The US brain drain is only just beginning

The door is shutting now. The lamp has gone out — and some Americans with the means to leave are trying to decide whether the time has come for them to seek a new life abroad.

Perhaps they should have realised what was coming. Four years ago, JD Vance told the National Conservatism Conference: “If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country, and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Yet America is the home of Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Princeton, Berkeley, Yale, Johns Hopkins. Its reputation for scientific research is unrivalled, with well-funded labs and generous endowments. Who would want to put all that at risk?

But in just a few months the extent of Trump’s assault on US science, and universities in particular, has become apparent. At first, jobs in government-run institutions were the targets. Then it became clear that federal funding was at risk, especially if grant proposals included words deemed to be ‘woke’, like ‘bias’ and ‘women’. (These are routine terms in statistics.) The appointment of the anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Junior as health secretary showed the contempt in which Trump holds bioscience. The Republicans announced they wanted to increase taxes on university endowments. Now the Department of Education is being dismantled.

Academics are asking themselves questions that seemed unimaginable just a few months ago. Is it better to lie low and acquiesce with whatever the new administration demands, hoping to protect your teams?

(Maybe this will blow over by 2029, or sooner.) Speak out and risk losing your job? Or take your skills elsewhere?

US scientists are looking abroad for help. Their most pressing concern is how to safeguard their data, which is more vulnerable than ever before to government interference and deletion. Millions of gigabytes of data are currently flying out of the US to servers abroad. Some are trying to get work outside the US, particularly in Europe. Another priority is to gather evidence on the impact of the cuts and clean up their internet footprint to avoid attracting the government’s attention.

The mood is “absolutely terrible”, says an early career researcher in astrophysics, who came to the US for a postdoc job. In a sign of how bad things are, none of the US scientists who spoke to me felt able to disclose their name. “We collaborate closely with federal employees at NASA, the US Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and we all know at least one person who has been laid off because of DOGE cuts or is worried that they could be laid off soon.

“Senior scientists are saying that they’re thinking about retiring early, and early career researchers are wondering if we should look for jobs overseas, or non-academic jobs.” The NASA Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science (ROSES) funding call is supposed to come out in early February (“so we get ROSES for Valentine’s Day”, she explains), but this year it was pulled after a couple of days, with no explanation.

‘The tipping point for me,” says a Rhode Island scientist who has an interview for a job in Ireland, “was when we received a ‘stop work’ order on a grant and when another of my grants was listed in Ted Cruz’s report on DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and politicised science.”

It has all happened so fast. “I didn’t think the infrastructure supporting science could be so vulnerable to collapse so quickly.  I really underestimated the lack of political will and common sense in our federal government.”

The crisis is also alarming US PhD students working abroad. They no longer know if their planned careers will be viable when they go home to the States. “Everyone keeps saying it’s OK and almost good that so much is being destroyed, because if enough people get pissed off then we’ll get more traction behind ousting [Trump] and that this is just how we’ll galvanise the Democratic party,” says an American doctoral student in the UK. “If that doesn’t happen, then I would have lost … faith that the changes could be reversed. Or if they close the women’s colleges.”

This is a disaster for US academia. It is also bad for the European academics who collaborate with them and sometimes benefit from American funding. Jobs in the US are not the only ones at risk, either: because its government is a major funder of bodies like the United Nations, thousands of jobs are at risk there too. In March the US State Department sent an extraordinary questionnaire to international organisations and NGOs in Geneva. It asked questions like: “Does this project strengthen the sovereignty of the United States by limiting its dependence on international organisations and global governance structures, for example, the UN and the WHO? Does [it] create measurable benefits for US-based industries, the workforce and various economic sectors?”

But for some European universities, the crisis could be an opportunity. In the 1930s hundreds of Jewish scientists, including Einstein, were thrown out of their jobs and left Germany for Britain. Many then sailed to America, where research funding was more generous (even if anti-Semitic quotas excluded some of them from top universities).

America is not Nazi Germany, and scientists there are not being sacked because they are Jewish. But in the fight to attract talent, places like the Institut Pasteur biomedical faculty in France may benefit from a brain drain. “Every day, I receive requests from people who want to come back, French people and Europeans, and even Americans who no longer feel able to do their research or are afraid they cannot do it freely,” Yasmine Belkaid, the director general, told La Tribune. “You can call that a sad opportunity, but it is an opportunity all the same.”

Would Britain welcome scientific refugees from the US? France has indicated it will open up positions for them. Aix-Marseille University has declared itself a ‘safe place for science’ and has promised up to 15 million euros for posts in climate, health, environmental and social sciences. Eastern European countries with recent memories of authoritarian regimes have also reached out. Cambridge University says money may be available for groups who want to recruit a US scientist. Most British universities, however, are not in a position to take advantage of the brain drain. They have already laid off 5,000 academics in this academic year due to rising costs and the decline in foreign students, and according to the University and College Union that number could double. Even if it were financially viable, opening the door to US academics while making staff redundant is politically difficult.

Nonetheless, Britain is an attractive destination, even though Brexit imposed limits on collaboration. For most Americans, language is a barrier to working in parts of Europe. Some of the scientists I spoke to were especially keen on Ireland for this reason. “The language barrier can be overstated — particularly when it comes to scientific and medical research, so much communication is already conducted in English,” says Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “But that barrier exists on both a day-to-day/getting-together-with-colleagues level and an admin and teaching level. There’s already been some pushback in mainland European countries, emphasising the need to educate undergraduates in their native language rather than English… English is understood and used a lot in Nordic countries and the Netherlands; less so in southern and eastern Europe.”

While university managers may be pleased to have more job applications to choose from, European early career researchers will not welcome the competition. “If there is a big one-way West-to-East move across the Atlantic, then competition for jobs will be tighter – and not just for PhD students,” says Bale. Others told me that scientists from the Global South who would otherwise find jobs in Europe will struggle to compete with their peers fleeing from the US. “The UK academic labour market is relatively open and meritocratic,” he says. “That is definitely not (yet) the case in some European countries.”

Opponents of Trump have often talked about “surviving the next four years”. The hope that this period is a terrible aberration and that the Democrats will find a winning candidate for 2028 persists. Countries that once turned to authoritarians have sometimes made the journey back again. But scientists trying to establish their careers cannot afford to sit it out. “I 100 percent will leave the US as soon as I feasibly can without quitting the PhD,” says a climate scientist. “I’ve managed to arrange having a secondary supervisor in Paris, although I’d love nothing more than to settle in London long-term.” The Americans are coming — if we let them.