No Mercy / No Malice
Brain Drain
The Manhattan Project, the top-secret U.S. government initiative to build an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany did, relied on hundreds of brilliant scientists from leading universities. Many of them had fled fascist regimes in Europe and found refuge on American campuses, including Berkeley, Columbia, MIT, Princeton, Purdue, and the University of Minnesota. In the end, Adolf Hitler didn’t come close to developing a bomb. But if the rivers of talent had flowed in the opposite direction, the world would look dramatically different today.
In the eight decades since World War II, collaboration among the federal government, academia, and industry has unleashed unprecedented prosperity and economic growth for America. No other country has been as successful. Consider the list of the. Eight are based in the U.S. Research funded by the federal government has paved the way for a long list of breakthroughs, from the internet to GPS to mRNA vaccines to Apple’s Siri.
Yet rather than building on this foundation, the White House is determined to destroy it. The administration is attacking science and slashing research funding at universities under the false flag of fighting antisemitism. The demands are more thought control than civil rights. An assault on progressive ideology vs. bigotry. The results could be devastating: The river of knowledge may flow in reverse. Loath to get in the way of an adversary making a mistake, global competitors are eagerly shopping at the greatest yard sale of human capital since German scientists bolted for America in World War II.
China Calling
Soon, China won’t need to of U.S. intellectual property. It will become the primary source. After the White House in March moved forward with plans to lay off thousands of researchers from leading U.S. facilities, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Chinese recruiters jumped on social media to tout .
The Boston area is home to Kendall Square, which may be the most innovative square mile on the planet, and boasts universities including Harvard, MIT, and Tufts. In March, a was arrested by masked federal agents, a year after she co-wrote an op-ed criticizing the school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza. The governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, said: “China is on our campuses right now” recruiting scientists and faculty members. “That makes America less safe, less competitive, and has tremendous ripple effects for our economy.”
By many measures, China is already a scientific superpower. In other areas, it’s gaining ground quickly. The number of universities in China and Hong Kong ranked in doubled to 12 over the past five years, while the number of American universities slipped to 38 from 40, according to the annual Times Higher Education list of more than 2,000 institutions. A different ranking of the top 500 showed that the number of Chinese universities .
Departures of Chinese scientists have also been accelerating, fueled by a 2018 program that sought to curb Chinese espionage. Although the Trump-era “China Initiative” was shut down four years later, reports of in recent months have raised concern. I believe there are likely numerous Chinese nationals who are spies, and … it’s worth it.
Rivers of Talent
Imagine a football team that receives not one, but 31 of the 32 first-round draft picks. Every year. Now imagine the owner harasses the rookie quarterback, cleans out his locker, and threatens to have him and his family arrested and deported, sending a chill through the ranks of promising college players.
That would be … not smart.
This is what the White House is doing. When you hear the term brain drain, you think of America as the primary beneficiary. The country has long been the envy of the world when it comes to attracting talent. But we can no longer take this status for granted. Last week, we wrote about the reversing and flowing away from the U.S. But the may be even more important. In a March poll by the journal Nature, more than 1,200 American scientists — three-quarters of the respondents — said they were considering leaving America. The journal’s job-search platform saw from January through March 2025 vs. a year prior.
Gigantic Miscalculation
European leaders aren’t wasting any time in exploiting America’s dramatic research cuts, restrictions on academic freedom, and funding freezes. The European Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, earlier this week announced an investment of €500 million to woo international researchers, highlighting the EU’s values of freedom, openness, collaboration, and diversity. Without directly mentioning Trump, she said that undermining science and research is a “.”
French President Emmanuel Macron, who joined von der Leyen at Sorbonne University in Paris, said his country would €100 million to attract scholars and make Europe a “safe haven” for science. Macron said: “No one could have thought that one of the largest democracies in the world would erase, with a stroke of the pen, the ability to grant visas to certain researchers. No one could have thought that this great democracy, whose economic model relies so heavily on free science, on innovation, and on its ability to innovate more than Europeans … would make such a mistake.”
Many other countries see an opening, too. In the U.K., that the government is considering a £50 million program to court researchers, while , Canada, the Netherlands, and are progressing with their own plans. Regions within nations are jumping in as well: a €30 million effort — the “Catalonia Talent Bridge” — to finance posts for more than 70 American researchers facing restrictions to their academic freedom.
Slash and Burn
At my own institution, NYU Stern School of Business, I’ve seen firsthand the talent the rest of the world is racing to attract. The brightest scholars from the Indian Institutes of Science and other universities pace the halls of Stern. In sum, they dominate: exceptional scholars, teachers, and (American) patriots. To think that the U.S. is shutting off the tap — it isn’t just depressing, it’s fucking stupid.
Even if the White House is sparing artificial intelligence and quantum research from its slash-and-burn strategy, it has requested cutting the $9 billion budget of the National Science Foundation by more than half. The government agency, a major funder of basic science, math, and engineering, especially at universities across the country, terminated more than .
Waging war on universities and reducing federal funding for scientific research will weaken America’s economic competitiveness. that a 25% cut to public R&D spending would cut gross domestic product by 3.8%. That’s comparable to the decline seen during the Great Recession, which ended in 2009. A 50% reduction in funding would lower GDP by almost 7.6%, making Americans much poorer.
Oppenheimer
The U.S. can’t rely on the private sector to replace the government in funding science. No corporation can match the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or, which has played a critical role as an engine of American innovation. Early-stage research is risky and requires massive capital — and patience — investments companies focused on quarterly earnings can’t justify. Prosperous nations play the long game. The world’s most valuable firms have one thing in common: They were built on technology financed by American taxpayers via public-private partnerships — government and universities.
They also excel at bringing the government, universities, and companies together. J. Robert Oppenheimer, and “father of the atomic bomb” and were crucial Manhattan Project players, as everyone knows thanks to the performances of Cillian Murphy and Matt Damon in the Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer. But hundreds of others — and dozens of companies, too — played supporting roles. As physicist Niels Bohr said in 1944, the government wouldn’t have succeeded without “.”
Golden Goose
It was fear of Adolf Hitler getting a bomb that drove Franklin D. Roosevelt to launch the Manhattan Project. But it was hope that to write to Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, in November 1944. Roosevelt asked Bush to come up with a set of policy recommendations to sustain America’s wartime innovation during peacetime.
America’s innovation supremacy wasn’t an accident or birthright — it was earned through deliberate investment and intense collaboration among the world’s most exceptional minds. Now we risk throwing it all away. We’ve spent 80 years building a nearly unassailable lead, only to suddenly decide the race is optional. Our universities still dominate global rankings and our tech firms command unprecedented market power, but we’re actively dismantling the foundation that made it all possible. I believe America is being run by a mob family. That’s bad. What’s worse is that Michael Corleone is running the grift, and Fredo is running the government. America has become the textbook definition of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I was in Hamburg last week presenting at the OMR Festival (Online Marketing Rockstars), and the general vibe is bewilderment: How could a superpower be this stupid?
Life is so rich,
P.S. I enjoyed my conversation with Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and staff writer at the Atlantic, about the rise of kleptocracy in America. Listen or , or watch it .
