I’ve spent my entire career training students in STEM, and sending them off to graduate and professional schools to become scientists and doctors and dentists and veterinarians and nurses and research technicians. That may be ending sooner than I expected. Entire fields are drying up right now.
Admissions in some graduate programs have have been cut in half or paused altogether, said Emilya Ventriglia, president of UAW 2750, the union representing around 5,000 early career researchers at NIH facilities in Bethesda, Maryland, and elsewhere.
“At this rate, with the hiring freeze, there may be no Ph.D. students next year if it’s not lifted soon, because usually people make their decisions by April,” Ventriglia said.
Spring is when we’re accustomed to hearing joyful news from our students who have applied to and gotten in to the programs they wanted. It’s kind of quiet around the campus this year. A lot of students who have been working hard for four years are being told that their progression is over, and are having to rethink their life suddenly.
I’m worried, too. Universities around the country have suffered declining enrollments, and it’s going to make it worse if the perception spreads that universities are a dead end. Government policy is about to kill science and engineering in this country. It’s also a bit ironic that these people who have been railing about DEI and liberal arts and majors that don’t have concrete utility are now using that angle to destroy STEM education.
We might wonder who is going to benefit from this intellectual suicide.
At the University of Nebraska, an institute that works to improve water management for agriculture offered to host a doctoral candidate in hydrology from Ghana and was talking to three other international students. But it had to rescind the offer after it lost USAID funding, said Nicole Lefore, associate director of the school’s Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute.
She now worries about the diplomatic fallout, noting she has met with agriculture ministers in other countries who were educated at land grant universities in the U.S. through USAID programs.
“The university you go to, people have a loyalty to it. And so bringing in generations of students for education and agriculture in the U.S. helped to create those personal connections and then later scientific and diplomatic connections. That’s really important to the soft diplomacy side of what the innovation labs were doing.”
She said she is barraged with emails asking what this will mean.
“The only winner out of this is China, she said. ”Because the countries that are being cut off there, I think they will turn to someone.”
I thought MAGA hated China, but here they go helping that country, and the EU. I’ve got one bright student who is thinking about applying to a university in Mexico. Everyone benefits except the US.
I got no quip to make about this. My sympathies to your nation.
Yeah, my kid, soon a rising HS freshman, is looking at a path of bio-tech & disease pathology…and we’re now looking at financial options for her to do her university work out of the country as there may be nothing left for her here.
I need to see if 529’s can pay for schools in other countries. If not, then hell with the tax breaks, I’m gonna cash it out and put it somewhere else where it will do some good.
(update – just looked it up. unless it is a 529 program that is exclusive to the state’s schools, the funds can be used overseas)
I would expect some Canadian academics are considering heading back home as conditions deteriorate in the US. But they may have trouble getting positions here, as Canada is cutting back on the number of foreign students being admitted Foreign students make up a large percentage of revenue for Canadian universities, especially because they are charged more than Canadian residents. Some schools are already firing staff due to the upcoming reductions.
The only bright spot I see is this: European, Canadian and Asian universities will be able to recruit a lot of top scientists as there is a stampede out of USA.
And when they get here, we will science the hell out of Russia and the other nations who paved the way for this apocalypse. Already, the Swedish and German tech is far superior to the Russian miltech. A few years down the road, and the Russian military might as well use bows and arrows.
-Trump will hope the wheels of justice will turn so slowly he will die.
I suggest we start a crash program and get cryogenics sorted out in time to freeze Trump. Then we can decant him as the trial is ready to start.
Yeah, this is a disaster, no other way to put it.
The open secret about science is that it runs on money. Lots of money.
The most successful project I worked on, a few decades ago, cost $300 million total. Back when $300 million was a lot of money.
We were congratulated for coming in on budget and running a cost effective project.
It made a lot more money than it cost. It’s been tens of billions of dollars so far.
Science has been the main driver of our civilization and explains the USAs preeminence in the world, up until two months ago.
This is a critical and well known fact, that is now being widely ignored.
US GDP per person has gone up 9-fold in a century.
85% of that increase is due to advances in science and technology!!!
About the only way to increase economic output per person, i.e productivity per worker, is through advances in science and technology.
Repost
Importance of science to the USA
Once again, it is time to point out that science is the leading driver of our civilization and responsible for the USA’s leading (don’t laugh, it was true up until a week ago) position in the world.
Attacking science is like attacking your own feet and hands. It is national self harm.
The world’s leading nations all spend relatively high levels of their GDP on science, about 3%.
Spending on science is estimated to yield a ROI of 20-60%.
If we stopped spending public money on science, in the short term nothing would happen.
The payoffs from science can be short term but most are long term.
In the long term, we would just fall further and further behind the rest of the world.
Did anyone else read the novel by Iain Banks (the Culture series) where a world sets up a digital hell for uploaded personalities? (looks at the Republicans, SCOTUS and billionaire donors). Rupert Murdoch, I have not forgotten you.
If you really look at what Trump and the GOP are doing, they are simply wrecking all the best and critical features of our society.
It’s vandalism.
The attacks on science and medical research are going to have wide ranging effects on everything.
I just checked my old university.
12% of the student body are foreign students from 100 different countries.
These students are critical because they pay for their American educations and the university needs that funding.
Strangely enough, an American college education is prized in much of the rest of the world.
Something like 8 out of the top 10 research universities in the world are in the USA.
This is soft power and it is important.
If you look at the ruling elites in much of the world, they were educated in the USA.
I once looked at a list of Iranian leaders and where they were educated. Almost all of them had at least one…American university degree.
All of that is now past history.
Between the cuts to STEM programs, the anti-immigration drives, and the failure of our democracy, fewer and fewer foreign students are going to come to the USA to study.
Right now, I wouldn’t recommend it myself.
Yeah, I remember that one.
It was a vivid and complicated novel
Iain Banks and the Culture are one of my all time favorites.
He had an optimistic view of the future which is lacking in most science fiction today.
This is what is going, not near soon enough, but eventually, kill Trump’s ambitions. You cannot keep racing around like a rabid bull in a glass shop, while disparaging the people that make things out of glass, and expect for all but the most stupid to not, at some point, realize this has got to stop. But.. we also are seeing the glaring cracks in the whole system from it too. It “should” already be a constitutional crisis, and the freaking SCOTUS should be flat out calling for either the arrest of members of congress, for contempt of the constitution, or immediate calls for an emergency election, if only, again, for congress, since its their supposed flipping job to impeach this sort of crap. But… so far Trump has played an insane game of waffle, in which he threatens, temporarily imposes, or lets someone else use a wrecking ball, then claims he isn’t directly responsible, on everything, without ever “quite” crossing the line that he has to be called out on. The closest he has come is, finally, spitting on a direct order from a court, and we know damn well that its a toss up if a) SCOTUS agrees and also orders him to reverse it, or b) some minor technicality won’t let him off for somehow it being “totally fine that he did that, as long as he fixes it after the fact.”
But, while he is using jack boots on soft targets, including naturalized immigrants, I am not sure he has a damn clue what the outcome will be if he really pushes the, “Anyone saying bad things about me, or holding protests of my policies, should be arrested”, or what resistance that is already producing, let alone will if he, as he always does, tries to double down on it. Depending on just how unhinged he, and Mr. Ketamine, become this may be the shortest presidency in US history, and the only question is who ends it, and, unfortunately, how it is ended. But, its reaching the point where, if it ends the bad way, it might not even be via “civilians”.
The two of them are absolute idiots, and even the people in the media, who kissed Trump’s ass on the way here, are only still on his side (for the most part, since some are definitely traitors), out of shear terror at what would happen if they actually apposed him. And, that… in any other era, would be a nightmare, but about the only thing Trump could really do at this point, would be to betray some of his own “allies” and further betray the economy, by basically shutting off the internet, because, short of that, just like every other country that has found themselves in the position of being horrible to their own people, and confronted with the fact that reality, if you do not openly cripple the internet, and even if you do, and they still find a way to real information (maybe also terminate all cell phone companies, order the arrest of VPN operators, including non-US ones?, who knows…, but would it even work?), to get through. And, in the mean time, what do any of us imagine having that happen to the thing the entire generation that is stuck on said internet way more than they should be, is going to have to the mood of people who can and will try to end him?
At this point its not even clear what the nitwit is aiming for. If he imagines he is going to get a China out of this, then.. sorry, but for the vast number of faults and rights violations China has it actually gives a damn about science, medicine, and having some sort of general (as long as you don’t break party rules) social safety net. If he is trying for Russia then his current trajectory is taking him towards Stalin’s Russia, not Putin’s, and there is no KGB to step in, when it collapses, and resurrect the corpse of its design, worse, some of the crazier people that have sided with him are already pushing him more in the direction of making the US are “nicer” Taliban Afghanistan. At least the ones that don’t have businesses he is now killing with his madness. I suspect he doesn’t even have a flipping clue what damage his madness is doing, he is just playing a game of, “What can I do to make actually powerful and rich people think I am powerful and rich too?”, but that even many of his executive orders are what he accused Biden of doing with last minute pardons – “I have no idea what this is, but here is my signature. Now what was it the beekeeper wanted? I lover charades!”
Its.. by measures disgusting, terrifying, and grossly fascinating – kind of like going back in time to when the American revolution was happening, and being “in court” to watch Mad King George claim he was a clam, and proclaim that the sky was now to be called salad, or some madness, while the ministers all scrambled to take every advantage possible while he was a) still alive, and b) obviously not in his right mind. But, I don’t think for a moment the Trump is going to make a sudden, and unexpected, mental recovery…
History lesson.
The expulsion of the Jews in 1492 was a disaster for Spain, psychologically, intellectually and economically. It boosted the legitimacy of the Spanish Inquisition, whose stifling effect would be felt by the society until the 19th century. It also stripped 2% of Spain’s most urbane, educated and affluent inhabitants. At a time when Europe’s economy was shifting from agrarian to industrial, Spain could not afford this loss. The effect was compounded when the Spanish Inquisition managed to have 300,000 Muslims expelled a century later. Such a massive exodus would be an enormous loss for any country at the time – but especially for Spain, which was only a third the size of France.
— Jean-Benoît Nadeau & Julie Barlow
@7 raven:
Yep, science is one of the most cost effective ways to increase the per-capita GDP, and the gains of science are cumulative so it’s effectively a non-recurring expense.
And that’s not mentioning the other major driver of per-capita GDP which is education. The reduction/elimination of science funding hits both. So we could be looking at a slump in productivity to go with our inflation.
The entire world witnessed what Hitler did, and now it’s happening all over again, with another wannabe god-king. A single bullet would have stopped Hitler, but no one had the nerve to try it. I suppose the leader-worshiping human race deserves what it gets.
America has always had an anti-intellectual streak, and science is decidedly “intellectual-y”, but these people have turned it into an art form. Don’t forget that the 100th anniversary of the Scopes trial will occur this July, and then ask yourself, How far have we come?
At this point I feel like starting a pool regarding when we’ll see an executive order outlawing the metric system.
Safe Place For Science: Aix Marseille University ready to welcome American scientists
@birgerjohannson #5:
When Charles II was restored to the English throne, he granted amnesty to everyone except the 51 men who had signed his father’s death warrant. Half of them had already died, so those who hadn’t already fled the country were put on trial and nine of those convicted; they were hanged, drawn and quartered. Morbidly, three of the corpses of the dead men — most notably that of Oliver Cromwell — were exhumed and beheaded, and their rotting heads placed on spikes at the gates of London alongside those of their former fellows.
Anyway, my question is: does Washington DC have city gates? Is it too late to build some?
Rich Woods @ 17
Trump is so vain he will insist on being embalmed like a pharaoh.
And the pharaoh mummies were purchased by victorian Englishmen and displayed as morbid cutiosities. Just a thought.
birger @18: Trump is so vain I doubt he is capable of contemplating his own death.
I suffer with a chronic autoimmune disorder called Sjogren’s Disease. Patients and researchers recently won a hard-fought war to change its’ name from Sjogren’s Syndrome to Sjogren’s Disease in hopes that medical journals and our own doctors might begin to take the disease more seriously. Alas, US medical journals and many of our own doctors still call it a syndrome.
On the Sjogren’s online chat group, we share information about research into our disease.
Recently, we’ve been very excited to share information about research that is being done and published in Italy and Brazil.
Researchers in Brazil recently published a very scholarly paper about the neurologic, cognitive and psychiatric manifestations in patients with Sjogren’s Disease. Meanwhile, my neurologist refuses to believe that Sjogren’s has anything to do with my neurological symptoms. Sadly, he is employed by a major teaching university.
It is becoming apparent that the best of STEM researchers are already migrating to countries other than the US.
In case you are interested:
https://advancesinrheumatology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s42358-025-00438-7
The ultranationalists running the US right now are fools because of their non-strategic use of scientific research. The nazis they are so impressed by spent the inter-war years badgering away at research with loads of military applications. After the war, the US stole away military technologists who jump-started our technological dominance. The Manhattan Project was massively expensive, but the list of things that came from the early cold war include computers, aerospace, materials science, advanced metallurgy, and so much more. Basically, the money spent on The Manhattan Project was the biggest burst of techological research, ever. Even ‘conservatives’ will credit Reagan with breaking the USSR’s will to compete based on how much we spent. Somehow, they forget the rest. Our dominance is technological and every US advance except maybe the radio-controlled buttplug owes part of its existence to the US’ biggest research program. I’ve had weird conversations with ‘conservatives’ where I ask them how they think WW2 might have gone if our expenditures on primary research were as they are now. What? We’d have lost. The way to get ahead is to invest until you lead in some areas, then maintain your lead by reinvesting from the successes.
Kagehi
No, he has already been president too long for that to happen. The shortest presidential term is William Henry Harrison’s 31-day-term before dying in office.
weylguy
Some folks did try to blow him up and came close to doing so. He was injured. As for Trump, he came close to being felled by a bullet. Unfortunately, it missed.
It’s not just science! (even though science is critical to progress) Our entire society (at least those who are not murderous, dishonest sociopaths) is rapidly coming to a horrible end.
I have been seeking answers to how to halt this death spiral. But, I can’t find any that would work. I see AOC, Jamie Raskin, Jasmine Crockett, some judges and a few others are trying to mitigate the damage. But, even they are playing by rules that the felonious muskrat and magat tRUMP have long since abandoned and ignore with impunity. And, I see no entity or power that can stop the murderous MUMP cult from destroying what is left of society.
I am open to ideas, people. We should be willing to use their own weapons against them, as long as we don’t become murderous as they are. It takes power. But, empowerment almost always takes big money. While I’ve been involved in many of them, grassroots movements, methods and local action require millions of people to act in a unified, carefully coordinated manner and for a LONG time to accomplish anything significant.
Cue martha and the Vandellas: ‘Nowhere to run to baby, nowhere to hide’
This discussion made me think of something I’ve been meaning to check on: requirements to claim refugee status. I just looked at the UK requirements…the short version at Gov.UK. The question seems to be is there enough abuse coming down, and particularly aimed at you, to make you feel unsafe living anywhere in the country.
@7
“Spending on science is estimated to yield a ROI of 20-60%.”
Spending on hatred yields 3 branches of government.
Apparently applications from US citizens for UK citizenship are up since Trump was elected: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/09/more-americans-are-now-seeking-uk-citizenship-three-of-them-tell-us-why
The thing to remember is that the “elite” 0.001% tend to hold multiple citizenships and have no real national allegiance. They can live anywhere (Trump has touted US citizenships for 5 million bucks) and their wealth is mobile. Wealth is also relative, attracts more wealth and directly translates into power. The USA could be completely bankrupted and whilst the parasites will lose some money they’ll still hold most of the wealth. I seem to remember that 8 men in the USA hold between them more wealth than the combined wealth of 50% of the population. That ratio will actually go up if the total wealth of the USA decreases, especially if they control the crash. The monetary total is irrelevant so long as it’s orders of magnitude greater than that of the serfs.
None of this is particularly new, except for the methods and mediums used. You’ll just end up with kleptocrats rather than titled aristocrats. Mind you, the more religiously fanatical of their minions, are already claiming divine right for Trump so that’ll probably follow sooner rather than later.
I believe the French have some experience at dealing with aristocrats. (No help from the UK alas, we’ll be too busy fending off our own titled dickheads).