Trump science funding cuts raise fears of U.S. brain drain
Trump administration cuts to U.S. science funding have raised fears of a brain drain, with thousands of grants cancelled and researchers moving abroad. Experts warned the losses could damage biomedical innovation and the economy.
The Trump administration’s continued attacks on academia and its funding cuts to scientific research have provided an opening for other countries to poach researchers from the United States. Experts warned the cuts to science could shrink the U.S. economy by nearly $1 trillion over 10 years, while young scientists have grappled with cancelled grants, firings and hiring freezes.
A study in September by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation warned that without a reversal, the cuts to science could shrink the U.S. economy by nearly $1 trillion over 10 years. That could leave the U.S. lagging behind China, which is investing heavily in research.
In April 2025, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put out its latest public health alert on “superbugs”, strains of bacteria resistant to antibiotics. The drug-resistant germs are responsible for more than 3m infections in the US each year, claiming the lives of up to 48,000 Americans. Globally, the largely untreatable pathogens contribute annually to almost 5m deaths.
Under the Trump administration, thousands of young American scientists have grappled with wave after wave of disruptions. Billions of dollars have been wiped from research budgets, almost 8,000 grants have been cancelled at the National Institutes of Health and the US National Science Foundation alone, and more than 1,000 NIH employees have been fired. More than 10,000 post-doctoral experts in scientific and related fields were lost to the federal workforce last year across 14 research agencies, with the number of employees departing outstripping new hires by 11 to one.
Researchers said multibillion-dollar cuts in NIH contracts made it impossible for labs to maintain their equipment, leaving them with the choice of paying exorbitant maintenance fees or giving up on experiments. With an ongoing hiring freeze at NIH, there was “no way even to apply to start your own lab at NIH, no matter how good you are, or how critical your work.”
The administration is also preparing to ask Congress to cut funding for the NIH by 20 percent in the fiscal 2027 budget, putting at risk thousands of research grants aimed at finding treatments and cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, infectious diseases and other illnesses. NIH grants for medical research were credited with delivering a more than 2.5-to-1 return on taxpayer investment, generating $94.58 billion in new economic activity in FY2024.
The disruption has already prompted departures. A robotics engineer in Cambridge, Mass., signed on in May to head a new robotics lab at Austria’s Research Institute for Biomedical Artificial Intelligence and moved his family to Vienna. His first task was to hire top scientists, and he helped recruit a team of four from U.S. research labs at Yale, M.I.T., the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Francisco.
The brain drain has prompted fears that American science is being deprived of its lifeblood. Without the NIH driving innovation at its core, the US would cease to have the largest biomedical ecosystem in the world.