They're also straight up harassing and arresting foreign students for no reason, so they don't even have to muck with the budget at all to materially ruin things.
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 anti-intellectualism is actually directly fueling new technologies and research breakthroughs to the country you consider 'your enemy'.
Just curious, it's hard to see things clearly from inside the carnival.
There are way more opportunities with other countries that I'm aware of, mostly EU-EU.
I guess it is actually going to happen, in 10 years, 20 years max, no one will think the world super power is America anymore, it will clearly be behind China by then.
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.
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.
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.
This is garbage.
What you describe might be the case in some social-sciences circles but never has been the case in most STEMs fields.
If you have a (sensical) unorthodox idea that displease a research director, 10 other research directors will be very happy to dig up this exact idea in a slightly different context.
This is how sciences progress.
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.
As your sibling pointed out, the end result is China benefiting from that void.
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.
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.
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.
Under her PhD supervisor she directly worked with the NM department of transportation as a consultant. She did all that as an international student besides her graduate studies while being paid at 50% FTE (+tuition).
It takes between $10m (rural) to $100m (urban) to build a mile of interstate. Recycled materials can reduce the cost by 15-50% while still being equally as sustainable for decades.
Fortunately she is no longer at risk (or minimal risk) job/immigration wise. But others are not as fortunate. Just yesterday I learned that a PhD student from my alma mater was turned back from port of entry and his student visa denied. Reason? He traveled with his University provided laptop without written authorization. I understand that there are embargos and sanctions and trade restrictions, but really?
> 10,109 ... left their jobs
> departures outnumbered new hires last year by a ratio of 11 to one
That means that there were ~919 new hires, and thus it seems that 10,109 minus 919 equals
> a net loss of 4224
It appears that the "11 to one" ratio is the average, across agencies, of each individual ratio. It's left as an exercise to the reader to determine whether that average has any meaning at all.
https://delta.tudelft.nl/en/article/fewer-phd-positions-and-...
https://www.sciencelink.net/features/its-not-just-about-mone...
> 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.[0] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/china-is-run-by-engineers-a...
It is no coincidence that these kinds of personality-based dictatorships often devolve into dysfunction as time goes on.
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.
If their credentials exceed their defacto responsibilities in the government, they might be blocking someone else from being promoted or otherwise "growing" or whatever.
It isn't always Eureka moments but also a slow grinding away at assumptions to confirmations.
And as a tax payer I prefer discretionary spending for high performers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This intellectual capital is valuable, despite whatever the latest populist memes about professors claim.
PhDs seem to be quite employable by private industry, where competency is still valued.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Can you defend this statement?
Some of the people who left where underperforming but a significant percentage where extremely underpaid while providing extreme value to average Americans.
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?
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.
But as far as I can tell, not nearly as hard as in the US. I don't think that any PhD student in Europe has been deported by masked agents, for instance.
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.
FWIW, I do. I don't live in the US, though.
But the “economic anxiety” angle is well debunked at this point. Grievance, stoked by the right wing takeover of the media, is the answer. And we’ll need to go a lot further along the vector of solutions you’ve started down to fix that.
But sure, if you want to add "break up big tech" and "regulate social media" to the shopping cart I'm absolutely up for it.
Not taxes. Authoritarianism.
it's not about taxes -- that is a false narrative. Trump did not reduce the budget, he just redirected money from science to "border security" (aka an unaccountable domestic paramilitary force aka ICE) and the military. Taxes were cut yes, but primarily on the very wealthy.
but yes, you are correct that Americans from both parties support high military spending instead of investing in the wellbeing of its citizens (education, healthcare, housing, etc.), and _that_ is a significant problem that I don't see us getting away from any time soon. very sad.
There’s a reason OECD ranked the US tax system as most progressive some years back.
* It's low quality stuff that you buy everyday * It's not merely low quality stuff, but low quality stuff in astonishing quantity... * ... and among them, occasionally there are some high quality stuff. It might be a small ratio, but the base number is there.
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.
> 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.
seems like it was made to fit a specific narrative...
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.
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.
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?
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.
This past year top US talent entering college left the US at 5x the rate they did before. Europe, pacific rim, china, all have massive recruiting programs to suck talent out, and it’s working.
Trumps Gift will surpass Hitlers Gift.
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...
In addition to the tumult at the agency, they were being monitored for what they did on their own time. Truly draconian stuff.
Want to collaborate with the WHO? Forbidden. Speak at a conference abroad on vacation time? Nope.
I don’t blame them. The autocratic push at the top feels different when it extends beyond work, and touches causes you feel deeply about. It’s a huge loss for the US.
- "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).
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'.
This is a principle which means nothing and it's not one I share, and I don't think you share it either. HackerNews is not academia, and academia does not deal exclusively in quant, (even though my corner of academia was indeed 100% numbers 100% of the time). I'm only expressing the impression I have from my perspective as someone who still has ties to academia.
> I'm not sure what you're saying.
It's already been common for the allure of the United States shift depending on the politics of the country and the politics of the specific academic. But that hadn't been enough to shake the crown off our head, so to speak. I am saying that I believe we are no longer number 1.
> If my town is washed away by a flood, I don't say, 'we've always had rain'.
To extend this analogy, I am saying "We've always had rain, we've even had floods. This is the first flood to wash away much of my town. I am sad about that and I don't think it will recover."
/s
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.