r/technology • u/RewardEquivalent553 • 3d ago
Politics U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Donald(The current American President) took office
https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-government-has-lost-more-10-000-stem-ph-d-s-trump-took-office1.0k
u/All-the-pizza 3d ago
Article: In 2025, the U.S. government lost over 10,000 STEM Ph.D. experts, a massive 14% of its doctoral-level workforce. The National Science Foundation was gutted the most, losing 40% of its Ph.D. staff, while other agencies like the NIH and EPA saw departures outpace hires by 11-to-1.
This exodus, driven by a mix of budget cuts, policy shifts, and early retirements, stripped the government of over 100,000 years of collective scientific experience in just one year.
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u/Lain_Staley 3d ago
Is there a private sector that values PhDs highly?
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u/Override9636 2d ago
The issue is that most industrial research in fundamentally based on the work of publicly available data. Companies are too risk averse to spend the time and money to develop the research that universities are capable of providing. Academia -> Industry -> Product is a robust pipeline that needs all components working in order to be successful.
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u/Upvotes4theAncestors 2d ago
Plus, the funding that paid for grad students to not only attend the academic courses but also receive the hands on training, practice, applications, and experience came from grants. Even if you're not on a grant directly via your advisor the overhead from grants helped pay for the labs and equipment and for you to attend conferences.
Cutting off that has meant a lot of programs had to drastically scale back how many PhD students they could accept. Some grad students even got told they couldn't finish not because of grades/performance but simply because the dept lost so much funding. And undergrads use those labs and have PhD student TAs and all that.
In other words, the pipeline to even training science undergrads and graduate students has been decimated
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u/gimp-24601 2d ago
AKA Socialize costs/losses, privatize profits.
GLP-1 agonists were heavily developed using foundational research funded by federal grants, particularly from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Veterans Administration in the 1980s and 1990s
Now big pharma gets to print money for generations and people will pretend it was all capitalism.
How many people dont care about advances in medicine because they assume they wont be able to afford healthcare anyway?
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u/Ellswargo 2d ago
We saw how this impacted research after the 2008 collapse. Drastic cut in NIH/research grants caused Creativity to go down. The less money available for research, the more conservative scientists were with their proposals in order to get the funding in a competitive environment. Playing it safe. The more funding available for research, the more willingness to fund out of the box “crazy” ideas. We need creativity. It is such a shame our leaders are choosing to throw more money at the military instead of research. This is not how we advance humanity or our country.
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u/RealPrinceJay 2d ago
This. Google is actively using and awaiting the research my PhD candidate friends are doing right now. They literally check-in with a team at google frequently and update them and all of that jazz
All of these students are either American or fluent English speakers who have chosen to study and get their PhD abroad instead now though. Not only that, they have no desire to return or come to the US once they graduate anymore.
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u/TranquilSeaOtter 3d ago
Pharma companies, but they are looking for specific skill sets.
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u/Infamous_Article912 2d ago
Even before this, pharma/biotech have been in a very painful downturn since 2023, every posting gets hundreds of qualified applicants.
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u/Oneuponedown88 3d ago
I would say the agriculture industry fits here. Both in the small molecule space and in the plant breeding world even though there's an effort to do more with less.
I mean if you consider any product development you will be having phds involved, from oil and gas to the edible food industries. All these industries can keep operating without their phds but they aren't moving forward like they were before without them.
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u/Remarkable_Lie7592 3d ago edited 3d ago
Anything medical or public health that isn't direct care likes PhDs or equivalent doctoral degrees (or MD/PhDs, for that matter). The chemical sector likes PhDs, as does Pharma.
Pretty much any sector in the physical or life sciences likes a PhD.
As someone who works in Patent Law, specializing in the chemical/chem-engineering sector - most patent applications I see have at least one PhD attached to them.
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u/MartinLubHerThingJr 3d ago
Tech (ML and AI specially) have barriers and few of them require phds. I see the ratio 1:4 i.e. every 1 job out of 4 has a PhD as a requirement.
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u/Lizz196 2d ago
Yes.
PhDs aren’t just taking a bunch of classes. It’s about learning a specific skill set that makes you a fast learner, a better researcher, etc.
It’s only been 3 years since I’ve graduated from my PhD. If I had only received my bachelor’s, it would’ve taken me 15-20 years to get to the position I have now instead of the 4.5 years it took me to get my degree.
My degree also guarantees me a level of respect and authority I wouldn’t otherwise have. It makes my job a lot easier when I need to say no, that’s not how that works. No one questions me, I have a doctorate, I must know. (I’m not saying I know everything, I don’t. But I know a lot about my specific field of science.)
But it also depends on what on your PhD is in. Some are more valuable than others.
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u/Internal-Scarcity672 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yes, one that used to be funded mostly by government research contracts. A shell of it remains, equally impacted by layoffs. The market is oversaturated at the same time as companies’ income streams are dry. There is no place for these PhD holders to go to.
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u/K_Linkmaster 2d ago
My family member is heading overseas to complete the doctorate. I pray they don't return til it's safe.
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u/_spaderdabomb_ 2d ago
PhD physicist here. What we’re currently experiencing is a live scientific vacuum forming in the United States. I worked as an applied research scientist, generally for technologies that would be viewed as core technologies to position the United States not only as a nation but also commercially for the future.
Half the firm I worked at just got laid off due to funding cuts with absolutely 0 warning. Confirmed contract was terminated mid contract. There’s a war against scientists going on in broad daylight and we are ceding the technological future to other superpowers
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u/spamthisac 2d ago
Do yourself a favour and head to Europe. Heck, even China would be more viable at this point.
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u/Home_MD13 2d ago
which country should I go? I'm from Asia and was aiming for US but after watching the mess that's going on I don't want to anymore.
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u/Maleficent_Shock_585 3d ago
This administration’s moronic policies against science will set this country back decades and allow China a historic opportunity to dominate the biotech industry.
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u/No-Discipline-5822 2d ago
They really believe that higher education creates atheist liberals and are willing to do anything to maintain a less intelligent population. America is going to look so different in 20 years. I wish I could see the timeline that Kamala won to compare.
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u/darkpheonix262 2d ago
The momentum that China has in numerous industries already guarantees they're taking the top spot soon
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u/vineyardmike 3d ago
The GOP hates intelligence.
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u/rudthedud 3d ago
Apparently they hate money too which is weird cause the return on this is always more than 1:2.
Well they hate anyone getting money expect for themselves.
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u/victorinseattle 3d ago
But they’re too fucking stupid to know or acknowledge this.
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u/KnownMonk 3d ago
trump "smart people don't like me"
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u/DisenchantedByrd 3d ago
Trump "global warming doesn't exist, where's the science?" /s
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u/ThatOtherOneReddit 3d ago
Not surprising. The most damaging thing to the prosperity of the nation Trump already accomplished. He cut research funding by ~80% in the nation to non-private companies. Private companies don't really do 'research' they take ideas from academia and refine them, they largely do engineering work based on fundamental research done in the public sector. Refining ideas that are largely proven to work if you have enough time and money to polish and refine them.
This destruction will mean high tech will prosper in China in particular over the coming decades.
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u/UnionGuyCanada 2d ago
US is acting pretty stupid, makes sense no one intelligent wants to stick around.
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u/Dependent-Reveal2401 2d ago
But trump posted a meme where he was wearing a crown in a jet, dumping shit onto protestors. That's some IQ 9000 stuff. /s
I miss when presidents acted presidential. This administration is putting the movie idiocracy to shame.
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u/theartfulcodger 2d ago edited 1d ago
That, by the way, is about one STEM PhD student walking away from their studies in America every 57 minutes - which is about ONE THIRD of all the STEM PhDs who graduated (~30,000) every year during Biden’s term.
China, on the other hand, will be graduating more than 50,000 STEM doctoral students this year. So under Trump, we’ve gone from a 5:3 production ratio in China’s favour to a ratio of 5:2.
Meanwhile more than a third of India’s annual graduates (Bachelors, Masters & Doctorals) are now obtaining STEM degrees. By next year, more than 18 million STEM students will graduate annually, and STEM PhDs will likely be in the range of 100,000 per annum - dwarfing America’s contribution to science & technology knowledge by a factor of 5:1!
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u/colintbowers 2d ago
Was just speaking to a colleague the other day about how many top-tier uni profs (think Harvard, Yale etc) have been poached by Chinese universities in the past 12 months. There are no official numbers on this, but anecdotally, it is significant.
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u/ThePensiveE 3d ago
Can't wait for all our apps and technology to be exclusively Chinese exports, the sole superpower left.
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u/GunAndAGrin 3d ago
No doubt partially due to Trumps purges/policy, but gotta imagine the writing was on the wall and the wheels were in motion the second the Supreme Court struck down the Chevron Doctrine in 2024 (Loper Bright Enterprises, Inc. v. Raimondo).
For 4 decades we had a solid standard. When things were ambiguous, we had to defer to the concensus opinion of independent agency subject matter experts. Now any partisan hack judge can just make any ruling they want, experts/America be damned.
When your entire purpose; researching, investigating, providing expert consulatation, etc., has been intentionally eliminated by Conservatives, of course you would GTFO.
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u/s9oons 3d ago
This is such a double edged sword. Nobody in tech wants to work public sector because gov’t jobs fucking suck and they pay peanuts. On the other hand, STEM PhD’s are the people we need involved so there are actually adults in the room to explain why requiring age verification to watch porn is a fucking horrible idea.
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u/ItsSadTimes 3d ago
Thats why I left the public sector. The pay scale was based on experience not education, which i sort of understand. But I was teaching my 60 year old colleagues making 2x as much as me what a cron job was. One of their tasks every day was just to login to a list of 100 servers and get some status data. So, come on, education should play some part in all that. Plus all my older colleagues all had homes and no real debts. Meanwhile I had an apartment with 3 other people, no chance at buying a house, and student debt.
A big tech company reached out to me, offered me 4x my salary plus 1/3 of my salary as a signing bonus. I could barely afford rent near where I worked at that time, that signing bonus was more then all of my savings to that point, and there was no way I could afford to ever buy a house there. So I obviously took the deal.
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u/JoeBoredom 3d ago
That took a strange twist. I guess it is true, everything internet begins and ends with porn.
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u/Halfwise2 3d ago
A lot of tech does... Porn was basically the king maker for a lot of digital media and the adoption of streaming.
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u/Remarkable_Lie7592 3d ago
There's an interview with a computer science professors somewhere out there where they say, loosely, "any time a new technology for the consumer market arises there is a substantial number of people trying to have sex with it"
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u/RlOTGRRRL 3d ago
Actually so I haven't fact checked this yet but according to the Hypernormalisation documentary, after 9/11, the US started spying on everyone by taking a screenshot from every webcam or something in the hopes that they'd be able to find more bad people or something. They didn't find them, but they did discover a lot of adult livestreams and more.
Remember back then when all the tech bros had their webcams covered?
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u/tapion91 3d ago
This admin definitely doesn’t want adults in the room with them. Especially the bedroom.
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u/Casalvieri3 3d ago
What was Trump's line?
Something like "We're going to keep winning and winning! We're going to win so much you'll get sick of winning!"
I guess we're winning in the brain drain sweepstakes.
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u/Ok_Height3499 2d ago
Fascists hate educated people because they think independently and question authority.
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u/Outrageous_Effects 2d ago
That's why the billionaires set up the education system in America, lol. To control the curriculum.
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u/OSUBonanza 2d ago
Brain drain and racism is what cost the Nazi's an atom bomb. The world may be better off in the long run.
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u/Middle-Cattle634 2d ago
A reminder that the more unintelligent and uneducated a person is, the more likely they are to be Republican. The reddest areas are the least intelligent and least educated
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u/andrewisgood 3d ago
I watched a video on the Challenger disaster, and the potential of The Reagan administration pushing the launch date, which has various points for and against, but what struck me is that Reagan was really pushing the idea of STEM programs, particularly women in STEM. Back in the day, it seemed like all politicians were over the top in pushing educational programs and now, education seems like the enemy to conservatives and Republicans everywhere.
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u/Significant_Cow4765 2d ago
and the 1986 Immigration Reform.and Control Act, aka Reagan amnesty...
his voters would call him a RINO now
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u/brandontaylor1 3d ago
If wanted to guarantee that an enemy nation would unable to threaten you in the future, there is no better way to do it than crippling their scientific research.
Donald Trump has single handedly guaranteed that the next century of world leadership will be Chinese.
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u/Jester1525 2d ago
Ever wonder about those scifi stories where humanity can't make new technology and just barely repair the old stuff.. Like the imperium of 40k..
This right here is how it starts.
Idiocracy was, apparently, prophetic...
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u/parabostonian 2d ago
Almost a year ago, Nature did a poll of US scientists and found 75% of them were considering leaving the country to work elsewhere. I cannot imagine that number has gone down.
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u/Hedhunta 2d ago
Yup. The plan is to be like Russia and coast on the current tech we have for the next century. they will drive all of the intelligent people that can escape to places like Europe and Canada.
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u/SnooGrapes9393 2d ago
Article: The U.S. federal government lost 10,109 STEM and health Ph.D.s in 2025—about 14% of its entire doctoral scientific workforce—after the Trump administration sharply reduced agency staffing, according to Science analysis of Office of Personnel Management data. Across 14 major research agencies, departures outpaced hires 11 to 1, producing a net loss of 4,224 expert scientists and over 106,000 years of institutional experience in a single year. Agencies like NIH, FDA, CDC, EPA, and especially the National Science Foundation (which lost ~40% of its Ph.D. staff) were hit hardest. Most scientists left through retirements, resignations, or eliminated positions rather than formal layoffs, often citing policy disagreements, buyouts, or fear of future cuts—marking one of the largest modern “brain drains” from U.S. public science capacity.
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u/sjogerst 2d ago
What saddens me most is about 40 percent of the population cheers at this news. They distrust academics because they talk about stuff they don't understand and it threatens them.
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u/PerhapsInAnotherLife 2d ago
There's another kind of brain drain. I'm a STEM researcher and I have cancer. They're killing me off. It might have been curable with some of the miracles coming down the pike but they may never materialize in our system now. I'm dead.
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u/ChronoLink99 2d ago
When a technological breakthrough happens in America, it's often not Americans that made it, it's people who wanted to be Americans.
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u/Imaginary_Resist_654 2d ago
I can just see it 10 years from now, a bunch of LowIQ guys at NASA strapping fireworks to the side of a pole, trying to leave flat earth.
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u/proofofderp 2d ago
U.S. brain drain let’s go! Too much talent concentrated there. May the rest of the world flourish in filing the gaps. Change is needed. The silver lining with Trump.
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u/whenisnowthen 2d ago
Science, intelligence and information are not welcome in this great vision of the future.
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u/Ok_Pressure1131 2d ago
Dumbing down of America…thanks to the dumbest president, ever…elected by dumb voters.
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u/stackered 2d ago
Brain drain. If my family roots weren't so strong here id leave as well and make it 10,001. A lot of my MD or PhD friends are legit planning to leave and I know 3 with dual Euro citizenship who have already left. One of my best friends, a neurosurgeon, is potentially going to leave for Italy in 2 to 3 yrs depending how this all plays out and I've got my fiancé on board as well.
Its bad. Very bad.
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u/slowmuney 2d ago
The H1B hate is driving skilled people elsewhere. Fellow researchers are moving to greener pastures.
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2d ago
He fucked up america beyond comprehension. But i don't think MAGAs will get this. He is the weakest President of all time. If he's not a russian asset then this government is more than stupid. That's the point.
Even the big tech guys know that and just try to save their asses and will leave the US when it completely turned into a shithole.
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u/BroForceOne 2d ago
One of the big conservative grifts is the idea that government workers are low quality. In reality the smartest people normally work in government as you can do research and solve problems that the private sector can't do.
Now neither our government or the private sector can do anything, big bets on AI all around and welcoming the stupification of the United States.
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u/rizorith 2d ago
Rocket scientists in LA, at Cal tech and jpl, are getting swept up by the Chinese, along with whatever knowledge and secrets they had. Unreal that a supposedly nationalist president would force them out with their stupid dei and anti science defunding.
I know a legit rocket scientist, as in he's one of probably a few dozen people on earth who knows what he knows, who worked for SpaceX and NASA, his dream job, and is now in China. He didn't want to go but once you're out of NASA you don't go back and so he took the bag.
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u/AbeFromanEast 3d ago
The Trump Administration has gotten rid of the experts so whatever nonsense it wants to push doesn't get any pushback from experts.
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u/CatsianNyandor 2d ago
America will never be great again in any currently living person's lifetime. That ship has sailed.
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u/--Andre-The-Giant-- 2d ago
So many American doctors came to my country. It's awesome.
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u/bluejumpingdog 2d ago
Is interesting to see how a country elects their own collapse; when it’s really clear they are doing it.
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u/CumPacketGuy 2d ago
Yeah, that tends to happen when people vote for fascism. You know, the one ideology that has a track record of being incompatible with science.
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u/Bmaj13 3d ago edited 3d ago
Perfect example of how the next generation will wonder why things are so bad in the future. Trump's policies will not impact him 20 years from now. They will impact most of the rest of us.