Science Under Siege: How Policy Shifts Are Driving Researchers Away

The current administration has been going after science in a big way. Funding for research has been frozen, many jobs have been cut, and policies have shifted to push out scientists. Over ten thousand doctoral-level STEM experts and about twenty-five thousand total science workers have left the federal government since the president returned to office. This loss is shaking a century-long lead the US once held in research and innovation.

Scientists are looking elsewhere for steady work and money. A survey of sixteen hundred researchers published in Nature showed that three out of four US-based scientists are thinking about moving abroad. Applications for jobs in other countries are rising fast. Nations like China are already luring more than a hundred top US scientists, while the EU’s Choose Europe program and Canada’s Leads 100 Challenge are offering big incentives to pull talent away from American labs.

The assault on science has also hit childhood vaccinations. The president’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has pushed an anti-vaccine agenda that lines up with a broader ideological purge called Project 2025. Because of this push, measles cases in the US have jumped to a 35-year high, with over two thousand four hundred fifty-six cases reported in 2026, even though the disease was declared eliminated in 2000. In March 2025 Kennedy announced plans to cut ten thousand full-time staff at the Health and Human Services department, adding to the ten thousand who had already left, shrinking the agency by about a quarter and losing roughly one thousand scientists. In June 2025 he fired all seventeen members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee and replaced them with skeptics.

Soon after, the president issued an executive order that told states to reduce the list of recommended childhood vaccines from seventeen to eleven and to split the measles-mumps-rubella shot into three separate doses. Experts say splitting the MMR vaccine serves no medical purpose, would force families to make extra appointments, and could lead to missed shots because the separate doses are not available from US drug makers. The same changes were struck down by a federal court in March after fifteen states, including Maryland, sued, and more than one hundred public health groups backed the lawsuit. Although states can ignore the order, the confusion it creates is already affecting vaccination efforts.