Trump Slashed Science Funding. Now the U.S. Could Face a Costly Brain Drain.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/04/business/dealbook/trump-brain-drain-academia.html



Trump Slashed Science Funding. Now the U.S. Could Face a Costly Brain Drain.
The White House’s attacks on academia and budget cuts for research have provided an opening for other countries to poach leading scientists.


In March last year, Wali Malik, a robotics engineer in Cambridge, Mass., received a call from a research institution in Austria, a country where he had never been and knew no one. “‘Hey,’” Malik recalled the man saying. “‘We have this position to build an institute from scratch, on A.I. and life sciences.’”

Malik wasn’t looking to uproot his life and move abroad. He was married with three children, and his parents lived in Washington. But with President Trump slashing science research, Malik rolled the dice.

“I had friends who lost their jobs,” he said. “I saw that happening in real time. I thought, ‘Let me entertain this.’”

So he made the leap. Malik signed on in May to head up a new robotics lab at Austria’s Research Institute for Biomedical Artificial Intelligence and moved his family to Vienna, sight unseen. His first task was to hire top scientists. He helped recruit a team of four — all from U.S. research labs at Yale, M.I.T., the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Francisco.

[pfitz59]

1. Trump hates smart people

They don't vote for him. Or kiss his ass.

[Bayard]

2. trump's stench will hang around long after he's gone