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The writer is a science commentator
Inconvenient truths need inconvenient truth-tellers. That is why the second Trump administration has worked hard to demean, discredit and even dismiss scientists. The bitter fruits of Trump’s war on science are plain to see. More than 10,000 workers with PhDs in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and health left the federal workforce last year through firings, retirement and quitting. That is roughly three times the losses that happened in the final year of the Biden administration, recent analysis in the journal Science shows.
There were some new hires but across 14 agencies operating in sectors like health, weather and environment, the overall picture was a net exodus of more than 4,000 highly trained workers. That shrinking hinterland of scientific expertise is evident in recent pronouncements: the repeal of the “endangerment” ruling that greenhouse gases threaten human health, which underpins climate legislation; the downgrading of pandemic preparedness research by the health agency tasked with responding to infectious diseases; and the refusal by regulators this month to review Moderna’s new mRNA flu vaccine.
The decisions seem grounded less in science and more in Maga talking points, such as the imagined climate scam and the fiction that children receive too many vaccines. The result? US researchers are fleeing abroad in a reverse brain drain; pharma companies are publicly questioning future investments in the country; and the US now boasts the highest number of reported measles cases since the disease was eliminated in the country in 2000. When it comes to science, the White House could not have crafted a more effective America Last policy.
Employment data posted by the White House Office for Personnel Management reveals that the National Institutes of Health tops the departure table, with 1,100 people leaving in 2025 compared to 421 the year before. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the US Forest Service were also hit hard. The National Science Foundation saw a net reduction of 40 per cent of its PhD workforce. It is a staggering haemorrhaging of expertise, with the disappearance of a collective 107,000 years of experience.
While retiring and resigning are deemed voluntary departures, government measures have undoubtedly hastened the exodus: extreme and arbitrary cost-cutting, particularly by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency; the installation of ideologues in leadership positions (witness Robert F Kennedy Jr’s needless stoking of fears over paracetamol and autism); and chilling censorship over what researchers can say and publish. Three-quarters of researchers who responded to a poll last year said they were considering leaving the US.
Accordingly, the EU set aside €500mn to lure scientists to the continent, pointedly offering legal guarantees of academic freedom and a commitment to diversity and inclusion. The University of Aix-Marseille opened an “asylum scheme” last year. The toxic mix of anti-science sentiment and perceived bias against scientists of Chinese heritage has been described as “a gift from Trump” as Beijing seeks to poach talent in vital areas such as AI, semiconductors and quantum technologies.
The trouble is, performative incantations that climate change is a hoax, or that pandemics are not a threat, do not turn falsehoods into truths. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is deprioritising pandemic preparedness and biodefence, Nature revealed this week, with workers reportedly instructed to scrub relevant material from its website. As Nahid Bhadelia of Boston University observed: “Just because we say we’re going to stop caring about these issues doesn’t make the issues go away — it just makes us less prepared.”
Staff turnover may also have fed into the chaos over the Moderna jab. The company had agreed a trial protocol with the Food and Drug Administration — but learnt this month in a letter signed by FDA head Vinay Prasad that this was inadequate.
Moderna’s president, Stephen Hoge, told Stat, a health news outlet, that the flip-flopping could deter investment: “How do we make investments if, after we’re done, the [regulatory] rules are going to be changed and the goalposts are going to be moved?”
Interestingly, approval, if it came, might well have coincided with the November midterms. The US government, meanwhile, has scrapped all federally funded mRNA vaccine research, including into cancer.
A cynic might say that approving such a vaccine just as the Maha crowd turned out to vote could have been very inconvenient indeed.