Growing up in Brazil, neuroscientist Danielle Beckman always dreamed of moving to the US for work. So, in 2017, when Beckman got the opportunity to work at the California National Primate Research Center at UC Davis, she jumped on it.
“I was so excited,” she recalled. “Coming to the US was always the dream. It was always the place to be, where there’s the biggest investment in science.”
But months into President Donald Trump’s second term, as his administration wages an unprecedented war on the country’s top universities and research institutions, Beckman no longer sees the US as a welcome home for her or her research, which focuses on how viral infections like Covid-19 affect the brain.
Beckman is part of a growing wave of academics, scientists and researchers leaving the US in what many are warning could be the biggest brain drain the country has seen in decades.
But America’s loss could be the rest of the world’s gain.
As the Trump administration freezes and slashes billions of dollars in research funding, meddles with curricula, and threatens international students’ ability to study in the US, governments, universities and research institutions in Canada, Europe and Asia are racing to attract fleeing talent.
The European Union pledged €500 million ($562 million) over the next three years “to make Europe a magnet for researchers.”
A university in Marseille, France, is wooing persecuted academics under a new program called a “Safe Place for Science.” Canada’s largest health research organization is investing 30 million Canadian dollars ($21.8 million) to attract 100 scientists early in their careers from the US and elsewhere. The Research Council of Norway launched a 100 million kroner ($9.8 million) fund to lure new researchers. The president of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University recently told a crowd at a higher education summit the school is identifying “superstar” US researchers and making them offers as soon as the next day.
The Australian Academy of Science also launched a new talent program to recruit disillusioned US-based scientists and lure Australians back home.
“We know these individuals are highly trained, talented, and have much to offer,” said Anna-Maria Arabia, chief executive of the academy, noting the program has received “encouraging interest” so far.
“It’s vitally important that science can continue without ideological interference,” Arabia said.
The US could lose its scientific edge
The US has long been a powerhouse when it comes to research and development, attracting talent from far afield with its big budgets, high salaries and swanky labs.
Since the 1960s, US government expenditure in research and development (R&D) has more than doubled from $58 billion in 1961 to almost $160 billion in 2024 (in inflation-adjusted dollars), according to federal data. When incorporating R&D funding from the private sector, that number balloons to more than an estimated $900 billion in 2023.
The US’s enormous investment in R&D has led to an outsized influence on the world stage. The US has racked up more than 400 Nobel Prizes, more than double the amount of the next country, the United Kingdom. More than a third of the US’s prizes were won by immigrants.
“We have been respected worldwide for decades because we have trained succeeding generations of researchers who are pushing into new territories,” said Kenneth Wong, a professor of education policy at Brown University.
But Trump’s second term has upended the relationship between higher education and the federal government.
Trump’s gutting of federal health and science agencies has led to sweeping job losses and funding cuts, including at the National Institutes of Health, which funds nearly $50 billion in medical research each year at universities, hospitals and scientific institutions.
Between the end of February and the beginning of April, the administration cancelled almost 700 NIH grants totaling $1.8 billion, according to an analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The Trump administration has proposed reducing the NIH’s budget in 2026 by 40%.
The National Science Foundation has also slashed nearly $1.4 billion worth of grants. On Wednesday, 16 US states sued the Trump administration over the NSF cuts, which they argue will impede “groundbreaking scientific research” and “(jeopardize) national security, the economy and public health.”
Trump has also targeted elite universities and is in the middle of a legal battle with Harvard University over its refusal to bow to his administration’s directives to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs, resulting in billions in frozen federal funding. That battle significantly escalated this month when Trump banned Harvard’s ability to enroll international students – a decision swiftly halted by a federal judge hours after Harvard filed suit.
This week, the White House directed federal agencies to cancel all remaining contracts with Harvard.
“The president is more interested in giving that taxpayer money to trade schools and programs and state schools where they are promoting American values, but most importantly, educating the next generation based on skills that we need in our economy and our society: apprenticeships, electricians, plumbers,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Fox News this week.
“We need more of those in our country, and less LGBTQ graduate majors from Harvard University.”
‘I don’t feel so welcome’
Foreign institutions have already jumped on the chance to welcome Harvard students now caught in legal limbo. On Monday, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology said it will accept any Harvard students that wish to transfer, as well as prospective students with a current offer from Harvard.
“I see this as the most significant crisis that universities are facing since World War Two,” Wong said. “We are seeing a complete reset of this collaborative relationship between the federal government and leading research institutions.”
Once the beacon of scientific research, the US has now become an increasingly hostile place to study, teach, and do research. Three quarters of US scientists surveyed by the journal Nature in March said they were considering leaving because of the Trump administration’s policies.
Some have already jumped ship. Yale professors Jason Stanley, Marci Shore and Timothy Snyder, preeminent fascism scholars, announced in March they were leaving for the University of Toronto across the border in Canada because of Trump’s affronts to academic freedom.
Beckman, the Brazilian neuroscientist, said her lab has seen $2.5 million in grant funding cancelled in recent months. On top of these funding woes, Beckman said the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants, and shifting attitudes towards foreigners in the US, has also pushed her to look for work elsewhere.
“It’s the first time since I moved here that I don’t feel so welcome anymore,” she said.
As the US research ecosystem responds to shrinking budgets and intrusions on academic freedom, early-career scientists are going to be hardest hit, Wong said. But younger researchers are also more mobile, and institutions around the world are welcoming them with open arms.
“What we are losing is this whole cadre of highly productive, young, energetic, well-trained, knowledgeable, advanced researchers who are primed to take off,” Wong said.
Other countries have long deprioritized investment in scientific research as the US absorbed the R&D needs of the world, Wong said. But that trend is shifting.
R&D spending in China has surged in recent decades, and the country is close to narrowing the gap with the US. China spent more than $780 billion on R&D in 2023, according to OECD data. The European Union is also spending more on R&D. R&D investment in the bloc has increased from about $336 billion in 2007 to $504 billion in 2023, according to the OECD.
For a couple of months, Beckman said she considered stepping away from her Covid-19 research, which has become increasingly politicized under the Trump administration.
But then she started getting interviews at institutions in other countries.
“There is interest in virology everywhere in the world except the US right now.”