As Donald Trump has taken an axe to US federal spending, thousands of highly educated experts in scientific fields have left the government. In an astonishing reversal, the country which has historically benefited from the “brain drain” phenomenon is now experiencing it within its own government.
Brain drain refers to circumstances in which highly trained experts from underdeveloped and overexploited countries migrate to wealthier international job markets. Such loss of human capital can be catastrophic for a nation’s development, as a shortage of trained workers tends to strain critical sectors like healthcare and education.
Now the United States government — which once fielded as many as 281,000 scientists and engineers — is experiencing a similar phenomenon. According to Science magazine, federal agencies have lost some 10,109 doctoral-level experts in STEM and health fields over the last year. Though the experts only make up 3 percent of the over 335,000 federal workers who’ve left federal positions in 2025, they account for 14 percent of the STEM PhDs employed by the government at the end of 2024.
In effect, this represents a colossal exodus of specialized expertise from institutions important to public health, environmental protection, and scientific research. The effects are likely to be catastrophic — and the reverberations could be felt for decades.
Though thousands of federal employees with scientific expertise remain, the departing doctoral-level staffers represent a sizable chunk of the federal workforce. At the National Science Foundation, an independent research agency, the loss of PhDs was so severe that they accounted for 40 percent of its workforce prior to the Trump administration’s takeover.
Notably, Science found that reductions of force imposed by DOGE weren’t the main driver of the exodus. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, only 16 percent of the 519 STEM PhDs who left in 2025 did so under the Trump administration’s orders. Some agencies reported no forced PhD reductions whatsoever.
Instead, many experts just walked. Per Science‘s data, the most common reasons for PhD departures last year were voluntary quitting and retirement — scientists with decades of experience in their fields deciding they’d rather leave on their own than take part in Trump’s increasingly politicized federal government, which isn’t in any hurry to replace them with incoming talent. In the Department of the Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Services, for example, quitting accounted for over 60 percent of the PhD losses in 2025.
The result is a government hollowed out from within. The loss of institutional knowledge is staggering, to be sure: climate scientists who’ve tracked hurricanes for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, epidemiologists who managed pandemic response systems for the CDC, and ecologists who penned the country’s environmental regulations are now adrift, either retired for good or searching for work at non-government institutions.
Building back that expertise will be a feat — and that’s assuming anyone qualified will even want to work for these agencies after watching how they’ve become political pawns under Trump.
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