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.
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.
Currently I wouldn't dare to enter the US, while I'm sure I would be relatively safe in China. And: even before Trump the TSA had elements of despotism. All the while I never heard of Europeans being treated like shit in China -- simply the better hosts!
I keep mentioning that to people when they bring up a quite anti-China narrative (or paranoia). Most people in the western hemisphere are way more likely to be negatively impacted by the US than China.
Europeans, Canadians etc are less likely to travel to China so of course Chinese media spying would be less immediately detrimental than the spying of US companies. But even when traveling to China, it's less likely you'll be treated poorly than when traveling to the US.
China is alright if you keep your head down and you're not of the wrong ethnicity, locked up in a work camp and not allowed to have kids, or too openly gay or trans and so on.
And don’t even get me started on flexing an imperial muscle. South America and the EU would like a word.
No one is saying China is perfect in these threads, we’re just saying the US isn’t necessarily better. Two countries can be shitty simultaneously.
Yeah. Also lets not forget:
- Citizens from most EU countries can now enter China visa free. No ESTA and no other administrative crap. Generally no problem to enter and leave the country as long as you respect the law there.
- The Chinese authority are very cooperative when it is about granting some visting Visa to researchers. Most Chinese research centers and Universities have a some kind of direct link to an office that can bypass some of the procedures.
The situation is way easier than it was 10y ago.
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.
As long as we have Citizens United here in the USA, big money (no matter who it belongs to) will continue to threaten democracy.
So for the sake of my country, take your tech industry somewhere else.
There are way more opportunities with other countries that I'm aware of, mostly EU-EU.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://delta.tudelft.nl/en/article/fewer-phd-positions-and-...
https://www.sciencelink.net/features/its-not-just-about-mone...
Every country has its problems.
It’s not perfect but i still think it’s pretty good.
And the median wealth number is another way of saying "house prices are insane" right?
So yes they are high but it’s not like the disparity in the USA where the median is well below Australia (lot’s of people in the USA lost wealth in 2008 and never recovered) while the mean is well above (driven by the few that are extremely wealthy living a lifestyle unattainable to the commoners).
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.
Spain isn't great for being employed or freelance (autonomo) but if you set up a limited liability company (SL) and work from there it is not that bad. Tax on investments are averagely taxed compared to other countries.
That is only if you haven't accumulated wealth yet. The combination of quite high capital gain tax with sky high wealth tax, pretty high income tax isn't very attractive if your plan is to accumulate some wealth. If you just want to make enough every year to live there I guess it's reasonable though.
CGT is progressive and around 20%, compared to other European countries that is fairly average. Some Eastern European countries are at 15%, Belgian is going to 10%, Switzerland differs per canton.
Also, no CGT for fresh immigrants if you are able to use the Beckham law.
However plenty of those people leave after that period. Especially with the upcoming 36% unrealized capital gains tax on all your savings and investments.
Feels a bit like ISPs giving discounts to new customers only.
Many years ago, a friend of mine in the Netherlands had the same job as another guy, earning the same money, my friend being extremely thrifty, the other guy splurging. When they both found themselves out of a job at the same time, my friend got no support from the government as he had savings, while the other guy started getting a very generous allowance.
This goes directly against all that is reasonable. This is directly discouraging financial responsibility. My friend is thrifty just for the sake of it, he knows it's not in his interest. But he gets the short end.
A legal tax avoidance is to just buy a €1000 TV if you are near the limit. Yes that is as crazy as it sounds but people do it.
Also it's a bit more, right now you are looking at 36% on 6% or 2.16% per year with a €59k threshold. So a bit over €20k a year on that €1M.
This sounds like the Netherlands speed running their way out of investments. If a country I was living in proposed this, I would be leaving ASAP, or getting some heavy financial engineering done.
Unrealized gains are gains.
Paying for unrealized gains with realized money is not a situation anyone want to be in.
Say you have €80k in investments. Markets go up, in one year time your investments are worth €90k. You did not sell.
That means you had €10k in unrealized capital gains. Subtract the €1800 per person threshold. €8200, 36% tax is €2952 tax to be paid at the start of the year.
Losses give you tax credits redeemable against future capital gains (not against income tax from employment)
Unrealized capital gains taxes are crazy all in an effort to own the rich or something. Meanwhile the people they're perceived as targeting have all the resources to avoid it.
I don't know about non-publicly listed companies, I assume you indeed need to appraise yearly.
The rich don't pay these taxes as the unrealised capital gains tax is only for private individuals, not companies. The rich have their assets in companies / shells.
Paying tax on money you make because you already have money is far better than playing tax on your time you sold for salary.
The average worker in The Netherlands has one of the best QoL compared to average workers in other countries. But the Dutch income leveling and benefit system makes it so a high earner doesn’t have a significantly better QoL. Someone earning €30k has roughly the same spending power as someone earning €50k. (edit: net income after tax and benefits is €42k versus €47k for those two incomes but the person earning €30k has access to cheaper government housing)
In other countries, earning more gives you a better QoL.
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.
I took a big pay cut moving to Southern Europe, but post-tax I earn the same and everything is just so much cheaper. I honestly have a significant better life here. Good weather too.
I understand you're not the landlord then. I agree this is a problem: the same(ish) earning you mentioned in another comment makes social mobility difficult. Some people are born with a house, others without. That's super unfair. I'd first tax that rather than income.
> 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.
> 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
[0] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/china-is-run-by-engineers-a...
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.
It is no coincidence that these kinds of personality-based dictatorships often devolve into dysfunction as time goes on.
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.
Not taxes. Authoritarianism.
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.
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.
seems like it was made to fit a specific narrative...
> 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.
Isn’t this the consensus of the major world powers?
Is that what these lost PhD students were studying?
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.
> 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?
Did I just solve the housing crisis?
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 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.
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.
The private sector is good at doing more efficiently what the government already figured out how to do.
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.
Isn't it owned by the owner of the social media platform? Do you think Zuckerberg, Musk, etc are neutral? There is an enormous amount of evidence otherwise.
If some bots proliferate, it's because the owners allow those bots to do so.
I mean, why wouldn't they have the most bots?
- "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).
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...
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.
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.
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'.
Given the impact the economy has on people's lives, it's an understandable fear. There's plenty of evidence for this not being the case (and in fact evidence for the "brain drain" strategy having substantial positive impact), but getting people to let go of a fear typically requires more than just hard evidence that it's unfounded.
(There's a separate branch of that fear, that imagines immigrants to be a drain on public assistance programs, but there's plenty of evidence that that is not the case.)
(Also, as always, policy is complicated and no comment that fits on a page is going to capture all the nuance of it or facets of it.)
Immigrants are not killing Americans en masse nor taking the land by force.
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?
Is a trillion dollar company in your backyard really a good thing?
I meant more of a place where things are mostly going OK (compared to most other places), and resources (human and natural) are available, so any failure modes have to come from within.
Germany flipped over the boardgame while losing, but USA flipped it over while winning.
I think for any proposal to change policy that has serious impacts on the economics of the country, we should really be very clear on what problem we see, how we plan to solve it, and what specific trade-offs we're making with our solutions.
He/she is saying the quiet part out loud. It was never about illegal immigration. Illegal immigration is just the start.
The underlying theme is xenophobia, racism and bigotry.
So people that are at risk, say, by having a government job, or doing publicly funded research that produces science for the common good, can now be automatically identified, blacklisted, fired, etc. etc. etc. en masse. This would have taken too many person-hours to be worthwhile for a newly installed political manager at NSF or NIH. But that list is now an easy purchase from a government contractor, named after a nefarious communication device from an SF novel, and grants are currently being cancelled on far flimsier political grounds than that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dewey
---
Based on the public comments available from the HackerNews user dewey, here is an overview of their opinions and perspectives related to government, politics, and the US: Political Leanings and Philosophy * Skepticism of the "Left/Right" Binary: The user has expressed a critical view of the partisan divide, suggesting that both sides are equally prone to tribalism. 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. * Systemic Cynicism: In some discussions, the user has characterized Western democracy as a "sham," arguing that the citizenry does not make significant choices. They have suggested that elections are subject to large-scale manipulation through mass media and that "the range of acceptable opinions... are determined by the real rulers—presumably the billionaire class." * Pragmatic Localism: Despite their cynicism toward national politics, the user has advocated for local engagement. They argue that a citizen can effectively advocate for tangible improvements at the local level (e.g., public parks, youth programs) more effectively than through large-scale political movements. Views on the US Government and Public Policy * Efficiency and Technology: The user views government software and infrastructure through an investment lens. They have argued that if people want a cost-efficient government, they should "treat the software landscape as an investment opportunity," suggesting that public software could be treated as a "public utility" to save money in the long run. * Regulatory Complexity: In discussions about the Library of Congress and state laws, they noted that the density of classifications/laws is "nonuniform," pointing out that states like New York and California have highly complex legal structures compared to others. * Skepticism of "Big Tech" Collaboration: The user expressed frustration with the relationship between government-mandated security and private software, comparing some "security audits" and "box-checking" processes to the "silliest parts of the TSA process," which they feel provide little actual security value. Other Relevant Topics (as per your request) * Income/Wealth: While their personal income is not stated, they frequently critique "concentrated corporate power" and the "billionaire class," expressing concern that AI and LLMs may exacerbate this concentration. * Religion/Philosophy: They have referenced an interest in philosophy (specifically the "Analytic-Continental divide" and philosophers like Richard Rorty) and have discussed the spread of "subversive beliefs" like Christianity in a historical context, viewing religion as a subject of sociological and philosophical study. * Personal Life: The user has mentioned being a father with a mortgage, which they cite as a reason for their increased interest in local politics and wanting to "leave it better than I found it." In summary, the user does not clearly identify as "left-wing" or "right-wing" in a traditional sense. Their views lean toward populist-skepticism and pragmatic localism, combined with a critique of both corporate power and partisan political "teams."
> 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.
> father
Maybe it's trying to bait me into correcting it, but none of these are facts.
https://ml.usembassy.gov/u-s-requires-public-social-media-se...
Those who have nothing to lose: post away, please. Those most affected by this are the least able to speak up.
Freedom of speech rarely protected people's jobs, even in the best of times, but we are in the very worst of times right now for free speech.
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.
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.
But are we supposed to be content with not being given enough information to make a meaningful differentiation between people with PhDs in human resources and $IDENTITY-studies vs PhDs in organic chemistry and climatology?
When there's hostility towards discernment, it makes me feel like the two political strains are working together to use a one-two punch of credentialism and anti-intellectualism to erode empirical investigation into reality.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/01/16/lucky-charms-healthie...
>On social media, I have seen graphics showing certain breakfast cereals scoring higher than eggs, cheese, or meat. Did Tufts create these graphics?
>No. Food Compass works very well, on average, across thousands of food and beverage products. But, when this number and diversity of products are scored, there are always some exceptions. These graphs were created by others to show these exceptions, rather than to show the overall performance of Food Compass and the many other foods for which Food Compass works well. But, as objective scientists, we accept constructive criticism and are using this to further improve Food Compass. We are working on an updated version now – see our versions page for more information.
https://sites.tufts.edu/foodcompass/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00381-y.epdf
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.
You might even say that the opportunists dislike STEM because it gets in the way of their opportunism.
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)
The US is in a weird spot. The electorate does not generally want education and research cut.
Republicans here have convinced their base that education and the educated are bad, which has fed their desire to cut academic funding and research at all levels.
That is to say, the federal government doesn't have a popular mandate to do any of this. They simply hold all levers of power through a slim majority of the voting populace.
There's a number of companies or brands that are now Chinese owned. China knows that home grown brands (like Geely) don't work on an international stage, so they buy well known brands like Volvo.
It's a bit of a silent behind the scenes takeover but I'd say that China is now seriously making competitive cars. If you can follow the brands and notice.
By my eye, Volvo / Geely cars are the most impressive.
And I wasn't aware that breakthroughs needed to be nobel laureate worthy at a minimum to still be considered breakthroughs.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: Oh, that's old. In 2024 Chinese institutions only made up 7 of the top 10 most productive research centers but in 2025 they are account for 8/10: https://www.natureasia.com/en/info/press-releases/detail/911...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course I don’t want to visit the US. There’s no way I’d want to move there right now.
I know of multiple US run conferences which are taking place in Europe this year. Too many attendees wouldn’t come if they were hosted in the US.
Blindingly obvious.
The long-term (very likely permanent in many cases) damage being done to America by the Trump administration through brain-drain, weakening of our own economy, and causing the entire rest of the world to (rightfully) distrust us as a reliable ally and/or trading partner is incalculable.
And it is all pure unforced error driven by a malignant narcissist bent on retribution who is also seemingly being used by a few different actors with their own individual axes to grind as he slips into dementia.
> But from here in Australia, the subtext of all the ICE news is that foreigners are no longer welcome in the US. And that America is becoming an authoritarian, fascist state.
This is also how it feels in the US. (And it isn't only foreigners -- the message is also that "the wrong kind" of American citizens are also no longer welcome in the US)
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.
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.
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.
PhDs seem to be quite employable by private industry, where competency is still valued.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Without an opinion on the rest of this, public funding in the US doesn't produce big breakthroughs from scientists employed by the government, but rather by funding university research.
It appears that, after the administration canceling a significant proportion of grants in 2025, that science funding has largely been maintained or increased from pre-2025 levels for 2026, although how the 2026 funding gets spent, and whether it is all spent, is an open question.
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.
And I don't need an optimal number. But the common refrain is essentially that more is always better, and fewer means we're losing our standing in the world. Always.
Maybe keeping a lot of them but shedding some percentage is actually more optimal. But I'm open to being wrong. That's why I'm asking for metrics.
Cutting 10k scientists could therefore result in increased taxes without anyone ever seeing any savings. Or it could result in net gain from 1$ all the way up to what their cost * interest in the debt.
Therefore there’s no obvious side who takes the default win here. Instead you need actual well supported arguments.
Instead, what we’re likely to see is degraded capacity, slower timelines, and reduced technical oversight. If that happens, will you acknowledge this was a mistake? Or will any negative outcome just get blamed on the remaining employees?
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
"Science’s analysis found that reductions in force, or RIFs, accounted for relatively few departures in 2025. Only at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where 16% of the 519 STEM Ph.D.s who left last year got pink RIF slips, did the percentage exceed 6%, and some agencies reported no STEM Ph.D. RIFs in 2025."
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.
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
Government workers are meant to serve the government, and the government of the United States is By the People. The People voted for the administration and if someone can't work for the company because you dislike the guy running it, well, it sounds infantile to me. Someone so fragile as to not tolerate political disagreement and reasonable scrutiny and auditing should not be receiving a salary from public funds.
Glad to hear a British viewpoint now and then, but of course any problems stateside will be handled and voted on by Americans rather than Brits. Unless possibly you have dual citizenship (Brit & USA) perhaps?
FWIW Britain has plenty of history of what you term
"armed goons with "absolute immunity" literally executing people in the streets, after threatening to invade neighbours and allies, appointing shockingly-unqualified loyalists at the very top of national institutions, and generally gutting the rule of law."
You Brits almost have a monopoly on tyranny of various forms, having gone through most of them in bloody civil wars yourself. Hardly a model to follow, n'est-ce pa?
What you write here is certainly the goal, and I had a lot of colleagues who agreed with you. I thought it was bogus then, and I think it's bogus now.
Also people quit jobs all the time because of the boss. Usually it's the direct one, but not always, and as above, so below.
> reasonable scrutiny and auditing
It's been well over a decade since I left, and I'm sure it's gotten worse for those who stayed, but: lol. lmao.
Could you sound any more like a Lysenko propagandist in the USSR if you tried?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service_reform_in_the_Un...