In a single year, the federal government lost more than 10,000 of its most highly trained scientists, engineers and health experts. The administration calls it efficiency. The data call it a brain drain — one that leaves Americans less safe, less healthy and less competitive, while the White House cuts deals with the Kremlin for fuel.
The number is stark enough to stop you cold: 10,109. That is how many doctoral-trained experts in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and health walked out of federal jobs between January 1 and November 30, 2025, according to an analysis by Science magazine, the flagship journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The year before, the figure was 4,576. These were the epidemiologists who track outbreaks, the hydrologists who model floods, the chemists who test what is in our water and the program officers who decide which American laboratories get to chase the next cure.
They did not leave because the work was finished. They left — or were pushed — because an administration that campaigned against “the deep state” decided that expertise itself was the enemy. And while America sends its scientific talent packing, the White House has struck a deal to bring in Russian petroleum for the first time since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. That juxtaposition is not a coincidence of the news cycle. It is a portrait of priorities.
I. The Exodus, by the Numbers
Science reporters Monica Hersher and Jeffrey Mervis examined federal personnel data across 14 research-intensive agencies. Every one of them lost far more Ph.D. scientists in 2025 than in 2024. The departures were only about 3 percent of the 335,192 federal workers who exited last year — but they represented roughly 14 percent of all STEM and health Ph.D.s the government employed at the end of 2024. In other words, the cuts did not fall evenly. They fell hardest on the people the country can least afford to lose.
Ph.D.s gone in 2025
Doctoral-trained STEM and health experts who left federal service in Trump’s first year back, versus 4,576 in 2024. Science
Departures vs. new hires
At the 14 agencies studied, exits outnumbered hires eleven to one, for a net loss of 4,224 STEM Ph.D.s. The pipeline is not being refilled. Science
Years of experience lost
Cumulative years of federal service that walked out the door with departing Ph.D.s in 2025 — more than double the 2024 figure. Science
NIH departures
The National Institutes of Health topped the list, losing more than 1,100 Ph.D.s, up from 421 the year before. Science
NSF’s scientific core
Ph.D.s made up about 30 percent of the National Science Foundation’s workforce under Biden; by November 2025, 26 percent. Many were rotators whose posts were terminated. Science
CDC pink slips
At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 16 percent of the 519 departing STEM Ph.D.s were formally laid off — the highest layoff share of any agency studied. Science
Defenders of the administration will point out that formal reductions in force accounted for a relatively small share of departures, and that most of these scientists technically retired or resigned. That is true, and it is beside the point. People with doctorates and marketable skills do not wait for the axe once they see it being sharpened. When grants are frozen, advisory panels dissolved, positions eliminated and colleagues publicly ridiculed, a “voluntary” departure is simply a layoff the employee had the foresight to get ahead of.
II. Exporting Talent, Importing Russian Fuel
On October 9, President Trump announced an agreement with Vladimir Putin under which Russia would ship diesel to American and global markets. According to Reuters shipping data, the first tanker, the Malta-flagged Agioi Fanendes, loaded 40,000 metric tons of ultra-low-sulfur diesel at the Russian Baltic port of Primorsk on October 22 and is due in New York on November 7 — four days after the midterm elections the deal was plainly timed to influence. It is the first such cargo since President Biden banned imports of Russian oil and petroleum products in 2022. To make it happen, Trump waived parts of a new Russia sanctions law and threatened Europe with a U.S. diesel export ban unless allies released emergency reserves.
The same day, the Treasury Department issued General License 135 authorizing the transactions. As legal analysts at Diplomacy & Law have noted, that license sits in apparent tension with the Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act of 2022, a statute passed by Congress that continues to prohibit the import of Russian-origin petroleum products.
Set the two stories side by side. The United States is pushing out the people who invent the batteries, grids, fuels and forecasting models of the future — and propping up the petro-state whose war machine those fuel revenues finance. A nation confident in its future invests in brains. A nation governed for the next news cycle buys diesel from its adversary.
III. The Chainsaw Years: How the Gutting Happened
The exodus did not happen by accident. It was the product of a deliberate sequence of decisions, many driven by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency before the billionaire’s public falling-out with the president. When DOGE turned its attention to the National Science Foundation, Scientific American and Nature reported that all new research grants were frozen and that DOGE staff were reviewing active grants flagged for diversity-related terms. Within weeks, DOGE boasted on X that NSF had canceled “402 wasteful DEI grants,” according to the Associated Press — a list that included bird-feeder research and artificial-intelligence literacy work.
Trump returns to office and installs Elon Musk’s DOGE to slash the federal workforce and grant portfolios.
DOGE arrives at the National Science Foundation; hundreds of active research grants are terminated midstream.
NIH grant terminations mount past $2.4 billion, halting at least 160 active clinical trials, per the American Bar Association’s review of AAMC data.
RFK Jr. fires all 17 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee.
HHS cancels 22 mRNA vaccine projects worth nearly $500 million.
Trump tells the U.N. that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
Congress rejects the deepest proposed cuts in FY2026 spending bills; Science publishes its Ph.D. exodus analysis.
EPA rescinds the 2009 Endangerment Finding, the legal foundation of federal climate regulation.
FY2027 budget request again seeks a 55% cut to NSF and a near-halving of NASA science.
Trump–Putin diesel deal announced; Treasury issues General License 135 the same day.
At the National Institutes of Health — the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research — the damage reached patients directly. A review in the American Bar Association’s Health eSource, drawing on Association of American Medical Colleges data, found that by May 2025 more than 1,400 NIH grants worth roughly $2.5 billion had been terminated, including 91 grants tied to 160 active clinical trials. Those are not abstractions. They are people enrolled in studies for cancer, HIV and mental illness who were told, mid-treatment, that the research keeping them in the trial no longer had funding.
IV. Engineering a Hostile Environment
Budget lines tell only part of the story. The deeper damage is cultural: an administration that treats scientific consensus as a partisan opinion and scientists as political suspects. In late May, the White House proposed giving political appointees at federal science agencies the power to sign off on all research awards — upending a merit-review system in which expert peers, not partisan officials, decide what gets funded. House Science Committee Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) warned in a statement that, with the proposal, “American leadership in science is dealt a fatal blow.”
At the Department of Health and Human Services, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. removed every member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the expert body whose recommendations determine which vaccines insurers cover and which shots the Vaccines for Children program provides. Kennedy insisted, as CBC News reported, that “a clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science.” His replacements included prominent vaccine critics. When the people setting vaccine policy are chosen for their doubts rather than their expertise, scientists inside the agency understand the message: your evidence is negotiable.
“Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”
— The five living former directors of the National Weather Service, open letter, May 2025
That warning, reported by CBS News, came after more than 550 employees left the National Weather Service in the first months of 2025, leaving it down roughly 10 percent of its staff heading into hurricane season. Every former director alive — Republicans’ appointees and Democrats’ alike — signed it. That is what a hostile environment looks like: not one dramatic purge, but a thousand decisions that tell skilled people their work is unwanted.
V. Falling Behind on the Global Stage
America’s competitors are not waiting for us to come to our senses. In the 2026 Nature Index Research Leaders rankings, based on 2025 output in top journals, China extended its lead as the world’s leading contributor to high-quality research, and Harvard — long the planet’s top research institution — slipped to third place overall. Stanford and MIT tumbled further. Nature Index analysts caution that rankings alone do not prove policy effects, but the direction of travel is unmistakable.
Meanwhile, rival nations are actively recruiting the scientists Washington is driving away. The Association of American Universities documents how China launched a special “K visa” for science and technology talent and how provincial governments are wooing researchers with salaries, housing and bonuses — explicitly targeting those whose U.S. grants were terminated or who were fired from NIH. A Nature poll of roughly 1,600 researchers found more than 75 percent were considering leaving the United States.
Europe is recruiting just as hard. As Fortune reported last month, Germany’s Max Planck Society opened a recruitment track specifically for U.S. researchers, and the Netherlands’ €50 million Tulip Fund selected 34 researchers in its first round — 29 of whom came from the United States. The American Institute of Physics found that in 2025 the share of new physics Ph.D.s leaving the country hit its highest level in 30 years. No one has yet counted how many federal scientists have emigrated outright, and “considering” is not the same as leaving. But the direction is unmistakable: we are driving scientists away, and other countries are rolling out the welcome mat. The country that built its scientific supremacy on welcoming refugee physicists from 1930s Europe is now the country scientists flee.
The administration’s own budget signals that it intends to accelerate the decline. Its FY2027 request asks Congress to cut NSF by 55 percent, NASA by 23 percent, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science by 15 percent and NIH by 12 percent — and to eliminate NSF’s entire directorate for the social, behavioral and economic sciences. Even basic AI and quantum research at NSF, the supposed crown jewels of the administration’s tech agenda, would face cuts of roughly a third.
VI. What This Means at Your Kitchen Table
It is tempting to treat all this as a fight among academics. It is not. Federal science touches nearly every hour of an ordinary American’s day.
Your safety. The forecast that tells you to evacuate, the tornado warning that wakes you at 2 a.m., the flight that lands safely because the pilot had accurate weather data — all depend on the National Weather Service and the NOAA research that feeds its models. Fewer forecasters and fewer weather-balloon launches mean less reliable warnings when seconds matter.
Your health. NIH-funded research sits beneath nearly every new medicine on pharmacy shelves. Terminated trials, canceled mRNA work and a hollowed-out CDC mean slower cures, weaker outbreak response and less trustworthy vaccine guidance for your children. When HHS canceled nearly $500 million in mRNA vaccine projects — including, as Healthcare Dive reported, contracts with Moderna, Pfizer and CSL Seqirus — it walked away from the platform that delivered COVID-19 vaccines in record time.
Your paycheck. Federal research dollars flow to universities, hospitals and small businesses in all 50 states. They train the engineers who staff American factories and seed the startups that become tomorrow’s employers. A country that stops investing in discovery eventually stops leading in the industries discovery creates — and the high-wage jobs go where the science went.
Your air and water. EPA and NOAA saw some of the steepest increases in Ph.D. departures of any agency in the Science analysis. Those are the people who measure pollution, evaluate chemicals and enforce the laws that keep tap water safe.
Congress Holds the Purse — and the Administration Is Reaching Around It
Art. I, § 9, cl. 7
The Appropriations Clause gives Congress, not the president, the power to decide how federal money is spent. Here a crucial fact is often missed: Congress largely did not authorize the deep science cuts. In the FY2026 spending laws signed in January, lawmakers rejected the administration’s proposed slashing; NIH received nearly level funding and NSF was trimmed by about 3 percent rather than halved, as Eos reported. The damage came largely through executive action — grant terminations, hiring freezes, position eliminations and slow-walked spending of money Congress had already appropriated.
Impoundment Control Act
The 1974 Impoundment Control Act was passed precisely to stop presidents from refusing to spend appropriated funds because they disagree with Congress’s choices. Withholding or delaying congressionally approved research dollars to achieve, by attrition, cuts that Congress refused to enact strikes at the heart of that law and of the separation of powers it protects.
Russian Oil Act, 2022
The Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act is a statute, not an executive preference. A Treasury general license cannot amend an act of Congress. If the administration believes the law should change, the Constitution prescribes a remedy: ask Congress to change it.
Accountability
Congress has the tools to respond — binding spending language, oversight subpoenas, and the power to condition future appropriations on lawful execution of current ones. The question is whether it has the will.
VII. What Congress and the Democrats Are Doing
The honest accounting begins with credit where it is due. In January, a bipartisan group of appropriators passed FY2026 bills that rejected the White House’s proposed demolition of science budgets. Senate Appropriations Vice Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said the package rejected Trump’s push “to let our competitors do laps around us,” according to Eos. That bipartisan resistance mattered — and it shows the cuts are a choice, not an inevitability.
But the fight for FY2027 is far from won. The government is running on a continuing resolution that expires December 11, and no regular FY2027 appropriations bill has been enacted. The House Appropriations Committee’s Commerce-Justice-Science bill, while rejecting the worst of the president’s request, would still cut NSF by about 20 percent to $7 billion, as the American Geophysical Union detailed. A “less bad” cut is still a cut, and it would compound the losses of the last two years.
Democrats on the House Science Committee have laid out what they would do with a majority. According to AIP’s FYI science policy news, Lofgren — positioned to chair the committee if Democrats win the House on November 3 — said the committee would prioritize reversing “the tremendous damage that the administration has done to the science enterprise,” bring stalled bipartisan bills on quantum and AI back to the floor, and subject administration science officials to far more scrutiny. Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.), whose district includes Argonne and Fermilab, said his constituents are especially worried about delayed grants and workforce changes.
The limits are real. As AIP noted, many of the most damaging policies came through executive orders, which must be undone in the courts or overridden by legislation that would need to pass both chambers and survive a veto. Democrats cannot fix this alone from the minority — which is exactly why the next nine weeks, and the next election, matter.
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VIII. The War Goes On: Climate and Health
None of this is slowing down. On climate, the president has made his contempt explicit. Standing before the U.N. General Assembly, he declared climate change a fraud and claimed the predictions were “made by stupid people,” as E&E News reported.
“It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.”
— President Donald Trump on climate change, U.N. General Assembly, September 23, 2025
Policy followed rhetoric. On February 12, 2026, the EPA finalized its rescission of the 2009 Endangerment Finding — the scientific and legal determination that greenhouse gases endanger public health, which has underpinned nearly all federal climate regulation. As Davis Polk’s analysis explains, the rule also repealed federal greenhouse-gas standards for cars and trucks. States and environmental groups have moved to challenge it in court. The FY2027 budget, meanwhile, seeks to eliminate NASA’s SERVIR Earth-observation partnership on the grounds that it “imposed climate extremism on developing countries,” according to Chemical & Engineering News.
On health, the pattern is the same: canceled vaccine research, a purged vaccine advisory panel, a CDC that lost hundreds of its top scientists, and repeated attempts to shrink NIH. Each move is justified with the language of “gold-standard science” while the actual scientists are shown the door.
What does this say about the president’s priorities? A leader who believed in American greatness would treat the scientific enterprise as the national treasure it is — the engine that gave us the moon landing, the internet, GPS, the mRNA vaccine and the forecast that saves your family from the storm. This president treats it as an obstacle: to fossil-fuel profits, to his personal grievances about the pandemic, to a politics that runs on doubt. He proposes a $1.5 trillion defense budget, per C&EN, while asking to halve the agency that funds basic research. He waives sanctions for Russian diesel while threatening the grants of American cancer researchers. Leadership is the art of investing in a future you will not personally see. This is its opposite.
IX. What You Can Do
The honest assessment is this: no single citizen can restore 10,000 scientists. But the cuts that did the most damage were enabled by silence, and the funding decisions still pending are being made right now, on a deadline, by people who answer to voters. Here is where ordinary Americans have real leverage.
- Vote on November 3 — and make sure your neighbors can.The House Science Committee’s agenda, the power of the purse and oversight of the agencies all turn on who holds Congress. Confirm your registration, polling place and deadlines at vote.gov or your state’s election office, and ask candidates where they stand on federal research funding.
- Call your appropriators before December 11.Congress returns November 9 with a little over four weeks before the stopgap expires. Call your House member and both senators (Capitol switchboard: 202-224-3121). Ask them, specifically, to fund NSF, NIH, NOAA and NASA science at no less than FY2026 levels, and to include binding language requiring agencies to spend appropriated research money on time.
- Back the scientists who are speaking out.Federal researchers have taken real career risks to dissent. Organizations such as Stand Up for Science and the Union of Concerned Scientists organize, document and defend that work. Membership, donations and showing up at rallies make retaliation more costly.
- Make it local.Find out which universities, hospitals and labs in your state lost grants or staff, and write a letter to the editor connecting those losses to local jobs and patients. Lawmakers respond to stories from their own districts far more than to national statistics.
- Push your state to fill the gap.Some states are exploring their own research funds and recruitment programs to keep displaced scientists from leaving the country. Urge your governor and legislators to protect state research universities and public-health departments — and to join legal challenges where federal actions violate the law.
Editorial Conclusion
A nation does not stumble into losing ten thousand of its finest scientists in a single year. It chooses to. This administration chose chainsaws over peer review, conspiracy over evidence, and Russian diesel over American discovery — and it did so largely by going around the Congress that refused to approve the cuts.
What is at stake is not a line item. It is whether the United States remains a republic that governs by knowledge and by law: where Congress, not one man, decides how the public’s money is spent, and where facts are not fired for being inconvenient. Congress must use the power of the purse to restore what was taken and forbid it from happening again. The American people must demand nothing less — and hold accountable every official who would trade the country’s future for a news cycle.
Sources & References
- Science — U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office
- Reuters via U.S. News — First Russian diesel from Putin–Trump deal heading for U.S., data shows
- Diplomacy & Law — Trump’s Russia diesel deal: Can the U.S. import Russian fuel despite sanctions?
- Scientific American — Trump administration’s science cuts come for NSF funding
- Associated Press via News4JAX — Trump science cuts roil university labs
- American Bar Association — The fallout of NIH grant terminations: A crisis in research funding
- Capitol Releases — Lofgren statement on political appointees approving research awards
- CBC News / AP — RFK Jr. ousts CDC’s entire vaccine advisory committee
- CBS News — Former National Weather Service leaders warn about “loss of life” from NOAA cuts
- Nature Index — Harvard loses first place in Nature Index Research Leaders
- Association of American Universities — Scientific talent in America (brain drain brief)
- Fortune — America’s scientists are looking abroad. Can European business cash in?
- Science — Slasher sequel: Trump again proposes major cuts to U.S. science spending
- Healthcare Dive — HHS cancels nearly $500M in mRNA vaccine contracts
- Eos (AGU) — Science escapes largest cuts in latest budget bills
- Congressional Research Service — Overview of continuing appropriations for FY2027
- AGU — The Bridge — FY2027 appropriations update: NASA, NOAA and NSF
- AIP FYI — Democrats outline priorities for next Congress’ House Science Committee
- E&E News — ‘Con,’ ‘scam,’ ‘hoax’: Trump’s U.N. speech on climate
- Davis Polk — EPA’s Endangerment Finding in danger: Key takeaways of repeal
- Chemical & Engineering News — Trump’s 2027 budget proposes deep cuts to science programs
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