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Trump Slashed Funding for Science. Now the U.S. Faces a Costly Brain Drain.
The White House’s attacks on academia and budget cuts for research have provided an opening for other countries to poach leading scientists.
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Wali Malik, a robotics engineer, left his job in Massachusetts last year to lead a new lab in Vienna.
Credit...
David Payr for The New York Times
By
Vivienne Walt
Vivienne Walt, a DealBook contributor based in Paris, spoke to officials across Europe about recruiting talent from America.
April 4, 2026,
8:00 a.m. ET
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In March last year, Wali Malik, a robotics engineer in Cambridge, Mass., received a call from a research institution in Austria, a country where he had never been and knew no one. “‘Hey,’” Malik recalled the man saying. “‘We have this position to build an institute from scratch, on A.I. and life sciences.’”
Malik wasn’t looking to uproot his life and move abroad. He was married with three children, and his parents lived in Washington. But with President Trump slashing science research, Malik rolled the dice.
“I had friends who lost their jobs,” he said. “I saw that happening in real time. I thought, ‘Let me entertain this.’”
So he made the leap. Malik signed on in May to
head up a new
robotics lab at Austria’s
Research Institute
for Biomedical Artificial Intelligence and moved his family to Vienna, sight unseen. His first task was to hire top scientists. He helped recruit a team of four — all from U.S. research labs at Yale, M.I.T., the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Francisco.
“No one in my field gets the opportunity to build something from Day 1,” he said.
Malik, 39, is just one example of what threatens to become a worrying trend: the departure of talented scientists from America for opportunities abroad. The Trump administration’s
continued attacks on academia
and its
funding cuts to scientific research
have provided an opening for other countries to poach the type of researchers who have helped make America the world’s leader in medical and technology breakthroughs. That brain drain could be very costly for the U.S. economy.
Experts are sounding the alarm. A
study in September
by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank, warned that without a reversal, the cuts to science could shrink the U.S. economy by nearly $1 trillion over 10 years. That could leave the U.S. lagging behind China, which is investing heavily in research.
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