U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

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..

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.

I honestly do not know.

Academia works with networking between peers and moves where the money is.

In Academia, the relation between researchers and the 'names' in the domain matters a lot. But the money stream matters even more.

When relations are created, I do not see them 'ending' just because US decided to play the good guys again and open the money stream again.

It will help to restore some links yes, but will probably not cut any ties created with other countries.

It's a bad development but necessary, sadly. We can only hope that Europe rises and comes out as a new strong center eventually, because we need one to counter all those powerful and evil actors in the world.

Something ironclad that can't be changed by an "executive order" in 30 minutes.

It has to make sure nothing like this will ever happen again, there can't be public officials who can just NOT show up to congressional hearings and if they do they can just blatantly, provably, lie - because there is no penalty for lying except a honour system.

Your supreme court has to have term limits with no reelection like the German equivalent and be comprised of different strata of folks, so that all of them aren't politically nominated.

The trust is gone and not easily fixed without something really drastic happening - barring a brutal civil war, I can't see a quick way out of this. Sorry.

Most of these collaborations happens under the hood and are peer-to-peer and project based.

I can speak for the fields that I am close to:

- For Astrophysics, China already provide both hardware and computing resources to some projects. Conferences in China are in common and exchange are frequents. Rumors of collaborations on Space and scientific satellites are also on the way.

- For nuclear physics, China is actively participating in several software stack used for nuclear fusion. There is also mutual collaborations on some nuclear fusion reactors and they regularly host conferences where EU researchers are invited. They progressed tremendously compared to 10y ago.

- For particle physics, China was historically playing alone and was planning to create and operate their own particle collider similar to the LHC in size. This is not on the table anymore. There is a deeper collaborations with several EU institutes including CERN, they also voiced their interest in the FCC project.

- For Neurosciences, their labs has permissions to execute wet experiments on animals that are forbidden on most EU territories and that I will not describe. A lot of data are shared both way between China and several EU labs. Many neurosciences related conferences have emerged in China, exchanges are much more common that they were.

- For HPC and A.I, this is by far the most active and pushed research domain actually. Alibaba, Tencent and others are even proposing computing resources for free on some projects in exchange of conference attendance in China and collaborations. There is not much collaboration on hardware (due to embargos and NDAs) but a lot of collaborations on software.

Scientific collaborations are built on trust, not on an election mandate. And the trust is undeniably damaged.

Which funding agency will accept to bring money to the table if the other partner is likely to run home and abandoned everything on the next election 2y later ?

This was already a problem with long term collaboration with NASA and the back and forth of Congress funding, Trump just extended the same issue to all other STEMs fields.

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.

Every country has its problems.

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.

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.

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.

Very interesting read, with a lot more depth and details to this short (but accurate) summary.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Talking about average government spending isn’t a reasonable argument because you can only spend money once. If these people cost ~1B/year you aren’t paying for 100+B in spending by cutting them. Instead you get to add exactly 1B in government spending and thus the yardstick is the least efficient billion you’re paying out vs keeping these people.

Not that we actually balance the budget making the idea of short term saving meaningless. Instead it’s about long term consequences.

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

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.

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

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.

Re: regulation Ah but you’ve forgotten to think higher order, for how can a right wing government financed by big tech break up big tech? Such action will have to come from beyond the government regulatory bodies…

> 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.

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.

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?

The private sector is good at doing more efficiently what the government already figured out how to do.

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.

Measuring fundamental research by industry productivity standards is how we’ve gotten “publish or perish” culture and “salami slice publishing”. We have to allow space for projects to just fail in research and not have that be the end of someone because they weren’t “productive” enough.

Over the long run, the benefits of the public sector mostly accrue to society.

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.

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.

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 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.

> 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 do have that principle. The evidence in your comment wasn't meaningful to me because we can find a few examples of anything. A commonplace claim about today's many problems are, 'it's always been this way' - that's what I thought you may have been saying.

Maybe you didn't mean it as evidence but as an illustration, but that wasn't clear to me.

> 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."

That makes sense now, but as I said it was unclear to me. And the first part makes more sense in that context.

Can you please explain how it has harmed Americans and tech industry and the “academy”

And are you implying that the solution is to stop those highly desirable people from coming in because that will help you afford a place in South Bay?

In other words since you cannot compete with them, outlaw them?

> They noted that "it's no different on either side with how willing they are to believe something horrendous about the other side," which they believe interferes with objective interpretation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43134319