European agencies and research institutions are trying to woo US scientists left in limbo with promises of grants and work visas. But the enormous lacuna US President Donald Trump’s drastic cuts to federal funding for academic research have created will not be easy to fill: the White House has so far proposed to cut the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget by roughly 40%, National Science Foundation’s (NSF) by 55%, NASA by 24% and a whopping 74% cut to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Several universities have experienced lay offs and hiring freezes, while researchers and institutions have announced revoked grants and the deletion of vital scientific data.
Dr. Silvi Rouskin immigrated to the US from Bulgaria when she was 15 years old to pursue a career in science. Motivated by the United States’ open-minded approach to education, she stayed on and, with time and hard work, began collecting accolades and awards for her research into RNA, a molecule essential for biological functions in all living beings. Ultimately, she launched her own lab and began teaching at Harvard Medical School. The success didn’t come easy. She says that “to succeed at a top institution, you have to be highly competitive, and for many people – including myself – this requires great sacrifices”.
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But Rouskin’s work has been forced to a grinding halt as the Trump-led US administration via DOGE announced sweeping and seemingly indiscriminate cuts to funding for all kinds of research, labelled by many as an outright attack on science. Three of her students lost awards, and one of Rouskin’s own awards was abruptly and prematurely terminated. She also lost work with the Texas A&M university. “I collaborate and co-publish with over 20 labs across the United States – including labs in Florida, Nebraska, California, and Texas," she says. "Now, due to government funding cuts, I cannot even afford to support my students. The work from all of these collaborations is at risk of being lost.”
On top of that, the administration’s recent attempts to block foreign students from Harvard have left her students in an even more precarious position.
“Members of my lab are extremely worried, and I am worried for them!” she says.
Bright minds
The US’s dramatic cuts to funding, keyword based vetting on research papers and other anti-academic policies has stopped a vast amount of research in its tracks. The landscape is very different now compared to what Rouskin experienced when she was 15.
The US previously dedicated billions of dollars every year to research, which is why it attracted so many bright minds. The science surge began during wartime, as a wave of largely European scientists – which included the likes of Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller – fled their countries to work freely, away from political and bureaucratic shackles.
From the second world war onward, the US has recognised the human value and geopolitical soft power of scientific research and steadily began to increase investment in universities and federal agencies. Science and the humanities began to flourish, infrastructure for research increased and attracted the best minds from around the globe. That funding has been the key to US’s success in science and since 1950, 314 Nobel laureates won their awards while working in the US. About a third were foreign born.
European researchers increasingly chose the US to conduct their research. But the sharp U-turn implemented by the Trump administration may allow Europe to partially recover from decades of brain-drain. Universities and research funders are trying to capitalise on America's current anti-science stance, and woo researchers stuck in a limbo. The European Research Council (ERC) says it will inflate grants for senior scientists. The Karolinska Institutet, a medical university in Stockholm, has announced a 'task force' to admit more talent. The Aix-Marseille University in France announced the €15 million 'Safe Space for Science' initiative to attract researchers from the US. And EU chief Ursula von der Leyen and French President Emannuel Macron launched the €500 million 'Choose Europe for Science' programme to make the bloc "a magnet for researchers".
Can anyone fill the void?
If the current policies aren’t changed or revered in the coming years, Rouskin says she would consider moving somewhere else. And theoretically, the decline of US research could be a good thing for other countries. She says that “as US science declines, it is possible that countries like China and those in Europe will benefit”.
The French ARC Foundation for Cancer Research also announced a €3.5 million grant for struggling researchers in the US. ARC’s Vice President Dr. Eric Solary says that while attracting foreign talent is a part of the fund, European research is in itself underfunded.
‘We could benefit from it (foreign researchers) in principle. But there is another aspect, which is that French researchers are already afraid of the decrease support of the French government to research. They are also cut. In the budget, 500 million of euros were said to be reduced this year in this year's research budget.”
Ultimately, America’s lost science funding will be near impossible to match. Take the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the biomedical research leviathan with a roughly $47 billion annual budget. In 2022, the NIH spent just under 85 times more on biomedical grants than the European Commission.
Researches funded by the NIH collaborated with other scientists worldwide and produced thousands of research papers that have in turn led to breakthroughs in medicine and drug discovery. These papers trickle down to other researchers, who build on the data to conduct their own work – and so on.
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Science does not exist in a silo, and Solary says the funding cuts to institutions like the NIH will have a ripple effect on global research that cannot be easily reversed. “It will have an effect around the world because of the number of collaboration between European teams and American teams. We need the papers to circulate. We need the circulation of data and we need the analysis of that data. And as you know, there are threats to databases (…) and we don't know what the impact of that will be."
Even if Europe or other leaders in research like Canada or China increase funding and create incentives for researchers to work, the loss of federal funds for scientific research in the US would be a net loss for the world.
“Defunding critically important research with the potential to improve human health and save lives will cause long-term damage on multiple fronts,” says Rouskin. “These cuts threaten our collective health and well-being, disrupt the pipeline of discovery from academia to industry that leads to therapeutic innovation, and erode the United States’ global leadership. That is what these cuts would accomplish if they are not halted or reversed.”
English (US) · 