snooze

19 hours ago

I don't know where that money is going, but from my own experience, research at universities really isn't supported by tuition money. At least in STEM, PhD students are paid for by grants and contracts that their advisors secured from sources like NSF, DARPA, NIH, NSA, etc. Those are the people actually execute the research.

You might want to say tuition should support research, but the reality is that it doesn't.

ribosometronome

19 hours ago

Why would we want tuition to support research?

sevensor

18 hours ago

If we assume science still has new things to tell the world, who better for researchers to share their discoveries with than the next generation? That’s the argument, anyway. In practice, it’s a crapshoot. Many researchers are dreadful educators due to incentives, training, and disposition. Every now and then you’ll run across a researcher who is also a great educator, but there’s no institutional force that pushes them in the right direction.

linguae

17 hours ago

Right; a professor's tenure at many research universities depends on the professor's publication and grant-raising success, with less of an emphasis on a professor's teaching performance.

That's one of the things I like about teaching at a community college; whether or not I get tenure is based largely on my teaching performance, with service to the college and community making up the remainder of my evaluation. While I don't have upper-division undergrads, grad students, or postdocs, I have no research pressures whatsoever, which, interestingly enough, is the ultimate form of research freedom. I don't have a lot of time during the school year since I teach a 4-4 load, but I'm officially off duty during my one-month winter break and my 2.5-month summer break, which means I could do whatever I want during my breaks, including research (I'm actually in Japan right now as a visiting researcher at a Japanese university).

There are some teaching-oriented universities that have different balances regarding the importance of teaching and research in making tenure/promotion decisions, ranging from comprehensive masters-focused universities like those in the California State University system to private liberal arts colleges such as Swarthmore.

bobthepanda

18 hours ago

That explains why you would want researchers to teach students, but not why students (who generally have little to no income to speak of and are already struggling with university costs in the US) should directly pay for research

sevensor

17 hours ago

Perhaps I was unclear. The argument is that being educated by a groundbreaking researcher is better than being educated by someone who merely knows things, and so it’s worth a tuition premium. Like I said, I think that position is full of holes, but it’s not incoherent.

specialist

18 hours ago

There's no shortage of voc-techs and colleges for teaching skills & trades.

I personally think undergraduate at a big (research) university is bad for most students. But the prestige ain't nothing.

givemeethekeys

11 hours ago

Before universities became so expensive - yes, there was a time when they weren't - it made sense for research funding to come from our taxes.

But, if university is going to be so expensive, then we the people, and especially the students are being double-taxed - first for the education, and then to support research.

The irony of ironies is that all that research is going to put all those students that paid for it out of a job!

specialist

18 hours ago

Universities produce scholarship. That's expensive.

dangus

18 hours ago

I think the cynical student paying tuition in America would ask what the money is actually paying for and why it can’t cover the full cost of programs and research given that it’s so high.

Let’s say you go to Ohio State. The out of state (unsubsidized) tuition comes out to about $37,000 for full time tuition. That’s around 108 hours of instruction per year by my estimation.

Students are paying $342 per lecture hour, which means each professor is bringing in between $3000-30,000 per hour.

Sure they have to grade papers but…come on, right?

How is this not wildly profitable?

This does not include room and board, which has to be even more wildly profitable. Imagine being able to charge $1200 a month for a shared room with no kitchen or private bathroom with some cafeteria slop as included food.

I finished a formal university degree recently and probably only 1/4 of my professors were actually actively decent and all the lessons were heavily recycled copy paste jobs that get passed around the department.

Online school makes this an even worse value since the professor just grades electronic work and spends one hour a week on chat hours, with the rest of the lectures being pre-recorded or pre-written.

To be clear, I personally believe the government of wealthy nations should fully cover the cost of higher education to anyone who wants it because it’s a no-brainer obvious investment that pay off in positive societal ROI. My commentary simply concerns the status quo where costs are high despite subsidy and endowments still existing.

elashri

18 hours ago

Unfortunately the way students and the culture around them require in a university is much more than instruction hours. You need to pqy for all the infrastructure and the amenities that these students except and many will choose based on that. I was talking to a couple of parents during a visit recently and they focused more on what the experience their kids will get at my university. They were mostly not talking about education experience.

And most universities don't have any significant endowment and they don't work like what you think. Most of these are money for specific goal. i.e as rich alumni of CS program I can donate $100m and ask the university to invest them or put them in a bank and then pay grants for CS students. The university is legally bounded to not use the money for anything else. But this will be counted as +$100m endowment money for my university.

dangus

5 hours ago

I understand that there is non-academic infrastructure and amenities, but I’m not sure the cost gap is very well explained. I’m paying a multiple orders of magnitude cost premium on my professor’s wage depending on the size of my class and somehow I’m supposed to believe that it isn’t sufficient to pay for some amenities, building maintenance, and other reasonable overhead?

Planet fitness can make a killing on $20/month gym memberships but supposedly the campus recreation center is the bleeding me dry?

This also doesn’t explain how my online state school only had a slight discount over in-person instruction to take classes online. Like I said in my first comment, my professors only performed live instruction for an hour a week and taught with recycled and off-the-shelf materials.

Unsubsidized tuition room and board is higher than the median individual salary.

I think that if there was some kind of mandate or incentive to reduce costs that we would suddenly see cost reduction with very little compromise. But as it stands, everyone involved is incentivized to keep prices as high as possible.

lo_zamoyski

6 hours ago

I think we need a lesson in just funding practices here. Tuition is supposed to cover the costs of educating the person paying tuition. It is absurd that students should be saddled with the burden of paying for someone’s research. By what right? This is financial exploitation.

Using taxes is different, as public money and how it is used is the result of either consensus or some authority’s judgement that some public money should be invested in research for the sake of the common good. Even here, the privatization of profits and socialization of losses is criminal, not to mention the gatekeeping of research results funded by public money.

Figs

18 hours ago

> Aren't all the non-bankruptible tuition fees providing plenty of funding already?

No. Having worked in academia for years, most of my funding came from the NSF. Sometimes it was from the state government, or private organizations partnering with us instead. Usually the university took a 50%+ cut of the grants we got as "overhead" too...

Spivak

18 hours ago

Can confirm, universities aren't giving money to researchers- they're actually taking a cut of the grants that actually fund research. They don't even pay salaries, that's only in exchange for teaching hours.

Thankfully, since grants started putting caps on how much the university is allowed to take I haven't seen a 50% overhead cut in a long time. It's still a pretty significant chunk though.

standardUser

19 hours ago

When grants are cancelled and people are fired, new grants and new staff do not magically appear. It's an extreme strain and an unexpected expense on these institutions, not to mention a huge disruption for the lives of the people involved.

mikeocool

18 hours ago

Given all that university students are asked to pay for already, it would seem rather odd to ask them to also pay for the world's cancer research.

api

18 hours ago

AFAIK the massive influx of cash into universities for the last 30 years or so has gone into administration, which is basically a jobs program, not academics.

TSiege

18 hours ago

I believe that's tuition. Grants fund scientists research directly. It funds labs, hires grad students, etc

dotnet00

17 hours ago

A decent chunk of the grant money goes to the university, and a chunk of the money used to pay the students also loops back to the university in the form of non-tuition fees, rent etc.

user

19 hours ago

[deleted]

Herring

18 hours ago

Americans getting a crash course in how white supremacy destroys itself. Did you know: Slavery was so profitable, it sprouted more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River valley than anywhere in the nation.

Look at them now.

https://www.history.com/articles/slavery-profitable-southern...

msgodel

18 hours ago

Slavery was terrible for the economy and the debate at the time was actually surprisingly similar to the illegal immigrant labor debate today

Nevermark

18 hours ago

The parallel isn’t perfect.

But the deep irrationality driving artificial opportunistic ideological divides (this time less raw white supremacy, but still a lot of xenophobia, party loyalty propaganda, cult of personality, and fear and backlash with respect to minorities), drives sub-cultures like lemmings, off the cliff of reality. Taking the rest of us with them.

Obvious even as it becomes unstoppable.

Herring

18 hours ago

Yeah and the infrastructure of economic/political exclusion is initially just used against that "horrible" group X, but eventually expands to the majority of the population. This is because greed is basically an endless hole. They get to threaten the wider population "toe the line or you'll end up like them".

A lot of times the effects are invisible. I doubt everyday Mississippians even think about how slavers stole their future from them. Americans barely ever think about the trillions of dollars that the Iraq war wasted/stole.

Nevermark

17 hours ago

Yes, horrible starts as a scapegoated minority that can’t defend itself, who are treated performatively badly to shake out whowever won’t go along with the excess. These become the next trailers. This keeps expanding to include anyone who has any opinion different from the leader(s).

The continually incrementally enslaved majority is told that each thing they give up is just a temporary sacrifice until they have lost all their freedoms. Even then, their hardships are blamed on scapegoats, to maintain their “leader’s” grip on their minds and loyalty.

Anyone raising alarms is a traiter.

Watching the Republican Party metamorphose into group think, hero worship, the last couple decades has been deeply troubling.

Seeing the inability of any effective opposition or remedy, has been equally troubling.

krapp

18 hours ago

What? White supremacy isn't anywhere close to destroying itself. The power base just shifted from the plantation owners to CEOs.

arctics

17 hours ago

All the scientists who came to the US in 1930s were mostly Jewish for obvious reasons. After victory in WW2, we had Operation Paperclip when we brought thousands of Nazi affiliated scientists to work for us, the whole premise that scientists fled Nazi Germany is very shaky. I just don't believe so many people don't know the history...

nandomrumber

16 hours ago

The US had Jewish scientists and Nazi affiliated scientists come over, and proceeded to become the singular global superpower.

That’s a massive accomplishment, and kinda proves that a whole bunch of people there were victims of circumstance, a do or die situation.

Never underestimate the ability of a small percentage of malevolent people to upend society.

arctics

16 hours ago

Yes, just pointing out that this article implies that Nazi Germany was the reason many scientists moved to the US which isn't the case, many moved when the war was over and they lost.

wslh

19 hours ago

I don't clearly see how a massive exodus of American scientists moving abroad could happen. While I understand that young scientists might find it easier to relocate, the decision becomes significantly far more complicated for couples, even when both partners are scientists. For other countries or regions to become truly competitive, they would also need to increase their investment in science significantly [1].

[1] https://www.wipo.int/web/global-innovation-index/w/blogs/202...

shihab

19 hours ago

People don’t understand that other countries (primary suppliers of stem graduate students) do have lots of research positions, it’s just they don’t usually get first rate talent because USA is far more attractive for those people. Now they will

standardUser

19 hours ago

Other nations are indeed taking deliberate steps to seize the reins from the US, particularly China and Europe.

marcus_holmes

16 hours ago

If all the jobs doing research disappear because all the funding is cut, then what other choice to they have?

If one parent loses their job and cannot get a new one in their field, they have to either switch career (and start a new career at a lower point) or they take a longer-term view, assume that the other parent will also lose their job, and switch country.

apical_dendrite

19 hours ago

China will scoop up some researchers, but likely there will just be fewer people entering the profession in the US because there will just be less funding and opportunities for graduate students, postdocs, and early career researchers.

linguae

18 hours ago

I agree with this analysis; it would be hard for American scientists with spouses and children to relocate. However, there’s another thing to consider: the amount of researchers from grad students all the way to tenured professors and senior industry researchers who are not American citizens who moved to America for their careers.

The following is anecdotal and I don’t have any statistics. When I was a PhD student at UC Santa Cruz, roughly half of my classmates were foreigners, many from mainland China and India, but also from Iran, South Korea, Greece, Uruguay, and Mexico, to name a few. My first advisor was a German who became a naturalized American citizen, and while roughly half of my professors were native-born Americans, I also had professors from China, Ireland, Greece, Singapore, and Argentina. During my time in industry in Silicon Valley as a researcher, I’ve worked with many people who grew up abroad and moved to the United States for grad school.

The biggest issue I see with a brain drain in America isn’t necessarily Americans going abroad, since it would be a major sacrifice giving up family and friends to move to a place with an unfamiliar language and culture. The problem I see is when immigrants to America who have already made those sacrifices end up leaving America, either to return to their countries of origin or to different countries. If a significant number of immigrant scientists leave America, this will be a tremendous blow to American science, and this may also be a boon to countries that are willing and able to hire these talented people.

China, for example, has the money to fund science at levels competitive with the United States. I don’t foresee a lot of Americans moving to China, partly due to the language barrier, and also partly due to China’s political system. However, what if Chinese researchers in the United States return to China en masse? This is not good for us, though it would be great for China.

These are scary times in America.

marcus_holmes

15 hours ago

> The biggest issue I see with a brain drain in America isn’t necessarily Americans going abroad, since it would be a major sacrifice giving up family and friends to move to a place with an unfamiliar language and culture

So, all those people you met did exactly this.

> it would be hard for American scientists with spouses and children to relocate.

No harder than it was for any of those other people to relocate to the USA.

I know that Americans like to believe that everyone in the rest of the world really wants to live in the USA, but that's actually not true. There's a certain fascination, for sure, but (and especially recently) the USA is not the shining beacon on the hill that it once was.

> I don’t foresee a lot of Americans moving to China, partly due to the language barrier, and also partly due to China’s political system

I suspect that both these barriers are easily overcome with the simple realisation that the choice is "be a scientist in China, or not at all".

If the USA cuts funding for all science, then all scientists must move abroad. There's no option to stay in the USA and be a scientist, because science in the USA is government funded and the government stopped funding it. If the individual chooses to stay in the USA, then they must also choose to stop being a scientist.

dotnet00

14 hours ago

I broadly agree, though I wonder if part of the reason why Americans think that going to other countries might be a very difficult decision is that if they aren't immigrants or children of immigrants, they have a very limited experience of learning a second or third language and adapting culturally.

Learning Spanish in high-school isn't quite the same as learning to function in a new culture and language.

marcus_holmes

13 hours ago

Well, statistically speaking, Americans are more likely to be children or grandchildren of immigrants than, say, Europeans.

The language thing is real, and shared with other anglophone countries. Though there is an upside; almost everyone else speaks English, so it's likely that when you get to your new home you'll be able to be understood while you learn their language.

I spent a few years in Berlin, and worked there for two different German companies while struggling to learn the language. Everyone smoothly switched to English, sometimes mid-sentence, when I entered the chat. A German moving to the USA (or any anglophone country) would not have this experience and would have to get fluent in English really quickly.

dotnet00

13 hours ago

That's a very good point I hadn't considered!

linguae

13 hours ago

I agree. Even for Americans with experiences learning foreign languages and adapting to different cultures, it is not easy living abroad.

This is anecdotal, but I am currently in Japan as a visiting researcher at a Japanese university during my summer break; I'm a tenure-track computer science instructor at a Silicon Valley community college. This is my 13th time in Japan and my second-longest stay. I love being in Japan and it's a mission of mine to have ties to Japan for the rest of my life.

I'm in my mid-thirties, single with no children, and I'm knowledgeable of Japanese culture (including the work culture; I've interned in Japan for eight months and I've worked for a Silicon Valley branch of a Japanese company for six years) and I have the ability to have basic conversations in Japanese (I'm still studying with an aim for fluency), and so if push came to shove and I found myself with a bleak future in America, I could move to Japan long-term and adapt. In fact, it's a dream of mine to own a home in Japan.

However, it will still be a sacrifice. I would need to find a job either as a researcher or as a software engineer; a pure teaching career at the university level in Japan would be difficult for me until I become fluent in Japanese. Lower salaries plus the weak yen means it will be tough for me to pay off my dollar-denominated debts, including my student loans. In addition, I would like to get married and start a family one day, and while I'm treated well in Japan, I'm concerned about the treatment my children would face here (I'm a black American); it's one thing being a researcher at a Japanese institution, it's another thing being a child, especially a child with African ancestry.

Then again, the situation in America is deteriorating, with academia and science being under attack by our administration with breathtaking speed, and with anti-minority racism and xenophobia becoming normalized again in everyday society. Even if the Democrats win the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election, we still have a very large voter base who is completely on-board with MAGA. Barring a situation that leads to the complete repudiation of MAGA by the American public as a whole, MAGA is going to remain a force in politics for decades to come, which will be my entire working career, and there will probably be future MAGA presidents in the 2030s and 2040s. The idea of a liberal democratic republic with liberal institutions that respect diversity and have an international view is under attack in America, and if MAGA succeeds, life will be more difficult for academics and minorities in America. I just don't know if there are any countries out there that resemble this old vision of America; perhaps Canada and Australia are the closest things.

Job-wise, I'm at a community college where we are not as reliant on federal funding compared to research universities, but I'm monitoring the situation carefully, and I need to be prepared for a situation where circumstances force me into alternative employment, including moving abroad.

dotnet00

13 hours ago

I really appreciate you going into so much detail about your considerations, as Japan is one of the places I'm seriously considering for research after my postdoc. I have some basic Japanese down and am aiming to build up more in the time I have (regardless of if I actually end up going, I spend so much time engaging with anime, japanese music, japanese social media etc, that it would be disrespectful to not put some effort into properly learning the language).

My thoughts are very similar regarding the future of things in the US. Though I feel that the situation may be a bit more bleak, because even if democrats win, I don't really see things changing. They have a penchant for talking a lot and doing very little. As you said, barring a complete repudiation of MAGA, it's going to remain awful for quite a while.

marcus_holmes

13 hours ago

Japan is definitely one of those countries where integrating is hard, I've heard. Germany was a lot easier.

user

18 hours ago

[deleted]

msie

20 hours ago

This exodus will be known as "Trump's Gift."

ahartmetz

13 hours ago

Operation Paper Clippings

randcraw

18 hours ago

Or "Trump's Big Dump".

bgwalter

19 hours ago

[flagged]

tomhow

18 hours ago

Please don't post inflammatory comments like this on HN. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines, especially these ones:

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Eschew flamebait.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

sxcurry

19 hours ago

How many of those were hired due to diversity programs?

Please take a deep breath and think next time before you post such an ignorant statement.

tomhow

18 hours ago

> Please take a deep breath and think next time before you post such an ignorant statement.

You can't comment like this on HN, no matter what you're replying to. We've had to ask you before to avoid personal swipes in comments, going back many years. Please take a moment to remind yourself of the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

apical_dendrite

19 hours ago

> How many of those were hired due to diversity programs?

This is an incredibly obnoxious and uninformed comment. NASA does not hire incompetent people because of "diversity".

> The parallel with Hitler really does not apply. The US won't be sending scientists working on nuclear weapons, stealth aircraft or profitable endeavors like GPUs.

Also an uninformed comment. The physicists that came to the US and UK and then worked on weapons programs were not for the most part working on weapons programs in Germany. They were just able to transfer those skills into the Manhattan Project, radar, or other programs.

the_snooze

19 hours ago

It's also a very shortsighted view. R&D isn't just a bunch of eggheads grinding out a cleary-defined end like, say, nuclear weapons and making it happen. It's thousands of unseen shots on goal, most of which miss, but you get a handful of high-leverage innovations out of it.

What this pullback in US scientific funding does is reduce the number of those shots on goal. It undoes what the US prioritized from World War II onwards: that scientific innovation is foremost a strategic asset, not strictly a moneymaking venture. You saw that on display with the recent B-2 sorties over Iran: those could not have happened if not for highly specialized researchers slowly contributing to that body of work over decades.

bgwalter

19 hours ago

?

apical_dendrite

18 hours ago

I don't even know what you mean by "let those kind of people go". If they can't get funding, they won't become scientists in the first place. If they lose funding, the US can't just prevent them from moving overseas. It's (still) a free country! And a large proportion of them are foreign-born anyway.

Geoff Hinton couldn't get a job doing AI research in his native UK, so he moved to the US, where there were a lot more opportunities. At that time, neural networks weren't seen as particularly promising. Decades later, it paid off big. That's the kind of thing that will happen less and less (or work in reverse, with US researchers taking jobs overseas) since there will be far fewer funding opportunities.

user

18 hours ago

[deleted]

andsoitis

19 hours ago

> Many of the most valuable scientific organizations in the world, including NOAA, NASA, the NSF, the CDC, the EPA, and the FDA,

I don’t dismiss the premise of the article and I think it is a shame how these organizations are being impacted, but I don’t know that these are the best exemplars of cutting edge science being shut down that will lead to America’s downfall from its scientific perch.

rainsford

18 hours ago

Why do you believe those aren't good examples of cutting edge science funding? I get the stereotype that government organizations of all types are just stodgy bureaucrats stuck a few decades in the past, but the reality at least in the US in the year 2025 is that truly cutting edge science is not obviously being funded at any significant scale anywhere but government.

The world of privately funded research organizations like Bell Labs is long gone, with companies being barely able to look past the next quarter never mind being willing to invest in long term research that may not pay off for a few decades, if it pays off at all. And by definition most cutting edge science has that kind of financial time horizon. If there was an obvious, short term path to directly benefiting those conducting it, it's probably not very cutting edge at all and closer to engineering than actual scientific research. Not that there is anything wrong with that, we need engineering investment too. But it's not a replacement for science research.

I think a lot of people who scoff at the idea of government being on the cutting edge of science research don't understand how that research is being conducted. Sure, some of it is done by actual government employees, but especially for organizations like the NSF, the bulk of the research is being done by organizations and individuals outside of government who are simply given a check to look into things that might not immediately pay off or which have major societal benefit but no real path to commercial payoff.

dotnet00

17 hours ago

To be fair, there are still many well funded private research labs, they just focus on "sexy" easy-to-market science like quantum computing, photonics, deep learning, robotics etc.

whatshisface

17 hours ago

That's engineering. Science involves laws and facts about the natural world that are not yet known.

dotnet00

17 hours ago

There's a lot of overlap between science and engineering, a lot of the things being affected by the cuts would be engineering by your definition.

E.g. designing scientific instruments. The fundamental physics and chemistry can be well understood, and yet you need a strong overlap of scientists and engineers to produce and run something that actually collects useful data, especially at the cutting edge, where new things actively need to be discovered and built to achieve the desired capability. Another growing one is using AI to drive scientific discovery (e.g. sifting through the terabytes of data being generated everyday and identifying things of potential interest), it isn't strictly an engineering problem, as the entire point is that you don't fully know what you are/are not looking for.

There's a reason most of the things I mentioned also hire plenty of physicists.

whatshisface

16 hours ago

Scientific research groups hire engineers to engineer, and industry teams hire scientists to serve as specialized engineers, but there is next to no scientific research in the industrial sector.

andsoitis

17 hours ago

> Why do you believe those aren't good examples of cutting edge science funding?

They are, but the article asserts, without evidence, that the US, like Nazi Germany, has passed a threshold where it is going to lose its preeminence in scientific research.

anitil

18 hours ago

They're also the data collection point for much down stream research which is cutting edge

searine

18 hours ago

> but I don’t know that these are the best exemplars of cutting edge science

Then you simply aren't familiar with their work. These (plus NIH, DOE, DOD etc.) are the engines of a large portion of the world's science.

The engine is starved and it is going to destroy American industry.

baby_souffle

18 hours ago

> Then you simply aren't familiar with their work. These (and NIH) are the engines of a large portion of the world's science.

The problem is that not all cutting edge science is "sexy". NOAA and NASA are doing some _really_ cool stuff with weather monitoring / climate predicting. Sexy? Arguably no. Unless the weather app on your phone is sexy.

Important? I'd argue that it's critical that we keep getting better at it.

apical_dendrite

18 hours ago

And some important work is even less sexy than that. People like Ted Cruz love to mock work on animal models, because if you don't know anything about the field it sounds ridiculous ("look at these idiots wasting money putting shrimp on a treadmill"). But finding a simpler animal model has been one of the most successful ways to understand biological systems, and we've found all sorts of useful things by looking at how animals solve problems.

andsoitis

16 hours ago

> are the engines of a large portion of the world's science.

the article is meant to educate and inform, so inform the reader, who might know that fact, of it and some evidence to characterize the dynamic.

when you preach to the choir, you miss a chance to widen the circle of empathy.

dennis_jeeves2

6 hours ago

>I don’t know that these are the best exemplars of cutting edge science being shut down that will lead to America’s downfall from its scientific perch.

True, most are just bloated bureaucracies serving their own self interests

dahart

18 hours ago

What are better exemplars?

apical_dendrite

19 hours ago

I'm not sure why NIH is left off this list, since it's probably the most important scientific organization in the world. Between them NIH and NSF fund a huge proportion of the cutting edge science that is done in the US, either directly or by funding the training and early career work of researchers.

They fund a lot of the foundational work that doesn't get a lot of resources from the private sector. 99% of new drugs approved between 2010 and 2019 relied on NIH funding.

analog31

19 hours ago

It was probably an omission. Fill it in, and it makes sense. I believe the NIH is larger than the NSF. In addition to funding research, these agencies also fund education, both directly and indirectly.

Loughla

18 hours ago

Correct. One of the guys in my cohort in post graduate work was funded by a grant from the NIH.

user

18 hours ago

[deleted]

analog31

17 hours ago

And in my case, the NSF.

stonogo

19 hours ago

Then I have trouble believing you understand how cutting-edge research happens, because these organizations are the ones who fund it. The missing piece here is DOE Office of Science, but they're coming for that too.

throwawaymaths

18 hours ago

you ever worked with DOE office of science or anyone at the national renewable energy labs? not the brightest lightbulbs out there.

stonogo

26 minutes ago

But that's where the funding is (was). The user facilities attract researchers from all over the world, and make sure that research happens in America. Instrument development happens in partnership with the labs for the same reason. If you want research to happen in America, this is how you get that. If you want a dick-measuring contest, I guess funding these agencies isn't important.

mcphage

17 hours ago

> not the brightest lightbulbs out there

That’s true—all the brightest bulbs are working at FAANG companies building advertising delivery services, or at Fintech companies figuring out how to gamble faster.

betaby

15 hours ago

Unironically true.

mcphage

5 hours ago

Oh, I know it's true—but it means that complaining "the brightest lightbulbs" aren't working for the government science organizations is stupid, because all the "brightest lightbulbs" are doing is making life worse for everyone else, so who the fuck cares about them?

ideashower

19 hours ago

Isn't it true though that they, altogether, fund America's exemplars of cutting edge science? Like, isn't that the point?

giantrobot

18 hours ago

> but I don’t know that these are the best exemplars of cutting edge science being shut down that will lead to America’s downfall from its scientific perch

Most of these agencies do some foundational science but maybe more importantly they collect lots of boring data. Boring data they give out to researchers for free. They also hand out grants which might not be lottery tickets but they pay for boring stuff.

The current administration believes that if you stop measuring any problem it ceases to be a problem. No one can push back on their flood of bullshit about everything if there's no data to point to. Authoritarians despise objective reality and empirical measurement and will always strive to make it easier to push their bullshit narratives.

throwawaymaths

18 hours ago

NIST and NOAA collect boring data, the rest not really so much.

klysm

18 hours ago

Seriously? The NSF?

mensetmanusman

19 hours ago

This is good for the world. Hyper concentration of talent reduces diversity.

tyre

19 hours ago

Counterpoint: concentration of talent is incredibly valuable for humankind.

behringer

19 hours ago

They're concentrating in China. It's just that the US won't be that location of talent.

mensetmanusman

18 hours ago

Good, China needs talent not wasted on optimizing a police state.

hayst4ck

18 hours ago

The economic concept of economies of scale dictates that the more researchers there are in one location, the more efficiently they are likely able to research.

mensetmanusman

18 hours ago

It also destabilizes areas with brain drain resulting in economic destruction and mass migration (one of the factors destroying Europe).

burnt-resistor

19 hours ago

Diversity of what (identity or thought), who, and/or where?

Silicon Valley, the population of ordinary people residing there, 10 years ago (2015), heaved diversity. In corporate employment, it took decades to break through gender and race ceilings in industry to various degrees, but it largely happened, mostly, for better or worse.

Bringing together people, capital, opportunity, and academia creates a vibrant ecosystem that mutually reinforces further gains in a "virtuous" cycle. What doesn't create much is having only a few people spread out without a support system. It takes encouraging a mix of many open minded people within a smaller physical or digital proximity in order to get the w00w00 effect. That can't really happen when people are told they're not welcome.

gertlex

18 hours ago

> Silicon Valley, the population of ordinary people residing there, 10 years ago (2015), heaved diversity. In corporate employment, it took decades to break through gender and race ceilings in industry to various degrees, but it largely happened, mostly, for better or worse.

What's the meaning of "heaved diversity" here?

I think I agree with the rest of your comment, about the concentration of varied talent being important.

supportengineer

18 hours ago

Are you arguing that prior to 2015 there was no diversity in Silicon Valley?