It's harder to recruit PhD students and it's harder to fund them. NSF budget was cut 55% in the first year. The administration is doing everything possible to make it clear that no foreigners are welcome here. America is stabbing itself directly in the brain.
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'.
Unpopular opinion: there has been a steady decline of standards in the research community in the past decade or two. First reproducibility crisis. Then, some topics becoming political taboo where the unorthodox opinion would get you fired and canceled. The credibility of the science in the West has been falling, and the recent change of administration is predictably axing something that has a perceived strong bias in the opposite direction.
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.
> It's harder to recruit PhD students and it's harder to fund them
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.
STEM people in science (used to) populate places like NIH, NSF and other granting agencies. Theh were project managers responsible for funding decisions, or actual researchers. Remember that people used think that pharma just did marketing with all the new drug ideas coming from academia or government labs? Well, these people were either the ones paying the academic labs or actually generating what pharma marketed.
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.
I think, for the VA specifically at least, this isn't accurate. I'm sure they have some phd psychologists around for other things but the bulk of the work you mentioned will be done by counselors with masters degrees and some psychiatrists overseeing them. Psychiatrists, as well as "the -ologists" you mentioned, are specialized medical doctors. They all get the same schooling and then specialize through the residency system.
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.
My wife is a PhD in recycled asphalt materials and pioneered the use of such materials in New Mexico.
Under her PhD supervisor she directly worked with the NM department of transportation as a consultant. She did all that as an international student besides her graduate studies while being paid at 50% FTE (+tuition).
It takes between $10m (rural) to $100m (urban) to build a mile of interstate. Recycled materials can reduce the cost by 15-50% while still being equally as sustainable for decades.
Fortunately she is no longer at risk (or minimal risk) job/immigration wise. But others are not as fortunate. Just yesterday I learned that a PhD student from my alma mater was turned back from port of entry and his student visa denied. Reason? He traveled with his University provided laptop without written authorization. I understand that there are embargos and sanctions and trade restrictions, but really?
There have been a huge amount of cuts to the Veteran's Administration disguised. Hiring has been frozen, then people leave and their positions can't be filled, then they cut that position saying "it wasn't filled so wasn't needed".
Yup, this inspires great confidence in the source.
> 10,109 ... left their jobs
> departures outnumbered new hires last year by a ratio of 11 to one
That means that there were ~919 new hires, and thus it seems that 10,109 minus 919 equals
> a net loss of 4224
It appears that the "11 to one" ratio is the average, across agencies, of each individual ratio. It's left as an exercise to the reader to determine whether that average has any meaning at all.
I believe the opposite is happening in China. I saw an article the other day ( https://fortune.com/2026/01/14/china-graduates-1-3-million-e... ) that showed how the amount of engineers being produced there is orders of magnitude greater than the US. Way above what you'd expect given the different sizes of population. Now, i realize an engineer isn't the same as a PhD but i think we're seeing a dramatic brain drain happening in the west.
The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ, which I don't think is true. Academia is a badly broken system, and many people with formal credentials like PhDs have wasted huge amounts of time and effort on producing what is ultimately low-quality scientific work. This is a pretty uncontroversial statement among people I know in academia - or who were in academia but left - and this should absolutely affect the degree to which federal government agencies are willing to hire people who have formal credentials like a STEM PhD.
It sounds like you're saying that this is a step in the direction of "fixing" academia. I don't see any evidence of that, all i see is fewer scientists receiving decreasing funding in a state where weve already been slashing basic research investment for generations. Also, there is no evidence that the ones that are leaving are the least productive. Intuitively it's likely the opposite: the ones who have the most potential will find work elsewhere and will be the first to leave.
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.
The tail of the distribution justifies the entire distribution. I agree that a large percentage of PhD research is inconsequential, but a small percentage is massively consequential. It’s ok to whiff on a thousand STEM PhDs if you pick up one Andrej Karpathy (for example).
Can we agree academia is the worst system, except for all the others?
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.
Why wouldn't stem PhDs follow some bell curve of quality? I'm sure many PhDs that are leaving don't contribute but some of them do. I personally don't see a reason for it to be skewed for only PhDs which don't contribute to leave.
The problem with this framing is that it treats a mass exodus as if it were selective pruning. Losing 10,000+ STEM PhDs in weeks isn’t a quality filter. We’re hemorrhaging institutional capacity. We lose researchers who understand decade-long datasets, technical experts who can evaluate contractor claims, and people who can actually critique scientific literature when making policy decisions.
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.
> The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ,
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.
Most PhDs don't move the needle because the point of a PhD is to learn how to do research, not to produce ground-breakingly original work that reinvents the entire scientific order.
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.
People have tabulated the value of the academic pipeline, from grant to paper to patent to stock valuation. It is overall very valuable, even if you grant the very real issues with our hyper-competitive grant system.
This intellectual capital is valuable, despite whatever the latest populist memes about professors claim.
You may be right in the general sentiment that not everyone with a PhD is a desirable candidate, but even if half of them were, that would be 5,000 fewer and that isn’t insignificant, especially in STEM fields.
You don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because some PhD students make "low quality science" doesn't mean we end academia. After all, who is going to do the high quality science if you get rid of all the scientists?
10k PhDs would mean 10k dissertations. I thought the popular narrative is that finding new knowledge has become too hard or much harder than in the past, so how are these grad students finding stuff that is new? Are these dissertations extremely incremental or just repackaging/regurgitating stuff?
I have yet to hear a criticism of academia where it sounds like we're better disproportionately losing people with PhDs than without them, particularly since most of those people got their PhDs quite a while ago.
PhDs seem to be quite employable by private industry, where competency is still valued.
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.
hmm, I was thinking
>The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption
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.
> The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ
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.
You're kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Sure, some PhDs are in underwater basket weaving and barely warranting the title. However, most PhDs are extremely valuable. They are pushing the boundaries of our knowledge to improve society.
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.
That’s a straw man argument. Losing 10 people becomes a question of their individual qualifications, losing 10,000 people and this is no longer about individuals.
Some of the people who left where underperforming but a significant percentage where extremely underpaid while providing extreme value to average Americans.
Scientists of >=PhD level sacrifice their lifetime to a low-profit goal. They could very well be occupied in the industry and earn millions (granted not all of them) with their talent. Instead they demand and enjoy social respect and at the moment Europe respects them more than the USA.
Note that it's hard for researchers in Europe, too.
But as far as I can tell, not nearly as hard as in the US. I don't think that any PhD student in Europe has been deported by masked agents, for instance.
The problem with these threads is everyone wants to complain about Trump, but support drops drastically when you talk about policies that actually help buffer against the far-right. Eg implementing robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance. How many of you software engineers want to sign up for high taxes? It's basically tragedy of the commons.
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.
You’re right to be thinking of second- and third-order solutions to these problems, which unfortunately the commenters in these threads aren’t prepared to engage with.
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.
This isn't a taxes issue. The assault on higher education and the sciences by this administration is inseparable from the assault on minorities and free speech. This is the authoritarian playbook 101. Mao went as far as locking up all the PhD's and sending them to work camps.
> How many of you software engineers want to sign up for high taxes?
it's not about taxes -- that is a false narrative. Trump did not reduce the budget, he just redirected money from science to "border security" (aka an unaccountable domestic paramilitary force aka ICE) and the military. Taxes were cut yes, but primarily on the very wealthy.
but yes, you are correct that Americans from both parties support high military spending instead of investing in the wellbeing of its citizens (education, healthcare, housing, etc.), and _that_ is a significant problem that I don't see us getting away from any time soon. very sad.
All other first world countries tax their low and middle classes at much higher effective rates than the US to pay for those nets. Google stuff like effective tax rate by decile or quintile country name historical, and dig till you find solid sources with proper methodology.
There’s a reason OECD ranked the US tax system as most progressive some years back.
I love how Americans still dip their heads in the sand and pat themselves on the back by saying China produces low quality stuff.
* It's low quality stuff that you buy everyday
* It's not merely low quality stuff, but low quality stuff in astonishing quantity...
* ... and among them, occasionally there are some high quality stuff. It might be a small ratio, but the base number is there.
If 14% of the PhDs employed by the U.S. Government was 10,109, then there were about 72,207 total. That's about 3.2% of the civilian government, compared to 2.1% in the public workforce (and 1.3% of population).
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.
> 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.
> 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.
I came here to see if the comments could explain to my why this obviously bad thing is actually good. Its somewhat comforting to see others worried about the implication. The fact is that governments (aka public funding) is really what drives the biggest most impactful sorts of scientific breakthroughs. Think: NASA spinoffs, the internet, rocketry, MRNA, etc.
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.
There's a good chance they'd have been put to use strengthening the advertisement-dopamine-corporate control cycle that humanity is currently suffering under.
That exodus was only 3% of the 335,192 federal workers who exited last year but represents 14% of the total number of Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) or health fields employed at the end of 2024 as then-President Joe Biden prepared to leave office.
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?
Except they’re destroying those places too, and the places producing those skilled people, and breaking the pipelines that created innovation.
This past year top US talent entering college left the US at 5x the rate they did before. Europe, pacific rim, china, all have massive recruiting programs to suck talent out, and it’s working.
And this is only the beginning. Once the U.S. fully transforms into a China-like totalitarian state, complete with a social rating system and cameras for automatic payments everywhere, we will witness the collapse of educational institutions, the downfall of innovative companies, and an inability to address external multi-trillion dollar debt.
I had two friends (both PHDs, both worked for the CDC) leave the US this week.
In addition to the tumult at the agency, they were being monitored for what they did on their own time. Truly draconian stuff.
Want to collaborate with the WHO? Forbidden. Speak at a conference abroad on vacation time? Nope.
I don’t blame them. The autocratic push at the top feels different when it extends beyond work, and touches causes you feel deeply about. It’s a huge loss for the US.
- "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).
This is a tale as old as time. Anyone who's followed AI research has seen this happen.
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'.
I'm sure it's fine. There couldn't have been any Einsteins, Hugo Grotrians, Ingrid Francks, Wilhelm Westphals, James Francks, Otto von Bayers, Lise Meitners, Peter Pringsheims, Fritz Habers, Gustav Hertzs, and Otto Hahns, Hans Bethes, Max Borns, Eugene Wigners, Leo Szilards, Edward Tellers, or John von Neumanns among them.
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.
Well - I would not want to work under the orange king either. The
guy kind of tries to have some revival of the 1930s era with the
hipster TechBros. I think they need to compensate everyone else
with their wealth - just redistribute their wealth at once,
equally. Many people will be happy. Few superrich oligarchs will
not be happy. That's the way to go. Everything else just a weak
distraction.
good thing i can talk myself in a circle to pretend everything bad is good. yes, in years past i touted the fact that all the best minds in the world want to come to america as a reason america no. 1, but now thst that doesn't seem to be the case as much, america still no. 1 somehow. see how i'm moving around electons on the internet? i'm really thinking, aren't i?
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.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
titzer|1 month ago
Hammershaft|1 month ago
adev_|1 month ago
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'.
unknown|1 month ago
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gdilla|1 month ago
ajzushzb|1 month ago
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emeril|1 month ago
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john_moscow|1 month ago
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.
guywithahat|1 month ago
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.
jleyank|1 month ago
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.
giraffe_lady|1 month ago
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.
esalman|1 month ago
Under her PhD supervisor she directly worked with the NM department of transportation as a consultant. She did all that as an international student besides her graduate studies while being paid at 50% FTE (+tuition).
It takes between $10m (rural) to $100m (urban) to build a mile of interstate. Recycled materials can reduce the cost by 15-50% while still being equally as sustainable for decades.
Fortunately she is no longer at risk (or minimal risk) job/immigration wise. But others are not as fortunate. Just yesterday I learned that a PhD student from my alma mater was turned back from port of entry and his student visa denied. Reason? He traveled with his University provided laptop without written authorization. I understand that there are embargos and sanctions and trade restrictions, but really?
dmoy|1 month ago
mekdoonggi|1 month ago
snarky_dog|1 month ago
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stopbulying|1 month ago
michtzik|1 month ago
> 10,109 ... left their jobs
> departures outnumbered new hires last year by a ratio of 11 to one
That means that there were ~919 new hires, and thus it seems that 10,109 minus 919 equals
> a net loss of 4224
It appears that the "11 to one" ratio is the average, across agencies, of each individual ratio. It's left as an exercise to the reader to determine whether that average has any meaning at all.
retired|1 month ago
https://delta.tudelft.nl/en/article/fewer-phd-positions-and-...
https://www.sciencelink.net/features/its-not-just-about-mone...
ixtli|1 month ago
b00ty4breakfast|1 month ago
It is no coincidence that these kinds of personality-based dictatorships often devolve into dysfunction as time goes on.
JuniperMesos|1 month ago
ixtli|1 month ago
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.
morelandjs|1 month ago
imglorp|1 month ago
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.
dtdynasty|1 month ago
jayd16|1 month ago
quietsegfault|1 month ago
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.
epistasis|1 month ago
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.
TheOtherHobbes|1 month ago
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.
biophysboy|1 month ago
This intellectual capital is valuable, despite whatever the latest populist memes about professors claim.
yodsanklai|1 month ago
atonse|1 month ago
malfist|1 month ago
paulpauper|1 month ago
cbsmith|1 month ago
PhDs seem to be quite employable by private industry, where competency is still valued.
ActorNightly|1 month ago
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.
airstrike|1 month ago
tzs|1 month ago
bryanrasmussen|1 month ago
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.
gizzlon|1 month ago
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...
foxyv|1 month ago
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.
Retric|1 month ago
Some of the people who left where underperforming but a significant percentage where extremely underpaid while providing extreme value to average Americans.
thrance|1 month ago
Braxton1980|1 month ago
giraffe_lady|1 month ago
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BoredPositron|1 month ago
ajjahs|1 month ago
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JohnLeitch|1 month ago
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Yoric|1 month ago
But as far as I can tell, not nearly as hard as in the US. I don't think that any PhD student in Europe has been deported by masked agents, for instance.
Herring|1 month ago
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.
Yoric|1 month ago
FWIW, I do. I don't live in the US, though.
relaxing|1 month ago
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.
yodon|1 month ago
Not taxes. Authoritarianism.
insane_dreamer|1 month ago
it's not about taxes -- that is a false narrative. Trump did not reduce the budget, he just redirected money from science to "border security" (aka an unaccountable domestic paramilitary force aka ICE) and the military. Taxes were cut yes, but primarily on the very wealthy.
but yes, you are correct that Americans from both parties support high military spending instead of investing in the wellbeing of its citizens (education, healthcare, housing, etc.), and _that_ is a significant problem that I don't see us getting away from any time soon. very sad.
SideQuark|1 month ago
There’s a reason OECD ranked the US tax system as most progressive some years back.
tehjoker|1 month ago
MetroWind|1 month ago
* It's low quality stuff that you buy everyday * It's not merely low quality stuff, but low quality stuff in astonishing quantity... * ... and among them, occasionally there are some high quality stuff. It might be a small ratio, but the base number is there.
goodluckchuck|1 month ago
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.
cbsmith|1 month ago
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fleroviumna|1 month ago
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unknown|1 month ago
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dmix|1 month ago
> 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.
jeron|1 month ago
seems like it was made to fit a specific narrative...
BrenBarn|1 month ago
zerof1l|1 month ago
ixtli|1 month ago
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.
unknown|1 month ago
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TacoCommander|1 month ago
thegreatpeter|1 month ago
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?
layer8|1 month ago
mekdoonggi|1 month ago
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.
water9|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
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thoughtstheseus|1 month ago
insane_dreamer|1 month ago
SideQuark|1 month ago
This past year top US talent entering college left the US at 5x the rate they did before. Europe, pacific rim, china, all have massive recruiting programs to suck talent out, and it’s working.
Trumps Gift will surpass Hitlers Gift.
aw124|1 month ago
mekdoonggi|1 month ago
alecco|1 month ago
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...
Friedduck|1 month ago
In addition to the tumult at the agency, they were being monitored for what they did on their own time. Truly draconian stuff.
Want to collaborate with the WHO? Forbidden. Speak at a conference abroad on vacation time? Nope.
I don’t blame them. The autocratic push at the top feels different when it extends beyond work, and touches causes you feel deeply about. It’s a huge loss for the US.
unknown|1 month ago
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marbro|1 month ago
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giardini|1 month ago
- "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).
lynndotpy|1 month ago
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.
mmooss|1 month ago
> 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'.
kwoii|1 month ago
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cratermoon|1 month ago
/s
unknown|1 month ago
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roysting|1 month ago
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chronny903|1 month ago
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thatfrenchguy|1 month ago
d4mi3n|1 month ago
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.
beepbopboopp|1 month ago
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JohnTHaller|1 month ago
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periodjet|1 month ago
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.
mekdoonggi|1 month ago
Hizonner|1 month ago