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.
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
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 stupidity and your hate for intellectualism is directly fueling new technologies to the country you consider 'your enemy'.
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.
As an outsider as well, I think the damage done will be hard to reverse in just a decade. You lost trust of your closest allies. Even after the current presidential term, why would we (Europeans, Canadians, ..) invest in ties with the US, when the _next next_ president can be an entire shitshow again?
The American people have shown that they are okay voting for the same nationalistic rhetoric twice. If it was just once, maybe it's a fluke. Now it seems more like a pattern hinting at the mindset of ~50% of Americans.
Also, if I want to be really pessimistic, I'd look at history, at some point Roman turned on Roman (Caesar crossing the Rubicon) after years/decades of political turmoil. The things happening today in Minnesota etc could be preludes a similar Rubicon crossing moment that will shatter the republic..
As an outsider not in academia, your system has poisoned your well.
We trusted in you to do the Right Thing, yet a significant sub-system of your culture has entirely successfully undermined your 'Checks and Balances' - a sub-system which has clearly been in action since at least the eighties.
Currently I wouldn't dare to enter the US, while I'm sure I would be relatively safe in China.
And: even before Trump the TSA had elements of despotism. All the while I never heard of Europeans being treated like shit in China -- simply the better hosts!
I keep mentioning that to people when they bring up a quite anti-China narrative (or paranoia). Most people in the western hemisphere are way more likely to be negatively impacted by the US than China.
Europeans, Canadians etc are less likely to travel to China so of course Chinese media spying would be less immediately detrimental than the spying of US companies. But even when traveling to China, it's less likely you'll be treated poorly than when traveling to the US.
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.
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.
> 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.
Every authoritarian country thrives on “we’re surrounded by enemies, enemies everywhere” trope.
But, of course, all those glorious leaders happily shake hands and dine with each other, patting their backs and sharing ideas on how to keep peasants in check and themselves in power.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
The problem with these threads is everyone wants to complain 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.
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.
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.
I want you to go to your favorite frontier LLM and ask it how much it would cost the US to implement Vienna-style public housing. Figure in paying off current homeowners to get their support. Restrict it to major cities where housing is the worst, just to make it easier. I bet you it's well over $10T long-term.
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.
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.
Right now I'm not sure there is a country where young people are generally satisfied and optimistic about their future. America is a mess, Europe is generally a mess, China is struggling with too many grads who aren't able to find jobs matching their qualifications... From what I've heard things aren't exactly great in India either.
Australians will complain a lot but honestly the future is very bright. Higher exports than imports, government debt isn’t completely out of line and it’s not going exponential like some regions, it has European like public services, a median wealth 2.5x that of the USA, good employment figures.
It’s not perfect but i still think it’s pretty good.
But how much of the Australian economy is extraction for the Chinese economy? My brief understanding of the Aussie economy is that a large part of it is iron, hydrocarbons, copper, etc. going abroad, largely going to feed the Chinese economic machine. So economic performance is heavily tied into Chinese performance.
And the median wealth number is another way of saying "house prices are insane" right?
Where did you move? I understand you're retired: that changes the situation somewhat.
When I lived in Amsterdam, we were renting a flat. The gentleman we were renting from told us our rent easily covers all his expenses in South East Asia.
Spain. And I have to apologise, I call myself retired but in reality I'm just unemployed. It's more of a year long sabbatical, but I jokingly call it retirement since I moved to Spain and many Dutch people do so for retirement. I'm planning on setting up a company here.
Spain isn't great for being employed or freelance (autonomo) but if you set up a limited liability company (SL) and work from there it is not that bad. Tax on investments are averagely taxed compared to other countries.
>>Tax on investments are averagely taxed compared to other countries.
That is only if you haven't accumulated wealth yet.
The combination of quite high capital gain tax with sky high wealth tax, pretty high income tax isn't very attractive if your plan is to accumulate some wealth.
If you just want to make enough every year to live there I guess it's reasonable though.
I future-proofed myself by moving to a region with a €3M exception. So that I have a long way to go before paying wealth tax.
CGT is progressive and around 20%, compared to other European countries that is fairly average. Some Eastern European countries are at 15%, Belgian is going to 10%, Switzerland differs per canton.
Also, no CGT for fresh immigrants if you are able to use the Beckham law.
The Netherlands is taking action against the brain drain by rapidly importing highly skilled migrants through various tax lowering schemes in the first five years of living here.
However plenty of those people leave after that period. Especially with the upcoming 36% unrealized capital gains tax on all your savings and investments.
Feels a bit like ISPs giving discounts to new customers only.
This is misleading. It's actually taxing 36% of _assumed gains_ of say 5% on all assets. So if you have $1M in savings, you'll end up paying 1.8% or $18K/annum, regardless of the actual investment return. I can see it would be painful during down years, but most of the time it would be ok.
Many years ago, a friend of mine in the Netherlands had the same job as another guy, earning the same money, my friend being extremely thrifty, the other guy splurging. When they both found themselves out of a job at the same time, my friend got no support from the government as he had savings, while the other guy started getting a very generous allowance.
This goes directly against all that is reasonable. This is directly discouraging financial responsibility. My friend is thrifty just for the sake of it, he knows it's not in his interest. But he gets the short end.
Correct. If you go over €38.478 in savings, you immediately lose your renters benefit. No taper, just a hard drop-off. You can lose up to €5.000 in renters benefit a year.
A legal tax avoidance is to just buy a €1000 TV if you are near the limit. Yes that is as crazy as it sounds but people do it.
Same situation in the UK. Even a modest amount of savings (a few months of your salary) is enough to disqualify you from the majority of benefits, childcare etc.
You can write it off against future capital gains, but not against income tax from employment. So if the market is down a few years, you gain a lot of tax credits and you pray that the government doesn't get rid of those credits in the mean time.
This sounds like the Netherlands speed running their way out of investments. If a country I was living in proposed this, I would be leaving ASAP, or getting some heavy financial engineering done.
Why is this shocking? Surely if you hadn’t grown up with the very technical idea of unrealized gains, this would seem totally normal. The surprising thing is that we let ourselves be convinced in the past that making money with money should be tax advantaged compared to making money with labor.
Say you have €80k in investments. Markets go up, in one year time your investments are worth €90k. You did not sell.
That means you had €10k in unrealized capital gains. Subtract the €1800 per person threshold. €8200, 36% tax is €2952 tax to be paid at the start of the year.
Losses give you tax credits redeemable against future capital gains (not against income tax from employment)
How does that even work? What does it apply to? Say I own a 100% share in a business, each year does the government appraise it and pretty much require me to divest a portion of it to pay the tax?
Unrealized capital gains taxes are crazy all in an effort to own the rich or something. Meanwhile the people they're perceived as targeting have all the resources to avoid it.
Yes, you are supposed to either sell part of the stocks to cover the yearly tax or you need to dip into your savings account to find money to cover the tax.
I don't know about non-publicly listed companies, I assume you indeed need to appraise yearly.
The rich don't pay these taxes as the unrealised capital gains tax is only for private individuals, not companies. The rich have their assets in companies / shells.
Yeah, I was chatting with a friend living in Spain once, and ascending the ladder in responsibility didn't make sense, as whatever salary increase he got would be heavily taxed, and it didn't make sense to bear much more responsibility for just a little bit of extra money a year.
As you say, avg workers are "fine" there, but for anyone trying to standout or grow in their career, they will hit an income ceiling very fast due to the high taxation, so it doesn't make sense to keep on growing as you are not properly rewarded for it.
Because I was able to get a better QoL elsewhere in the EU.
The average worker in The Netherlands has one of the best QoL compared to average workers in other countries. But the Dutch income leveling and benefit system makes it so a high earner doesn’t have a significantly better QoL. Someone earning €30k has roughly the same spending power as someone earning €50k. (edit: net income after tax and benefits is €42k versus €47k for those two incomes but the person earning €30k has access to cheaper government housing)
In other countries, earning more gives you a better QoL.
I left mainly because of housing prices, the difficulty of being a freelancer, the 49.5% income tax after €78k, the 36% unrealized capital gains tax and just everything in life like supermarkets or public transport being so much more expensive than other European countries.
I took a big pay cut moving to Southern Europe, but post-tax I earn the same and everything is just so much cheaper. I honestly have a significant better life here. Good weather too.
I understand you're not the landlord then. I agree this is a problem: the same(ish) earning you mentioned in another comment makes social mobility difficult. Some people are born with a house, others without. That's super unfair. I'd first tax that rather than income.
In the process of setting up a company to do consultancy services for Dutch companies, but eventually want to shift to local companies once I get to learn the language, culture and business.
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.
Maybe. I would like to think that is true but i don't have much evidence.
I think what we can see provably is that China is investing in the development of STEM contributors at the primary school level through advanced degrees and the central government is directing the economy to spend huge amounts on the work that they do.
I'm very curious about this because even tho we need to preserve democracy, some elements of meritocracy also seem needed. Obviously as Xi's latest purges show, there is some politics to it as well, but China does seem to do a fairly good job of meritocracy in the bureaucracy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Knowing current administration anti-science approach to things like climate and health, I wouldn't be all at surprised if many of those who left academia were ones producing quality work that just didn't align with Trump admin's ideology.
If anyone is curious, as I was, where this misinformation came from: it appears to be a criticism of the Food Compass rating system from Tufts University. The connection to "past administrations" seems to be added by the person I'm replying to. They've also swapped Cheerios with Cheetos.
>On social media, I have seen graphics showing certain breakfast cereals scoring higher than eggs, cheese, or meat. Did Tufts create these graphics?
>No. Food Compass works very well, on average, across thousands of food and beverage products. But, when this number and diversity of products are scored, there are always some exceptions. These graphs were created by others to show these exceptions, rather than to show the overall performance of Food Compass and the many other foods for which Food Compass works well. But, as objective scientists, we accept constructive criticism and are using this to further improve Food Compass. We are working on an updated version now – see our versions page for more information.
> '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
Why?
If you go that far then
- senate
- scotus
- violence
- SV
- tech bros
- lies about AI
What is not broken.
The idea of academia is it is an investment. Look at internet, DoE, Genome, vaccines - a lot from academia. Companies barely do that.
Indeed. You're far more likely to get sensible policy opinions from a STEM PhD who knows what science is than from sleazy opportunist politicians, investors, and PR people.
You might even say that the opportunists dislike STEM because it gets in the way of their opportunism.
I think well meaning people in the west are looking for a silver lining and in the process overcomplicating a rather simple issue: the US government is cutting spending everywhere while its electorate demands even deeper cuts. The money has dried up and people are leaving.
(One of my best friends was a nuclear medicine phd who left his cancer research lab after covid to work at a VoiP company, so i too have anecdotes)
The US is in a weird spot. The electorate does not generally want education and research cut.
Republicans here have convinced their base that education and the educated are bad, which has fed their desire to cut academic funding and research at all levels.
That is to say, the federal government doesn't have a popular mandate to do any of this. They simply hold all levers of power through a slim majority of the voting populace.
China is famous for low-quality research and bad papers, which is exactly what you'd expect from a system that grants an expanded number of formal credentials to people who aren't actually doing good scientific research.
Be that as it may, China also has persistent threat actors outfoxing American cybersecurity in the form of Salt Typhoon. The cards are on the table, and the US is already undoubtedly losing several fronts of asymmetrical warfare.
I have a friend who, to explain it simply, worked medium high up in the CIA for 8-12 years during Bush and Obama. The only time he gets serious about talking about his time there is on this topic. Chinas cyber security is, according to him, light years ahead of the US to the point where its embarrassing.
If I understand Salt Typhoon correctly it's a masterpiece. The descriptions I've seen indicate that they penetrated lawful intercept. Lawful intercept operates outside network operators network management systems because it was designed not to trust the network operators. I am skeptical of claims that Salt Typhoon has been eliminated from US networks. Any such implicitly claim to detect lawful intercept traffic and ensure it isn't nefarious, which traffic that system is designed to hide.
Geely owns Volvo and IIRC a significant portion of Volvos are Chinese made now.
There's a number of companies or brands that are now Chinese owned. China knows that home grown brands (like Geely) don't work on an international stage, so they buy well known brands like Volvo.
It's a bit of a silent behind the scenes takeover but I'd say that China is now seriously making competitive cars. If you can follow the brands and notice.
Lol, the fully homegrown BYD is destroying Tesla everywhere outside the US where it’s basically banned and you’re taking about Geely and Volvo and behind the scenes. It’s all out there on the stage.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
Like $40k bonuses for ICE agents. Incidentally, $40k is about the stipend for a typical PhD student. I'll take a smart student doing nothing but eating food and digesting theorems over the absolute chaos that is being funded by our tax dollars.
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.
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.
> There is little to no evidence that the people leaving aren't the top performers, let alone the bottom.
According to the article, the majority of the losses were voluntary (people quitting or accepting buyout offers) and not people who were directly laid-off.
While this isn't direct evidence of where these people sit on the spectrum from top to bottom performers, my anecdotal life experience suggests that when losses like this are voluntary its far more likely they are top performers who have plenty of options elsewhere (either in the private sector, or in other governments).
Also (and also anecdotally) this brain-drain doesn't just apply to direct government workers. I know of several people who worked in (and in some cases headed up) prestigious university research labs in the US who have left in the last year after massive funding cuts. Most of them were immigrants who went back to universities in their country of origin, some after having been here for decades.
At least amongst my circles, that seems so obvious. I don’t know what things are actually like on the ground. But from here in Australia, the subtext of all the ICE news is that foreigners are no longer welcome in the US. And that America is becoming an authoritarian, fascist state.
Of course I don’t want to visit the US. There’s no way I’d want to move there right now.
I know of multiple US run conferences which are taking place in Europe this year. Too many attendees wouldn’t come if they were hosted in the US.
There's reason to suspect that the one's leaving are more likely to be top performers. First, top performers are the most likely to be able to find another job easily so they would take the voluntary buyout or just leave when things get crazy. Also, some of the DOGE cuts targeted probationary employees which include those that have recently been promoted or recently hired, both are classes of employee that the department explicitly wanted to keep.
That is kind of my point. That party has been attacking the education system in all forms for decades (imo) for exactly that reason. They have razed everything from school lunches to loan programs. This affects everyone.
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.
I agree with this. I guess you already believe they follow a bell curve.Then from your former comment you also believe it's worth it to lose many PhDs that don't contribute to also lose the few that do.
I guess the conflict is my value judgement that it's good to keep PhDs that don't contribute if it allows US to keep the ones that do contribute. I believe so for 2 reasons.
- Distinguishing between contributors and non contributors at scale is difficult.
- the value of research can be large from a few contributors.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I think your comment is more a refutation of the top level than the person you're responding to. I think people are right to assume there is already a serious throughput issue with scientific research, especially so-called "basic" research in the US and seeing a mass exodus from the government is troubling because public funding is what, historically, generates the big breakthroughs.
What the person you're replying to was likely trying to say is that once you get into this size of layoffs its no longer about the individuals and their performances and a claim that all 10k of them are on one side of a theoretical "bell curve" (which btw i havent seen evidence can actually be measured) is big and needs evidence.
> public funding is what, historically, generates the big breakthroughs
Without an opinion on the rest of this, public funding in the US doesn't produce big breakthroughs from scientists employed by the government, but rather by funding university research.
It appears that, after the administration canceling a significant proportion of grants in 2025, that science funding has largely been maintained or increased from pre-2025 levels for 2026, although how the 2026 funding gets spent, and whether it is all spent, is an open question.
It’s a separate question not arbitrary. How many PHD’s the government should employ is debatable, but saying we should have fewer such people says nothing about who was let go.
It’s always tempting to say ‘This was a good decision therefore all the consequences are good’ but in the real world good and bad decisions will have both positive and negative consequences. Understanding individual consequences is therefore largely separated from the overall question of should we do X. However in politics nobody wants to admit any issues with what they did so they try and smokescreen secondary effects as universally beneficial/harmful.
One metric you could use is how often publications are mentioned by patents, and how often those patents lead to economic value. By this metric, it is valuable.
The number of PhDs we have is currently too many given the amount of money we have for project grants. But there is no evidence that the money we allocate to research is too large. If anything, you could argue the opposite.
I would be delighted if the private market funded basic research - the seed ideas that lead to patents.
You’re confusing two different questions. ‘Should we have more STEM PhDs in government?’ is a reasonable policy debate. ‘Is losing 10,000 STEM PhDs in weeks a problem?’ has a clearer answer… yes, because institutional knowledge doesn’t rebuild quickly. Also, there’s no evidence this was performance-based attrition. Lastly, recruitment becomes harder after mass departures signal instability.
The burden isn’t on critics to prove some theoretical optimal number. The burden is on defenders of this exodus to show it improved government technical capacity rather than hurt it.
I disagree--we're all paying for it, so it should be justified regardless.
And I don't need an optimal number. But the common refrain is essentially that more is always better, and fewer means we're losing our standing in the world. Always.
Maybe keeping a lot of them but shedding some percentage is actually more optimal. But I'm open to being wrong. That's why I'm asking for metrics.
The US government operates with such a huge debt that we aren’t paying for these things. Instead we are paying for the long term effects of such spending.
Cutting 10k scientists could therefore result in increased taxes without anyone ever seeing any savings. Or it could result in net gain from 1$ all the way up to what their cost * interest in the debt.
Therefore there’s no obvious side who takes the default win here. Instead you need actual well supported arguments.
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...
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.
I think you're saying "how do we know this isn't the normal amount of Phd people who leave every year/administration
While we don't have PhD numbers the Trump administration fired a large amount of people so no matter some portion of those had Phds therefore it must be higher than the previous administration
"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."
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?
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.
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.
Mid last year I helped run a workshop on AI explicitly for laid off federal science workers. The people involved were clearly extremely intelligent and knowledgeable, passionate about their research areas, and harboring an immense amount of institutional knowledge. They showed great curiosity and adaptability in the workshop. It was obvious that they were a set of very bad fires.
How can your limited experience make any claims about the government workforce as a whole.
It requires a decent amount of time to understand if someone is talented and that talent is being used to better their job.
>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
How would you know? Some people have very strong convictions and as another comment stated if a person is talented it increases the chances they could find another job similar to their desired work
what you are saying is idiotic. people who are in demand can find work anywhere, they are the kind of people who will leave as soon as they feel their work environment has become even remotely uncomfortable. people who stay are more likely to be those who can't find job elsewhere.
I think people who will leave as soon as they feel their work environment has become even remotely uncomfortable are likely sitting in a comfortable sinecure, and it isn't the role of the taxpayer to provide sinecures for people with doctoral degrees.
Government workers are meant to serve the government, and the government of the United States is By the People. The People voted for the administration and if someone can't work for the company because you dislike the guy running it, well, it sounds infantile to me. Someone so fragile as to not tolerate political disagreement and reasonable scrutiny and auditing should not be receiving a salary from public funds.
Your guy has armed goons with "absolute immunity" literally executing people in the streets, after threatening to invade neighbours and allies, appointing shockingly-unqualified loyalists at the very top of national institutions, and generally gutting the rule of law. It's a bit past "tolerating political disagreement", man.
Glad to hear a British viewpoint now and then, but of course any problems stateside will be handled by Americans rather than Brits. Unless possibly you have dual citizenship (Brit & USA) perhaps?
FWIW Britain has plenty of history of what you term
"armed goons with "absolute immunity" literally executing people in the streets, after threatening to invade neighbours and allies, appointing shockingly-unqualified loyalists at the very top of national institutions, and generally gutting the rule of law."
You Brits almost have a monopoly (bwahahah!) on tyranny of various forms, having gone through most of them in bloody civil wars yourself. Hardly a model to follow, n'est-ce pa?
Yes, I'm sure it's "infantile" for people at the NIH to resign because they believe their work is being censored for conflict with the administration's preferred pseudoscience.
Could you sound any more like a Lysenko propagandist in the USSR if you tried?
This position is idiotic, more detrimental to the United States than the government over employing people, and frankly un-American according to how we understood what serves America best pre-Trump.
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.
>Private sector does some things better, see Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, SpaceX, et al.
All of those companies exist on the backbone of work that was done by government funded labs. You are just seeing the investments pay off.
PHds aren't engineers. The whole point of a PHd is basically spending a whole bunch of time working on something, with a very slight chance that it may or may not work - this is not something that is compatible with a private sector in any means. The point is that as a collective, you hope that someone has a brain blast moment and discover something that engineers can then take and make viable.
Really think about this claim: "private sector does some things better." What evidence is there of this really that isn't anecdotal? There are so many things tossed around like this which sound plausible but for which I can't think of a definitive, conclusive, account.
For example: the public sector literally send humans to the moon with technology vastly inferior to that which we currently have at our disposal. Heck, the Soviet Union put a probe on the surface of Venus and sent back images. To me, it is not at all clear that "private sector better" is a foregone conclusion. At best you could make the strong claim that contemporary economic theory predicts that private sector companies do better.
> Is it not a good thing that these folks could do something more productive in the private sector?
That's assuming that they could do something more productive in the private sector. I don't think that's true in a whole lot of cases. The private sector is about maximizing profit, but there's a whole universe of productive and necessary things that don't lead directly to profit. The private sector is terrible at doing those things.
And, depending on what exactly we're talking about, it's very often the case that the private sector is much less efficient in terms of bang for the buck.
> Wouldn't it be better if companies like these had a larger pool of PhDs to pull from?
The pool they're pulling from isn't getting larger. It's getting smaller.
I think your "every fusion startup that raised $100m" link answers that question. Fusion startups haven't been bottlenecked by being unable to afford to poach talent previously administering grant programs or working in government-funded plasma physics labs. Shutting the labs and programs down on the other hand does slow down the fundamental research that leads to those startups
Your phrasing "something more productive in the private sector" is taken from the DOGE emails to federal employees. Note that in this sense "productive" means "makes money for corporations". If your utility function is different, these jobs are no longer more productive.
For a very concrete illustration, I know a Veterans Administration physician who got the DOGE emails. He's been underpaid by $50k-100k per year compared to private market rates, for the last twenty years. He is happy to take that discount because the mission of caring for veterans is something he cares about, and because he feels he can practice better medicine if his goal is patient outcomes rather than billable procedures. He also values the education and research priorities of the VA.
It is absolutely true that he would make a lot more money for a private provider maximizing procedures and billing.
But is that what we should be optimizing for as a society? Is that what you personally aim for from your doctors?
Tell me have you thoroughly researched where all of the NOAA or NIH products go? The private sector has given us AccuWeather for the former and nothing for the latter.
I rely on NOAA forecasts to stay safe a lot and no private company gives me the kind of volume of information about the weather, hydrology, and sea conditions that they do. Call me when the private sector maintains flood gauges on all the rivers where I live or weather stations on peaks or satellites overhead.
I’m just thoroughly sick of hearing people repeat Reagan like he’s some kind of prophet.
I don't think this is necessarily a good thing. I'm in favor of the private sector, but these public sector research and scientific institutions also do very important work.
Some of the most brightest and accomplished scientists out of academia elect to forgo a higher paying private sector job in order to go into the civil service and work on even higher impact, lower paying jobs that don't necessarily chase an obvious profit motive. Ask yourself why.
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.
> I think the Apollo program for example was a massive waste of money that didn't improve anything for the average person
i mean, sure, that makes sense if you've never gotten on a plane, eaten food, used a space blanket when camping or in an emergency, been in an earthquake prone area or had hearing aids (non-exhaustive list)
> 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.
just because this was the primary political goal, and i'm 100% in agreement with you there, it does not mean that there were no other benefits to humanity. sometimes, humanity can accidentally do a good thing for everyone because we're trying to beat the other guy in a race. it does happen, sometimes.
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.
In mainstream media, public consensus is bought by the highest bidder, or the whims of the board of the company.
In social media, general consensus is owned by those that control the best and most bots to direct the conversation.
Unfortunately most people are too lazy/busy to seek out trusted information, and many if not most have no ability to understand if the answer they get should be trusted or not.
> In social media, general consensus is owned by those that control the best and most bots to direct the conversation.
Isn't it owned by the owner of the social media platform? Do you think Zuckerberg, Musk, etc are neutral? There is an enormous amount of evidence otherwise.
If some bots proliferate, it's because the owners allow those bots to do so.
Depends if your career depends on some facts not being true. Scientists can seem like a threat to you specifically if for example you need Climate Change to not be real. The last thing you would want is someone bringing evidence and analysis to that reality.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
- "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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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'.
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?
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.
The %55 budget cut is proposed, it fortunately hasn't happened ye and it might not survive congress.
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
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 stupidity and your hate for intellectualism is directly fueling new technologies to the country you consider 'your enemy'.
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.
As an outsider as well, I think the damage done will be hard to reverse in just a decade. You lost trust of your closest allies. Even after the current presidential term, why would we (Europeans, Canadians, ..) invest in ties with the US, when the _next next_ president can be an entire shitshow again?
The American people have shown that they are okay voting for the same nationalistic rhetoric twice. If it was just once, maybe it's a fluke. Now it seems more like a pattern hinting at the mindset of ~50% of Americans.
Also, if I want to be really pessimistic, I'd look at history, at some point Roman turned on Roman (Caesar crossing the Rubicon) after years/decades of political turmoil. The things happening today in Minnesota etc could be preludes a similar Rubicon crossing moment that will shatter the republic..
As an outsider not in academia, your system has poisoned your well.
We trusted in you to do the Right Thing, yet a significant sub-system of your culture has entirely successfully undermined your 'Checks and Balances' - a sub-system which has clearly been in action since at least the eighties.
I don't know how you get rid of that. It's You.
.
I get that America/the West is far from perfect.
Are you kidding?
Currently I wouldn't dare to enter the US, while I'm sure I would be relatively safe in China. And: even before Trump the TSA had elements of despotism. All the while I never heard of Europeans being treated like shit in China -- simply the better hosts!
100% this.
I keep mentioning that to people when they bring up a quite anti-China narrative (or paranoia). Most people in the western hemisphere are way more likely to be negatively impacted by the US than China.
Europeans, Canadians etc are less likely to travel to China so of course Chinese media spying would be less immediately detrimental than the spying of US companies. But even when traveling to China, it's less likely you'll be treated poorly than when traveling to the US.
I'm waking up to all the damage that huge tech companies cause. They destroy communities by creating huge inequalities among people.
As long as we have Citizens United here in the USA, big money (no matter who it belongs to) will continue to threaten democracy.
So for the sake of my country, take your tech industry somewhere else.
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.
I’m unfamiliar with academia but doesn’t this only measure formal funding? It doesn’t measure collaboration with separate EU funding.
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.
> 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.
It’s both.
Every authoritarian country thrives on “we’re surrounded by enemies, enemies everywhere” trope.
But, of course, all those glorious leaders happily shake hands and dine with each other, patting their backs and sharing ideas on how to keep peasants in check and themselves in power.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
NRL et al do a lot more than just weapons research too.
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.
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".
The problem with these threads is everyone wants to complain 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.
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.
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.
This has nothing to do with funding.
The US is spending $892.6 billion on the military, $11.3B on ICE, and planning to spend $400 million building a fucking ballroom.
It's about authoritarianism.
I want you to go to your favorite frontier LLM and ask it how much it would cost the US to implement Vienna-style public housing. Figure in paying off current homeowners to get their support. Restrict it to major cities where housing is the worst, just to make it easier. I bet you it's well over $10T long-term.
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...
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.
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.
Right now I'm not sure there is a country where young people are generally satisfied and optimistic about their future. America is a mess, Europe is generally a mess, China is struggling with too many grads who aren't able to find jobs matching their qualifications... From what I've heard things aren't exactly great in India either.
Every country has its problems.
Australians will complain a lot but honestly the future is very bright. Higher exports than imports, government debt isn’t completely out of line and it’s not going exponential like some regions, it has European like public services, a median wealth 2.5x that of the USA, good employment figures.
It’s not perfect but i still think it’s pretty good.
But how much of the Australian economy is extraction for the Chinese economy? My brief understanding of the Aussie economy is that a large part of it is iron, hydrocarbons, copper, etc. going abroad, largely going to feed the Chinese economic machine. So economic performance is heavily tied into Chinese performance.
And the median wealth number is another way of saying "house prices are insane" right?
Housing is a challenge
Where did you move? I understand you're retired: that changes the situation somewhat.
When I lived in Amsterdam, we were renting a flat. The gentleman we were renting from told us our rent easily covers all his expenses in South East Asia.
Spain. And I have to apologise, I call myself retired but in reality I'm just unemployed. It's more of a year long sabbatical, but I jokingly call it retirement since I moved to Spain and many Dutch people do so for retirement. I'm planning on setting up a company here.
Spain isn't great for being employed or freelance (autonomo) but if you set up a limited liability company (SL) and work from there it is not that bad. Tax on investments are averagely taxed compared to other countries.
>>Tax on investments are averagely taxed compared to other countries.
That is only if you haven't accumulated wealth yet. The combination of quite high capital gain tax with sky high wealth tax, pretty high income tax isn't very attractive if your plan is to accumulate some wealth. If you just want to make enough every year to live there I guess it's reasonable though.
I future-proofed myself by moving to a region with a €3M exception. So that I have a long way to go before paying wealth tax.
CGT is progressive and around 20%, compared to other European countries that is fairly average. Some Eastern European countries are at 15%, Belgian is going to 10%, Switzerland differs per canton.
Also, no CGT for fresh immigrants if you are able to use the Beckham law.
Sorry to hear you got priced out :( Unfortunately i am also quite pessimistic about the future of europe and the us, too.
The Netherlands is taking action against the brain drain by rapidly importing highly skilled migrants through various tax lowering schemes in the first five years of living here.
However plenty of those people leave after that period. Especially with the upcoming 36% unrealized capital gains tax on all your savings and investments.
Feels a bit like ISPs giving discounts to new customers only.
This is misleading. It's actually taxing 36% of _assumed gains_ of say 5% on all assets. So if you have $1M in savings, you'll end up paying 1.8% or $18K/annum, regardless of the actual investment return. I can see it would be painful during down years, but most of the time it would be ok.
No, that's not ok.
Many years ago, a friend of mine in the Netherlands had the same job as another guy, earning the same money, my friend being extremely thrifty, the other guy splurging. When they both found themselves out of a job at the same time, my friend got no support from the government as he had savings, while the other guy started getting a very generous allowance.
This goes directly against all that is reasonable. This is directly discouraging financial responsibility. My friend is thrifty just for the sake of it, he knows it's not in his interest. But he gets the short end.
Correct. If you go over €38.478 in savings, you immediately lose your renters benefit. No taper, just a hard drop-off. You can lose up to €5.000 in renters benefit a year.
A legal tax avoidance is to just buy a €1000 TV if you are near the limit. Yes that is as crazy as it sounds but people do it.
Same situation in the UK. Even a modest amount of savings (a few months of your salary) is enough to disqualify you from the majority of benefits, childcare etc.
That is the current system. In the new system it will be 36% on all capital gains, no more assumed gains. And an €1800 a year tax-free threshold.
Also it's a bit more, right now you are looking at 36% on 6% or 2.16% per year with a €59k threshold. So a bit over €20k a year on that €1M.
Actually that makes more sense? If you lose money on your investments, I suppose you can write it off next time?
You can write it off against future capital gains, but not against income tax from employment. So if the market is down a few years, you gain a lot of tax credits and you pray that the government doesn't get rid of those credits in the mean time.
> 36% unrealized capital gains tax
This sounds like the Netherlands speed running their way out of investments. If a country I was living in proposed this, I would be leaving ASAP, or getting some heavy financial engineering done.
On unrealized gains, wait, what??
Why is this shocking? Surely if you hadn’t grown up with the very technical idea of unrealized gains, this would seem totally normal. The surprising thing is that we let ourselves be convinced in the past that making money with money should be tax advantaged compared to making money with labor.
Unrealized gains are gains.
Yes.
Say you have €80k in investments. Markets go up, in one year time your investments are worth €90k. You did not sell.
That means you had €10k in unrealized capital gains. Subtract the €1800 per person threshold. €8200, 36% tax is €2952 tax to be paid at the start of the year.
Losses give you tax credits redeemable against future capital gains (not against income tax from employment)
How does that even work? What does it apply to? Say I own a 100% share in a business, each year does the government appraise it and pretty much require me to divest a portion of it to pay the tax?
Unrealized capital gains taxes are crazy all in an effort to own the rich or something. Meanwhile the people they're perceived as targeting have all the resources to avoid it.
Yes, you are supposed to either sell part of the stocks to cover the yearly tax or you need to dip into your savings account to find money to cover the tax.
I don't know about non-publicly listed companies, I assume you indeed need to appraise yearly.
The rich don't pay these taxes as the unrealised capital gains tax is only for private individuals, not companies. The rich have their assets in companies / shells.
Assuming you're not going to somehow avoid paying your tax when you do eventually liquidate, paying year to year is not that crazy.
Paying tax on money you make because you already have money is far better than playing tax on your time you sold for salary.
Yeah, I was chatting with a friend living in Spain once, and ascending the ladder in responsibility didn't make sense, as whatever salary increase he got would be heavily taxed, and it didn't make sense to bear much more responsibility for just a little bit of extra money a year.
As you say, avg workers are "fine" there, but for anyone trying to standout or grow in their career, they will hit an income ceiling very fast due to the high taxation, so it doesn't make sense to keep on growing as you are not properly rewarded for it.
But why did you left if you had a great QoL?
Because I was able to get a better QoL elsewhere in the EU.
The average worker in The Netherlands has one of the best QoL compared to average workers in other countries. But the Dutch income leveling and benefit system makes it so a high earner doesn’t have a significantly better QoL. Someone earning €30k has roughly the same spending power as someone earning €50k. (edit: net income after tax and benefits is €42k versus €47k for those two incomes but the person earning €30k has access to cheaper government housing)
In other countries, earning more gives you a better QoL.
The Netherlands had effectively full employment until a few years ago, last I checked.
Unless things got dramatically worse in the past 3 or so years, I think you are massively overreacting.
I happen to have a few personal friends that live there, for that matter.
I left mainly because of housing prices, the difficulty of being a freelancer, the 49.5% income tax after €78k, the 36% unrealized capital gains tax and just everything in life like supermarkets or public transport being so much more expensive than other European countries.
I took a big pay cut moving to Southern Europe, but post-tax I earn the same and everything is just so much cheaper. I honestly have a significant better life here. Good weather too.
> I left mainly because of housing prices
I understand you're not the landlord then. I agree this is a problem: the same(ish) earning you mentioned in another comment makes social mobility difficult. Some people are born with a house, others without. That's super unfair. I'd first tax that rather than income.
So you’re not retired? Confusing username to pick if so.
Did you get a local job, or are you taking advantage of geoarbitrage via a foreign remote job?
In the process of setting up a company to do consultancy services for Dutch companies, but eventually want to shift to local companies once I get to learn the language, culture and business.
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].
Even Trump: 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...
The episode was based on the book Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang (Amazon: China's Quest to Engineer the Future)
Very interesting read, with a lot more depth and details to this short (but accurate) summary.
Not just lawyerly society, special kind of asshole lawyer, as he was a protégé of Roy Cohn.
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... .
It is because China has a meritocratic system.
Maybe. I would like to think that is true but i don't have much evidence.
I think what we can see provably is that China is investing in the development of STEM contributors at the primary school level through advanced degrees and the central government is directing the economy to spend huge amounts on the work that they do.
I'm very curious about this because even tho we need to preserve democracy, some elements of meritocracy also seem needed. Obviously as Xi's latest purges show, there is some politics to it as well, but China does seem to do a fairly good job of meritocracy in the bureaucracy.
> 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
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.
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.
China-like is too complimentary to the intelligence of US leadership at the moment.
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...
These are the wages of nationalism. A stupid but powerfully attractive idea.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Would you have said the same for folks doing NLP circa 2015?
these folks were already associated with FAANG. Most of deep learning progress comes from industry funding, not academia
Knowing current administration anti-science approach to things like climate and health, I wouldn't be all at surprised if many of those who left academia were ones producing quality work that just didn't align with Trump admin's ideology.
the unscientific stuff was actually past administrations which told us cheetos is more healthy than eggs and meat lol
Turns out, if we feed data in and query it in the right way, we can come to charts that allow bad conclusions just like any other.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/01/16/lucky-charms-healthie...
If anyone is curious, as I was, where this misinformation came from: it appears to be a criticism of the Food Compass rating system from Tufts University. The connection to "past administrations" seems to be added by the person I'm replying to. They've also swapped Cheerios with Cheetos.
>On social media, I have seen graphics showing certain breakfast cereals scoring higher than eggs, cheese, or meat. Did Tufts create these graphics?
>No. Food Compass works very well, on average, across thousands of food and beverage products. But, when this number and diversity of products are scored, there are always some exceptions. These graphs were created by others to show these exceptions, rather than to show the overall performance of Food Compass and the many other foods for which Food Compass works well. But, as objective scientists, we accept constructive criticism and are using this to further improve Food Compass. We are working on an updated version now – see our versions page for more information.
https://sites.tufts.edu/foodcompass/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00381-y.epdf
> '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
Why?
If you go that far then
- senate
- scotus
- violence
- SV
- tech bros
- lies about AI
What is not broken.
The idea of academia is it is an investment. Look at internet, DoE, Genome, vaccines - a lot from academia. Companies barely do that.
Indeed. You're far more likely to get sensible policy opinions from a STEM PhD who knows what science is than from sleazy opportunist politicians, investors, and PR people.
You might even say that the opportunists dislike STEM because it gets in the way of their opportunism.
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
Yes.
I think well meaning people in the west are looking for a silver lining and in the process overcomplicating a rather simple issue: the US government is cutting spending everywhere while its electorate demands even deeper cuts. The money has dried up and people are leaving.
(One of my best friends was a nuclear medicine phd who left his cancer research lab after covid to work at a VoiP company, so i too have anecdotes)
Sigh.
The US is in a weird spot. The electorate does not generally want education and research cut.
Republicans here have convinced their base that education and the educated are bad, which has fed their desire to cut academic funding and research at all levels.
That is to say, the federal government doesn't have a popular mandate to do any of this. They simply hold all levers of power through a slim majority of the voting populace.
China is famous for low-quality research and bad papers, which is exactly what you'd expect from a system that grants an expanded number of formal credentials to people who aren't actually doing good scientific research.
China was famous for low-quality products as well.
While there have been substantial improvements, it still deserves its fame.
Be that as it may, China also has persistent threat actors outfoxing American cybersecurity in the form of Salt Typhoon. The cards are on the table, and the US is already undoubtedly losing several fronts of asymmetrical warfare.
I have a friend who, to explain it simply, worked medium high up in the CIA for 8-12 years during Bush and Obama. The only time he gets serious about talking about his time there is on this topic. Chinas cyber security is, according to him, light years ahead of the US to the point where its embarrassing.
If I understand Salt Typhoon correctly it's a masterpiece. The descriptions I've seen indicate that they penetrated lawful intercept. Lawful intercept operates outside network operators network management systems because it was designed not to trust the network operators. I am skeptical of claims that Salt Typhoon has been eliminated from US networks. Any such implicitly claim to detect lawful intercept traffic and ensure it isn't nefarious, which traffic that system is designed to hide.
Which breakthroughs, specifically? There are no Chinese institutions pumping out nobel prizes. Zero.
10 years ago were no Chinese companies pumping out world-class cars either. But here we are.
I'm honestly not sure what you're referring to.
Geely owns Volvo and IIRC a significant portion of Volvos are Chinese made now.
There's a number of companies or brands that are now Chinese owned. China knows that home grown brands (like Geely) don't work on an international stage, so they buy well known brands like Volvo.
It's a bit of a silent behind the scenes takeover but I'd say that China is now seriously making competitive cars. If you can follow the brands and notice.
Lol, the fully homegrown BYD is destroying Tesla everywhere outside the US where it’s basically banned and you’re taking about Geely and Volvo and behind the scenes. It’s all out there on the stage.
Idk man, i dont keep a list of China's breakthroughs handy. You can find the same results on google that I can.
And I wasn't aware that breakthroughs needed to be nobel laureate worthy at a minimum to still be considered breakthroughs.
https://www.nature.com/nature-index/news/nature-index-resear...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: Oh, that's old. In 2024 Chinese institutions only made up 7 of the top 10 most productive research centers but in 2025 they are account for 8/10: https://www.natureasia.com/en/info/press-releases/detail/911...
That's a volume based index, not impact, thus reinforcing my point.
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.
People start being inventive when tight on resources, so a bit of evolutionary pressure is not a bad thing.
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).
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.
People have really messed up views about hiring in general. I wish more people understood what you are saying here.
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!
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.
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.
The US doesn’t have enough money to fund the entire distribution
And as a tax payer I prefer discretionary spending for high performers.
> for high performers.
Like $40k bonuses for ICE agents. Incidentally, $40k is about the stipend for a typical PhD student. I'll take a smart student doing nothing but eating food and digesting theorems over the absolute chaos that is being funded by our tax dollars.
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.
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.
> There is little to no evidence that the people leaving aren't the top performers, let alone the bottom.
According to the article, the majority of the losses were voluntary (people quitting or accepting buyout offers) and not people who were directly laid-off.
While this isn't direct evidence of where these people sit on the spectrum from top to bottom performers, my anecdotal life experience suggests that when losses like this are voluntary its far more likely they are top performers who have plenty of options elsewhere (either in the private sector, or in other governments).
Also (and also anecdotally) this brain-drain doesn't just apply to direct government workers. I know of several people who worked in (and in some cases headed up) prestigious university research labs in the US who have left in the last year after massive funding cuts. Most of them were immigrants who went back to universities in their country of origin, some after having been here for decades.
At least amongst my circles, that seems so obvious. I don’t know what things are actually like on the ground. But from here in Australia, the subtext of all the ICE news is that foreigners are no longer welcome in the US. And that America is becoming an authoritarian, fascist state.
Of course I don’t want to visit the US. There’s no way I’d want to move there right now.
I know of multiple US run conferences which are taking place in Europe this year. Too many attendees wouldn’t come if they were hosted in the US.
There's reason to suspect that the one's leaving are more likely to be top performers. First, top performers are the most likely to be able to find another job easily so they would take the voluntary buyout or just leave when things get crazy. Also, some of the DOGE cuts targeted probationary employees which include those that have recently been promoted or recently hired, both are classes of employee that the department explicitly wanted to keep.
Academia critics usually think it was pretty great until the last 3-5 decades.
Wouldn't an easily misled electorate benefit the political party that lies the most?
We have definitive proof of that viz a vis, trump and his idiot magats.
That is kind of my point. That party has been attacking the education system in all forms for decades (imo) for exactly that reason. They have razed everything from school lunches to loan programs. This affects everyone.
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.
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.
I agree with this. I guess you already believe they follow a bell curve.Then from your former comment you also believe it's worth it to lose many PhDs that don't contribute to also lose the few that do.
I guess the conflict is my value judgement that it's good to keep PhDs that don't contribute if it allows US to keep the ones that do contribute. I believe so for 2 reasons.
- Distinguishing between contributors and non contributors at scale is difficult.
- the value of research can be large from a few contributors.
> 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.
Saying "oh these are just the bad STEM PhDs" seems like a ridiculous exercise in sour graping.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
No, the implicit assumption is that losing these 10k PhDs is worse than not losing them.
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?
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I think your comment is more a refutation of the top level than the person you're responding to. I think people are right to assume there is already a serious throughput issue with scientific research, especially so-called "basic" research in the US and seeing a mass exodus from the government is troubling because public funding is what, historically, generates the big breakthroughs.
What the person you're replying to was likely trying to say is that once you get into this size of layoffs its no longer about the individuals and their performances and a claim that all 10k of them are on one side of a theoretical "bell curve" (which btw i havent seen evidence can actually be measured) is big and needs evidence.
> public funding is what, historically, generates the big breakthroughs
Without an opinion on the rest of this, public funding in the US doesn't produce big breakthroughs from scientists employed by the government, but rather by funding university research.
It appears that, after the administration canceling a significant proportion of grants in 2025, that science funding has largely been maintained or increased from pre-2025 levels for 2026, although how the 2026 funding gets spent, and whether it is all spent, is an open question.
It’s a separate question not arbitrary. How many PHD’s the government should employ is debatable, but saying we should have fewer such people says nothing about who was let go.
It’s always tempting to say ‘This was a good decision therefore all the consequences are good’ but in the real world good and bad decisions will have both positive and negative consequences. Understanding individual consequences is therefore largely separated from the overall question of should we do X. However in politics nobody wants to admit any issues with what they did so they try and smokescreen secondary effects as universally beneficial/harmful.
One metric you could use is how often publications are mentioned by patents, and how often those patents lead to economic value. By this metric, it is valuable.
The number of PhDs we have is currently too many given the amount of money we have for project grants. But there is no evidence that the money we allocate to research is too large. If anything, you could argue the opposite.
I would be delighted if the private market funded basic research - the seed ideas that lead to patents.
You’re confusing two different questions. ‘Should we have more STEM PhDs in government?’ is a reasonable policy debate. ‘Is losing 10,000 STEM PhDs in weeks a problem?’ has a clearer answer… yes, because institutional knowledge doesn’t rebuild quickly. Also, there’s no evidence this was performance-based attrition. Lastly, recruitment becomes harder after mass departures signal instability.
The burden isn’t on critics to prove some theoretical optimal number. The burden is on defenders of this exodus to show it improved government technical capacity rather than hurt it.
I disagree--we're all paying for it, so it should be justified regardless.
And I don't need an optimal number. But the common refrain is essentially that more is always better, and fewer means we're losing our standing in the world. Always.
Maybe keeping a lot of them but shedding some percentage is actually more optimal. But I'm open to being wrong. That's why I'm asking for metrics.
The US government operates with such a huge debt that we aren’t paying for these things. Instead we are paying for the long term effects of such spending.
Cutting 10k scientists could therefore result in increased taxes without anyone ever seeing any savings. Or it could result in net gain from 1$ all the way up to what their cost * interest in the debt.
Therefore there’s no obvious side who takes the default win here. Instead you need actual well supported arguments.
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...
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.
I think you're saying "how do we know this isn't the normal amount of Phd people who leave every year/administration
While we don't have PhD numbers the Trump administration fired a large amount of people so no matter some portion of those had Phds therefore it must be higher than the previous administration
From the article:
"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."
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?
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.
foxyv says "most PhDs are extremely valuable"
Can you defend this statement?
Do you believe that 100% of the people who left were useless?
Do you think that's what is going on here?
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.
This doesn't match my experience at all.
Mid last year I helped run a workshop on AI explicitly for laid off federal science workers. The people involved were clearly extremely intelligent and knowledgeable, passionate about their research areas, and harboring an immense amount of institutional knowledge. They showed great curiosity and adaptability in the workshop. It was obvious that they were a set of very bad fires.
How can your limited experience make any claims about the government workforce as a whole.
It requires a decent amount of time to understand if someone is talented and that talent is being used to better their job.
>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
How would you know? Some people have very strong convictions and as another comment stated if a person is talented it increases the chances they could find another job similar to their desired work
what you are saying is idiotic. people who are in demand can find work anywhere, they are the kind of people who will leave as soon as they feel their work environment has become even remotely uncomfortable. people who stay are more likely to be those who can't find job elsewhere.
I think people who will leave as soon as they feel their work environment has become even remotely uncomfortable are likely sitting in a comfortable sinecure, and it isn't the role of the taxpayer to provide sinecures for people with doctoral degrees.
Government workers are meant to serve the government, and the government of the United States is By the People. The People voted for the administration and if someone can't work for the company because you dislike the guy running it, well, it sounds infantile to me. Someone so fragile as to not tolerate political disagreement and reasonable scrutiny and auditing should not be receiving a salary from public funds.
Your guy has armed goons with "absolute immunity" literally executing people in the streets, after threatening to invade neighbours and allies, appointing shockingly-unqualified loyalists at the very top of national institutions, and generally gutting the rule of law. It's a bit past "tolerating political disagreement", man.
Well, that went south quickly!
Glad to hear a British viewpoint now and then, but of course any problems stateside will be handled by Americans rather than Brits. Unless possibly you have dual citizenship (Brit & USA) perhaps?
FWIW Britain has plenty of history of what you term
"armed goons with "absolute immunity" literally executing people in the streets, after threatening to invade neighbours and allies, appointing shockingly-unqualified loyalists at the very top of national institutions, and generally gutting the rule of law."
You Brits almost have a monopoly (bwahahah!) on tyranny of various forms, having gone through most of them in bloody civil wars yourself. Hardly a model to follow, n'est-ce pa?
I'm a phd who used to be in civil service.
What you write here is certainly the goal, and I had a lot of colleagues who agreed with you. I thought it was bogus then, and I think it's bogus now.
Also people quit jobs all the time because of the boss. Usually it's the direct one, but not always, and as above, so below.
> reasonable scrutiny and auditing
It's been well over a decade since I left, and I'm sure it's gotten worse for those who stayed, but: lol. lmao.
Yes, I'm sure it's "infantile" for people at the NIH to resign because they believe their work is being censored for conflict with the administration's preferred pseudoscience.
Could you sound any more like a Lysenko propagandist in the USSR if you tried?
This position is idiotic, more detrimental to the United States than the government over employing people, and frankly un-American according to how we understood what serves America best pre-Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service_reform_in_the_Un...
Usually, when a system is broken, the correct course of action is to fix it. Not destroy it utterly.
Ahh yes, clearly any government would greatly benefit by having way fewer highly educated conscientious people working for them /s
We should round up and reeducate people with glasses. /s
Peter Gregory reincarnated.
The scarier part is that a lot of people will see this as good news.
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.
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.
>Private sector does some things better, see Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, SpaceX, et al.
All of those companies exist on the backbone of work that was done by government funded labs. You are just seeing the investments pay off.
PHds aren't engineers. The whole point of a PHd is basically spending a whole bunch of time working on something, with a very slight chance that it may or may not work - this is not something that is compatible with a private sector in any means. The point is that as a collective, you hope that someone has a brain blast moment and discover something that engineers can then take and make viable.
Really think about this claim: "private sector does some things better." What evidence is there of this really that isn't anecdotal? There are so many things tossed around like this which sound plausible but for which I can't think of a definitive, conclusive, account.
For example: the public sector literally send humans to the moon with technology vastly inferior to that which we currently have at our disposal. Heck, the Soviet Union put a probe on the surface of Venus and sent back images. To me, it is not at all clear that "private sector better" is a foregone conclusion. At best you could make the strong claim that contemporary economic theory predicts that private sector companies do better.
This is not a good thing.
> Is it not a good thing that these folks could do something more productive in the private sector?
That's assuming that they could do something more productive in the private sector. I don't think that's true in a whole lot of cases. The private sector is about maximizing profit, but there's a whole universe of productive and necessary things that don't lead directly to profit. The private sector is terrible at doing those things.
And, depending on what exactly we're talking about, it's very often the case that the private sector is much less efficient in terms of bang for the buck.
> Wouldn't it be better if companies like these had a larger pool of PhDs to pull from?
The pool they're pulling from isn't getting larger. It's getting smaller.
I think your "every fusion startup that raised $100m" link answers that question. Fusion startups haven't been bottlenecked by being unable to afford to poach talent previously administering grant programs or working in government-funded plasma physics labs. Shutting the labs and programs down on the other hand does slow down the fundamental research that leads to those startups
> Private sector does some things better, see Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, SpaceX, et al.
The private sector is good at doing more efficiently what the government already figured out how to do.
citing rocket companies feels funny when most of the research and some non-trivial % of contracts comes (came?) from gov’t (mostly defense) spending
Your phrasing "something more productive in the private sector" is taken from the DOGE emails to federal employees. Note that in this sense "productive" means "makes money for corporations". If your utility function is different, these jobs are no longer more productive.
For a very concrete illustration, I know a Veterans Administration physician who got the DOGE emails. He's been underpaid by $50k-100k per year compared to private market rates, for the last twenty years. He is happy to take that discount because the mission of caring for veterans is something he cares about, and because he feels he can practice better medicine if his goal is patient outcomes rather than billable procedures. He also values the education and research priorities of the VA.
It is absolutely true that he would make a lot more money for a private provider maximizing procedures and billing.
But is that what we should be optimizing for as a society? Is that what you personally aim for from your doctors?
I know a land lord that rents his apartment for $500/mo, when it's worth $2000/mo because he cares about his community.
Did I just solve the housing crisis?
Tell me have you thoroughly researched where all of the NOAA or NIH products go? The private sector has given us AccuWeather for the former and nothing for the latter.
I rely on NOAA forecasts to stay safe a lot and no private company gives me the kind of volume of information about the weather, hydrology, and sea conditions that they do. Call me when the private sector maintains flood gauges on all the rivers where I live or weather stations on peaks or satellites overhead.
I’m just thoroughly sick of hearing people repeat Reagan like he’s some kind of prophet.
I don't think this is necessarily a good thing. I'm in favor of the private sector, but these public sector research and scientific institutions also do very important work.
Some of the most brightest and accomplished scientists out of academia elect to forgo a higher paying private sector job in order to go into the civil service and work on even higher impact, lower paying jobs that don't necessarily chase an obvious profit motive. Ask yourself why.
Incredible false dichotomy. I don’t even know where to start dissecting this "argument".
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.
> I think the Apollo program for example was a massive waste of money that didn't improve anything for the average person
i mean, sure, that makes sense if you've never gotten on a plane, eaten food, used a space blanket when camping or in an emergency, been in an earthquake prone area or had hearing aids (non-exhaustive list)
https://www.nasa.gov/technology/tech-transfer-spinoffs/going...
> 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.
just because this was the primary political goal, and i'm 100% in agreement with you there, it does not mean that there were no other benefits to humanity. sometimes, humanity can accidentally do a good thing for everyone because we're trying to beat the other guy in a race. it does happen, sometimes.
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.
In mainstream media, public consensus is bought by the highest bidder, or the whims of the board of the company.
In social media, general consensus is owned by those that control the best and most bots to direct the conversation.
Unfortunately most people are too lazy/busy to seek out trusted information, and many if not most have no ability to understand if the answer they get should be trusted or not.
> In social media, general consensus is owned by those that control the best and most bots to direct the conversation.
Isn't it owned by the owner of the social media platform? Do you think Zuckerberg, Musk, etc are neutral? There is an enormous amount of evidence otherwise.
If some bots proliferate, it's because the owners allow those bots to do so.
>Do you think Zuckerberg, Musk, etc are neutral?
I mean, why wouldn't they have the most bots?
Why? If they instead move to EU, that's a win for EU.
EU unfortunately doesn't have the economic investment in education like US for a lot to justify the move.
Scientists tell people things they don't want to hear
That’s an odd description
Depends if your career depends on some facts not being true. Scientists can seem like a threat to you specifically if for example you need Climate Change to not be real. The last thing you would want is someone bringing evidence and analysis to that reality.
> for example you need Climate Change to not be real
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.
You know he means some US citizens who are anti- intellectual due to a combination of insecurities and propaganda by the Republican party
GP’s point is that because being anti-science is on the rise.
Because academia and University research is broken at best and leftist breeding ground at worst /s
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.
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.
Would you say that the number of people you can trust to represent our interests as their prime duty has gone up recently?
> 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.
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).
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?
Unless a comparable number of younger PhDs were hired to compensate, it’s a reduction of PhD-level federal workers in either case.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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'.
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?