Sure, I make more money here, but is it worth dealing with nonsensical immigration policies, haphazard funding cuts, crumbling infrastructure, completely random rulemaking, and demoralized colleagues facing severe and nonsensical budget cuts when various other countries with a good standard of living and competitive research labs make immigration very easy for skilled people like scientists?
It isn't specifically a Trump thing, but he's certainly proving to be the straw that broke the camel's back, and it's likely I'll go elsewhere once my postdoc appointment ends.
I can imagine that the decision is even easier for people from countries like China. Why deal with the stress of the government suddenly deciding that you aren't allowed to work at your institution anymore regardless of track record or background, (many chinese colleagues have been worried about the proposed legislation and it comes up often), when you can work at a similarly cutting edge institution back home? You just have to determine if the US being less authoritarian on certain things is valuable enough to put up with the awful treatment through the long immigration process.
AI is just an enabling of the the imagination of the now widened bracket of behavior.
As has been often remarked on. this is a really shit timeline to exist in.
[1] https://www.wipo.int/web/global-innovation-index/w/blogs/202...
But other countries don't need to increase funding to become competitive, since we are decreasing funding. All they have to do is nothing.
If one parent loses their job and cannot get a new one in their field, they have to either switch career (and start a new career at a lower point) or they take a longer-term view, assume that the other parent will also lose their job, and switch country.
The following is anecdotal and I don’t have any statistics. When I was a PhD student at UC Santa Cruz, roughly half of my classmates were foreigners, many from mainland China and India, but also from Iran, South Korea, Greece, Uruguay, and Mexico, to name a few. My first advisor was a German who became a naturalized American citizen, and while roughly half of my professors were native-born Americans, I also had professors from China, Ireland, Greece, Singapore, and Argentina. During my time in industry in Silicon Valley as a researcher, I’ve worked with many people who grew up abroad and moved to the United States for grad school.
The biggest issue I see with a brain drain in America isn’t necessarily Americans going abroad, since it would be a major sacrifice giving up family and friends to move to a place with an unfamiliar language and culture. The problem I see is when immigrants to America who have already made those sacrifices end up leaving America, either to return to their countries of origin or to different countries. If a significant number of immigrant scientists leave America, this will be a tremendous blow to American science, and this may also be a boon to countries that are willing and able to hire these talented people.
China, for example, has the money to fund science at levels competitive with the United States. I don’t foresee a lot of Americans moving to China, partly due to the language barrier, and also partly due to China’s political system. However, what if Chinese researchers in the United States return to China en masse? This is not good for us, though it would be great for China.
These are scary times in America.
So, all those people you met did exactly this.
> it would be hard for American scientists with spouses and children to relocate.
No harder than it was for any of those other people to relocate to the USA.
I know that Americans like to believe that everyone in the rest of the world really wants to live in the USA, but that's actually not true. There's a certain fascination, for sure, but (and especially recently) the USA is not the shining beacon on the hill that it once was.
> I don’t foresee a lot of Americans moving to China, partly due to the language barrier, and also partly due to China’s political system
I suspect that both these barriers are easily overcome with the simple realisation that the choice is "be a scientist in China, or not at all".
If the USA cuts funding for all science, then all scientists must move abroad. There's no option to stay in the USA and be a scientist, because science in the USA is government funded and the government stopped funding it. If the individual chooses to stay in the USA, then they must also choose to stop being a scientist.
Aren't all the non-bankruptible tuition fees providing plenty of funding already? Where's that money going? The football team?
The minister has followed the recent developments in the United States closely:
"Academic freedom is under pressure in the United States, and it is an unpredictable situation for many researchers in what has been the world's leading research nation for many decades. We have had close dialogue with the Norwegian knowledge communities and my Nordic colleagues about the development. It has been important for me to find good measures that we can put in place quickly, and therefore I have asked the Research Council to prioritize grant funding schemes that we can implement rapidly," says Aasland.
The program is meant to last years, we'll see how it goes.
Now I know, $10m ain't much in the grand scheme of things, but we're just 5 million folks over here.
[1]: https://www.forskningsradet.no/en/news/2025/100-million-nok-...
You are talking about $2/capita for this Norwegian contribution. Also, this has to be set against the fact that Norwegian government has cut research funding recently in real terms.
The US idiocy is massively stupid on a strategic level, but it is also simply massive. That makes it hard for the rest of the world to compensate.
Norway's overall science budget is $1 billion per year, or $200/person/year. US's was $200 billion/year or $600/person/year. So Norway isn't really pulling its weight.
You might want to say tuition should support research, but the reality is that it doesn't.
Using taxes is different, as public money and how it is used is the result of either consensus or some authority’s judgement that some public money should be invested in research for the sake of the common good. Even here, the privatization of profits and socialization of losses is criminal, not to mention the gatekeeping of research results funded by public money.
No. Having worked in academia for years, most of my funding came from the NSF. Sometimes it was from the state government, or private organizations partnering with us instead. Usually the university took a 50%+ cut of the grants we got as "overhead" too...
Thankfully, since grants started putting caps on how much the university is allowed to take I haven't seen a 50% overhead cut in a long time. It's still a pretty significant chunk though.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/38843335-64cd-4c03-bdbc-a77...
Look at them now.
https://www.history.com/articles/slavery-profitable-southern...
But the deep irrationality driving artificial opportunistic ideological divides (this time less raw white supremacy, but still a lot of xenophobia, party loyalty propaganda, cult of personality, and fear and backlash with respect to minorities), drives sub-cultures like lemmings, off the cliff of reality. Taking the rest of us with them.
Obvious even as it becomes unstoppable.
A lot of times the effects are invisible. I doubt everyday Mississippians even think about how slavers stole their future from them. Americans barely ever think about the trillions of dollars that the Iraq war wasted/stole.
That’s a massive accomplishment, and kinda proves that a whole bunch of people there were victims of circumstance, a do or die situation.
Never underestimate the ability of a small percentage of malevolent people to upend society.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
This is an incredibly obnoxious and uninformed comment. NASA does not hire incompetent people because of "diversity".
> The parallel with Hitler really does not apply. The US won't be sending scientists working on nuclear weapons, stealth aircraft or profitable endeavors like GPUs.
Also an uninformed comment. The physicists that came to the US and UK and then worked on weapons programs were not for the most part working on weapons programs in Germany. They were just able to transfer those skills into the Manhattan Project, radar, or other programs.
What this pullback in US scientific funding does is reduce the number of those shots on goal. It undoes what the US prioritized from World War II onwards: that scientific innovation is foremost a strategic asset, not strictly a moneymaking venture. You saw that on display with the recent B-2 sorties over Iran: those could not have happened if not for highly specialized researchers slowly contributing to that body of work over decades.
Silicon Valley, the population of ordinary people residing there, 10 years ago (2015), heaved diversity. In corporate employment, it took decades to break through gender and race ceilings in industry to various degrees, but it largely happened, mostly, for better or worse.
Bringing together people, capital, opportunity, and academia creates a vibrant ecosystem that mutually reinforces further gains in a "virtuous" cycle. What doesn't create much is having only a few people spread out without a support system. It takes encouraging a mix of many open minded people within a smaller physical or digital proximity in order to get the w00w00 effect. That can't really happen when people are told they're not welcome.
What's the meaning of "heaved diversity" here?
I think I agree with the rest of your comment, about the concentration of varied talent being important.
I don’t dismiss the premise of the article and I think it is a shame how these organizations are being impacted, but I don’t know that these are the best exemplars of cutting edge science being shut down that will lead to America’s downfall from its scientific perch.
The world of privately funded research organizations like Bell Labs is long gone, with companies being barely able to look past the next quarter never mind being willing to invest in long term research that may not pay off for a few decades, if it pays off at all. And by definition most cutting edge science has that kind of financial time horizon. If there was an obvious, short term path to directly benefiting those conducting it, it's probably not very cutting edge at all and closer to engineering than actual scientific research. Not that there is anything wrong with that, we need engineering investment too. But it's not a replacement for science research.
I think a lot of people who scoff at the idea of government being on the cutting edge of science research don't understand how that research is being conducted. Sure, some of it is done by actual government employees, but especially for organizations like the NSF, the bulk of the research is being done by organizations and individuals outside of government who are simply given a check to look into things that might not immediately pay off or which have major societal benefit but no real path to commercial payoff.
They are, but the article asserts, without evidence, that the US, like Nazi Germany, has passed a threshold where it is going to lose its preeminence in scientific research.
Then you simply aren't familiar with their work. These (plus NIH, DOE, DOD etc.) are the engines of a large portion of the world's science.
The engine is starved and it is going to destroy American industry.
The problem is that not all cutting edge science is "sexy". NOAA and NASA are doing some _really_ cool stuff with weather monitoring / climate predicting. Sexy? Arguably no. Unless the weather app on your phone is sexy.
Important? I'd argue that it's critical that we keep getting better at it.
the article is meant to educate and inform, so inform the reader, who might know that fact, of it and some evidence to characterize the dynamic.
when you preach to the choir, you miss a chance to widen the circle of empathy.
They fund a lot of the foundational work that doesn't get a lot of resources from the private sector. 99% of new drugs approved between 2010 and 2019 relied on NIH funding.
Most of these agencies do some foundational science but maybe more importantly they collect lots of boring data. Boring data they give out to researchers for free. They also hand out grants which might not be lottery tickets but they pay for boring stuff.
The current administration believes that if you stop measuring any problem it ceases to be a problem. No one can push back on their flood of bullshit about everything if there's no data to point to. Authoritarians despise objective reality and empirical measurement and will always strive to make it easier to push their bullshit narratives.
True, most are just bloated bureaucracies serving their own self interests
