In March last year, Wali Malik, a robotics engineer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 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 AI 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 Donald 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 University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 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.
And last month, the Partnership for Public Service, another nonpartisan organization in Washington, estimated that 95,000 employees had departed federal science agencies from September 2024 to December 2025. The report said budget cuts were “jeopardizing our nation’s research and development pipeline.” Trump’s proposed budget for 2027 includes new funding cuts for scientific research.
There is no precise tally of how many scientists have opted to leave the U.S. since Trump returned to office in January last year. But the funding cuts, and the White House’s aggressive immigration crackdowns, could also halt the inflow of top foreign talent. That means America could miss out on the next generation of innovators like Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella, all immigrants to the U.S. who went on to lead the world’s defining tech giants.
An Unexpected Gift
The lure of the U.S. remains strong, of course: Hundreds of foreign founders have moved their businesses to thriving tech and research hubs like New York or Silicon Valley, where venture capital is far more accessible. About 30% of European startups that were later worth over $1 billion left Europe between 2008 and 2021, the vast majority to the U.S.
But to the rest of the world, the Trump administration’s cuts to science seem like an unbidden gift. And several are making sizable investments to attract American talent — just as the race for AI talent has reached fever pitch.
“The last time there was such a huge opportunity was the Vietnam War, when lots of graduates were coming to Canada,” Canada’s industry minister, Mélanie Joly, said last year, describing the government’s plans to draw top U.S. scientists; it unveiled its $1.2 billion, 12-year program in December. “We want the best and the brightest,” she said.
Similarly, China last year fast-tracked relocation for scientists who had lost funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, where the Trump administration canceled or froze 5,844 research grants last year, according to data analyzed by the journal Nature. And in May, the European Union launched a 500-million-euro Choose Europe for Science program, prompting numerous institutions across the 27 EU countries to add further programs of their own.
Waiting for the Midterms
“The U.S. was always the golden paradise for scientists,” said Heinz Fassmann, president of the Austrian Academy of Science, which last year introduced 500,000-euro four-year fellowships for 25 American scientists. “This could be a chance to reverse the migration flow,” Fassmann said.
When Malik told his colleagues that he was leaving for Vienna, “they were shocked,” he said. “But everyone said: ‘I wish I could come with you. I need to get out of here.’”
Even so, how big or long-lasting the migration of American talent might be remains uncertain. University officials in Europe say they will be closely monitoring the November elections in the U.S., believing that a Democratic wave could slow the exodus.
“We’re waiting for the midterms,” said Éric Berton, president of Aix-Marseille University in France, which started a program in March last year to hire U.S. scientists; six have arrived so far. “We are going to have a lot more applications if the Republicans win, so we will need a new program.”
A Different Lifestyle
Despite the new recruitment efforts, money remains a limiting factor in attracting large numbers of American scientists to Europe. Malik estimates that salaries for research scientists are one-third lower in Vienna than at U.S. research institutions. And European companies spent 270 billion euros less on research and innovation than their U.S. equivalents in 2021, according to an EU report.
Publicly funded research institutes can afford only so many seasoned American recruits. “We can only go up to 10 or 12,” said Mehran Mostafavi, vice president of research at Paris-Saclay University, which posted positions for top American scientists after Trump’s cuts last year.
But Americans considering a move to Europe say they’re weighing lower earnings against more stable funding and a cheaper, more relaxed standard of living.
“I was motivated partly by a desire for a lifestyle more common in Europe,” said Lauren Altman, 31, an experimental physicist at the University of Pennsylvania who has been offered a post at Paris-Saclay. “I love walkability and public transit.”
Altman said she feared that the loss of hundreds of scientists could inflict lasting damage to U.S. research. “This is going to have long-reaching effects, not just on who’s getting hired now, but who’s getting trained 15 years from now,” she said.
Before he moved to Vienna, Malik had a stressful, 90-minute commute from his home in Northborough, Massachusetts, to Cambridge, where he was senior director of lab automation at Tessera Therapeutics. He said he now had a more relaxed 40-minute train ride to work. His children, 11 and 9, are becoming fluent in German.
“For me, having more time to spend with the family, and spending weekends going to different countries, it is a great experience,” Malik said.
Still, he acknowledges the professional trade-offs. Malik said Europe lagged far behind the U.S. in scientific infrastructure like compute power. That, together with the need for capital when scientists try to scale up, could constrain governments’ ability to capitalize on luring American researchers.
“You can get people here,” Malik said. “The question is, can you keep people here?”