Trump's funding cuts are emptying America's Ph.D. pipeline
The U.S. Is Driving Away Young Scientists
A New York Times analysis of 27 top research universities found new Ph.D. enrollments fell about 18 percent in engineering and 10 percent in science and health between 2024 and 2025, roughly 1,600 fewer doctoral students. Grant cancellations, funding delays and a sudden change barring second-year students from the NSF graduate fellowship have pushed young researchers to quit, delay or leave for Canada. The White House insists its policies are raising research investment.
We'll never know what discoveries could have been made by the scientists who were never given the opportunity to pursue them.
- dozerly
It’s driving everyone away. No demographic is better off, other than obscenely rich people, under this administration. We have effectively killed what the brain “gain” we’ve been benefitting from for decades.
- Schlagbohrer
It is driving away mid-career scientists too. France is eagerly recruiting them though and the EU as a whole.
https://www.cnrs.fr/en/update/choose-cnrs-opportunities-scie...
- tdb7893
I recently started a program in ecology and the worry I've heard from scientists is that going forward funding is going to be very politically uncertain. It's hard to run a lab when you might just have grants get cancelled capriciously and have funding dry up for years at a time. I know I'm going to be looking outside the US for PhD programs once I finish my master's.
Four years of this is a huge blow to the field, eight would mean a wipeout of a generation of talent.
- superxpro12
yes, we know. yes, this was an obvious consequence of trumps policies.
The entire administration has done one thing: sell of all of the US's assets, and convert it into profits for the trump family. thats it. Every action taken since the first 40 executive actions signed, through doge, defunding USAID which murdered over a million children, or bombing Iranian schools, has been to enrich trump and his friends.
Thats it. It's very simple.
They traded away every piece of soft power they could find and exchanged it for cash in their pockets.
- sailfast
The past two years is not a good summary of the United States. The policies that led them to leave are clearly wildly unpopular. They will be back.
While government funding may not grow above previous levels I would posit this is actually a feature - I’d expect to see a better public / private blend that is more resilient.
- contemporary343
These are underestimates if anything. I know of programs at Caltech and other top schools with cohorts that are 33% to 75% smaller in physical science/ engineering disciplines.
- ModernMech
We are at the point where AI researchers are worried about having to use the term "super intelligence" and avoiding any use of the prefix "trans-" in their terminology in order to get federal grants. So yeah, I can understand why they wouldn't want to do their research here.
I was pretty astounded and heartbroken watching my colleagues pass around a list of banned words so they could scrub their proposals. Then again, what options do they have? Either you get money from the government, corporations who have a very narrow idea of what they want to research, or you move to a country that takes research seriously.
- zhiyan
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are driven away equal..."