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Meet the researchers leaving the US because of Trump’s funding cuts and politicization of science
https://apnews.com/article/trump-science-research-funding-cuts-9f4c34581f4343f316a5e72852a71b51
But over the past two years, delayed federal grants and fears about the future motivated her to pack her life into boxes. She moved to Finland with her husband and daughter and is continuing her research — studying how fish, shellfish and seaweed that humans eat are responding to climate change — at the University of Helsinki.
When the Trump administration began upending U.S. scientific research last year, dismantling the federal grant-giving process and attempting to exert more political influence over what projects get funded, foreign universities saw an opportunity. They adopted programs to lure U.S. researchers abroad, promising more stable streams of funding and academic freedom.
Since then, many have taken the bait. While there is no way to quantify the overall change across the nation, scientists, researchers and professional groups say the shift is clear, unprecedented and concerning.
“You can almost talk to any vice president for research at a university and they will tell you of one or two top faculty that they’ve lost,” said Tobin Smith, senior vice president of government relations and public policy for the Association of American Universities.
White House spokesperson Liz Huston said Trump is “ending waste” and is “committed to keeping America the world leader in scientific innovation, and that means funding real science.”
But more than half of American states have lost scientists to recruitment programs in other countries, according to an April report from the Business for Federal Research Funding Coalition. Last March, early-career biomedical scientists were about 20 percentage points less likely to say they would “now” stay in the U.S., compared to their recollection of how they felt six months earlier. And physics Ph.D. graduates in 2025 left the U.S. at the highest rate in 30 years, according to the American Institute of Physics.
Countries including Canada, France, Belgium and Finland are touting their recruits from U.S. institutions, a disturbing and surprising development, scientists say, for a country that far and away leads the world in Nobel prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry.
“It used to be the shining city on the hill where we all want to go,” said Christine Stawitz, now at the University of Birmingham in England. “That reputational loss, I think, is hard to quantify, but also really damaging.”
Some American scientists are moving abroad. Here’s why
Stawitz left her job at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last year to become a research software engineer in the United Kingdom. She said NOAA no longer aligned with her values, especially after she was asked to strip websites of references to climate change and diversity, equity and inclusion topics.
She says the upheaval in U.S. science is a common subject at scientific meetings. “People talk about the U.S. at conferences in the U.K. now like, I don’t know what’s going on there. It’s not good,” she said.
Froehlich’s decision to leave was a slow burn. She was already concerned about school safety and gun violence in the U.S. when the nation’s research landscape was overturned. Then, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, her colleagues’ grants kept getting postponed or canceled. Student researchers burst into her office in tears, unsure how to navigate their futures. She worried about future federal funding for her own research, which involves climate change.
“The cumulative effect of those things ultimately ended up making us really serious about, I don’t think here is our home anymore,” said Froehlich. She was recruited through an initiative by the Research Council of Finland and now has five years of guaranteed funding totaling about $3 million. She moved into a flat by the Baltic Sea in Helsinki and is taking Finnish lessons offered by the university.
And international scientists are leaving the US
International researchers who were drawn to the U.S. for its reputation as a global leader in science are also seeking different places to do their work.
Married biologists James Letts and Maria Maldonado were recruited to Australia’s Monash University and left behind their posts at the University of California, Davis. Letts is from Canada, and Maldonado from Argentina. Both got their doctoral degrees in New York and spent over a decade doing science in the U.S.
Grant-related uncertainty — including having to lay off a staff scientist while waiting for stalled funding — made them take the leap.
“All I want to do is do great science and make discoveries, but I want my work to mean something as well. And the opportunity to do that seemed very difficult in the U.S.,” Letts said.
Forty percent of the U.S. science Nobel Prizes were won by immigrants. Omar Yaghi, a 2025 Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, left his post at the University of California, Berkeley this year to direct an artificial intelligence lab at China’s Tsinghua University.
The consequences of losing scientific talent
The U.S. is still a science powerhouse, full of institutions around the country with robust research communities and well-resourced institutions that attract foreign scientists. Even if every European country threw open its doors, there still wouldn’t be enough capacity to accommodate every American scientist.
And not everyone is leaving. Many scientists are choosing to stay, searching for new sources of research funding or pivoting to jobs in industry.
But the erosion of reputation and the talent drain may not be over. The Trump administration has cut or frozen up to $174 billion in federal grants since the president’s second term began, according to a tracking tool released by the States United Democracy Center and the organization Grant Witness. And a proposed rule from the Office of Management and Budget could give political appointees more control over what future projects are funded. A resolution approved by Congress has delayed a final decision on the rule until December.
Scientists who have moved away and those still in the U.S. are worried about what’s left behind. They say the next generation of scientists may struggle with fewer graduate programs, money and mentorship — and it could take a decade or longer for the U.S. scientific enterprise to truly feel those effects.
Major research institutions accepted 15% fewer applicants for fall 2026 doctoral programs compared to last year, according to admissions data collected by the Association of American Universities. One of the students impacted was a mentee of Smith’s.
“What is one of my pieces of advice to that young man? Next year, look in Canada,” he said.
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The Associated Press’ health and science coverage receives financial support from the AP Fund for Journalism and private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
What if an AI bubble bursts — and that accelerates AI job losses?
What if an AI bubble bursts — and that accelerates AI job losses?
October 20, 20266:30 AM ET
What if an AI bubble bursts, triggering a recession, and that recession ends up accelerating the replacement of workers with AI? Call it the AI double whammy.
I know. Dark thoughts.
I've long been skeptical of sweeping claims about how AI will transform the world. I still am. We don't really know. But as this technology advances, I've found myself worrying more about what it could mean for our livelihoods.
Two strands of economic research have given me reason to take this double whammy seriously. One concerns the history of financial bubbles. The other concerns a surprising relationship between recessions and automation, when businesses use technology to do tasks that were previously done by humans.
When revolutionary technology fuels a bubble
First, the bubbles. In 1978, the economist Charles Kindleberger published an influential book titled Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. Drawing on the theoretical work of economist Hyman Minsky, Kindleberger went through centuries of economic history and saw a recurring pattern.
Often the bubble starts with some big potential change to the economy. A revolutionary new technology, for example, that promises to transform industries and create enormous wealth. Investors have a good reason to be excited by it. But they get overly excited. During the upswing, they bet tons of money expecting basically that the sky is the limit. And they often build up debt in the process, borrowing money to make even bigger bets and thereby helping to further fuel the boom. That debt can become a ticking time bomb. When reality sets in, asset prices fall, but those debts remain. Borrowers struggle to repay, lenders suffer losses, and a market crash can spiral into a financial crisis and a painful recession.
One crucial insight is that a technology can truly be revolutionary, yet still fuel a bubble that ends in a financial crash. For example, the railroads. I wrote about that bubble in a previous Planet Money newsletter — and how its collapse triggered "The Panic of 1873." The ensuing economic turmoil helped foment a populist uprising and the first major immigration crackdown in American history.
AI is now basically propping up the U.S. stock market. An analysis from J.P. Morgan earlier this month found that just 42 AI-related companies accounted for around two-thirds of the S&P 500's stock price gains since early 2024. Meanwhile, AI-related companies are borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars to help finance data centers and the energy infrastructure to power them.
None of this proves that what we're witnessing is a bubble or that this debt is a ticking time bomb for the financial system. The bursting of the dot-com bubble helped usher in a relatively mild recession. Debt played a smaller role in that boom, helping to limit the financial fallout. Its collapse did not trigger a systemic financial crisis like the one that followed the housing market bust around 2008.
Even without a financial crisis, though, there could be a painful reckoning. Will all these companies ultimately make enough money to justify all their borrowing and spending? Will each company survive? Technology analyst Benedict Evans has warned that fierce competition between companies offering similarly capable AI models could drive down the prices they can charge and leave little room for profit — even as they're spending ungodly amounts of money to develop and run these models.
When recessions accelerate automation
If an AI bust triggers a recession, that would be painful enough. But this is where a few studies add to my anxieties. Because they suggest that recessions can be the very moment when businesses turn to new technologies to replace workers.
We tend to imagine automation as a gradual process. Technology improves, businesses adopt it, and jobs slowly change or disappear, theoretically while new jobs appear in other parts of the economy. But this research suggests that automation can happen in bursts, and those bursts tend to cluster around recessions.
One study, by economists Nir Jaimovich and Henry Siu, found that jobs vulnerable to previous waves of automation saw most of their decline around recessions. Between 1990 and 2017, 88% of the decline in the share of Americans employed in these jobs occurred during recessions or in the months immediately before or after them.
And here's the unsettling irony: fierce price competition could keep AI companies from delivering the profits investors expect, while making their technology cheaper for other businesses to use to replace workers. If an AI bust triggers a recession, that downturn could accelerate worker replacement. Investors could lose their money, and workers could still lose their jobs.
It's a nightmare scenario. First, the bust hammers our retirement savings. Then, as businesses scramble to cut costs, many of our jobs are permanently lost.
Of course, we still don't know whether AI will deliver enough profits to justify all the borrowing and spending, whether a bust would trigger a painful recession, or whether the automation patterns found in past recessions will repeat themselves with AI. A downturn could leave businesses with less money to invest in AI. And AI could still prove more useful for helping workers get more productive than outright replacing them.
Whether AI delivers one whammy or two whammies or none, there are policies that can limit the damage when workers lose their jobs. Obviously, unemployment insurance and other policies like that. And people like Bill Gates are proposing that we should tax AI and robots, making it more economical to continue employing humans while generating revenue that the government can spend to enhance the safety net. That idea is something we might explore in a future newsletter.
So, yeah, there are reasons this nightmare might never come true, and there are ways to limit the damage if it does. That, however, hasn't stopped me from worrying about it.
But it felt cathartic writing this down — getting these worries out of my head and onto the page.
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P.S. Charles Kindleberger's life was super fascinating. As we've written before, he worked for the CIA's wartime predecessor and helped design the Marshall Plan. Someone should probably make a Hollywood movie about him.