US science faces an unprecedented brain drain amid funding cuts and political pressure - Space and astronomy

Researchers are leaving the United States as federal funding becomes more uncertain and distrust of science grows under the Trump administration. At the same time, the number of international doctoral students arriving in the country is declining.

The United States is experiencing an unusual loss of experienced researchers, driven by budget cuts, political pressure and growing uncertainty across universities and research institutions. The trend is also accompanied by a marked decline in the arrival of foreign doctoral students, according to the information available in the original report.

Chloé Arson, a physicist who moved to the United States in 2009 after completing her doctoral studies at France’s École des Ponts et Chaussées, had not planned to leave the country. After spending many years at Georgia Tech, she obtained a professorship at Cornell University, one of the leading institutions in the country.

That situation changed in 2025, when the Trump administration introduced policies aimed at tightening control over research and universities. In May of that year, Cornell received a letter stating that Arson’s work on geothermal energy and heat networks was no longer considered a government priority and that funding she had secured would be suspended.

Cornell faced the possible loss of hundreds of millions of euros in federal funding. In late 2025, the university was among several Ivy League institutions that reached an agreement with the White House. The deal included a $30 million investment in agrotechnology research, the abandonment of some policies supporting minorities and financial penalties running into several million dollars. In return, the government released most of the funds. Many professors condemned the agreement as a form of extortion.

Arson says the research environment has become highly unpredictable. Access to funding, the recruitment of young researchers and evaluation based on scientific criteria are, in her view, no longer assured. She believes that several applications linked to her work, including research into geothermal energy and nuclear waste, were rejected for political reasons.

At the beginning of 2026, she applied for a position at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and was selected. She is due to take up the post in 2027, becoming one of the researchers moving their work across the northern border.

The situation could change marginally depending on the results of the US midterm elections on November 3, but the current combination of funding reductions and distrust toward science has already unsettled the country’s academic and research communities.

Sources: Le Monde Sciences.