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The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should w

• giraffe_lady 9mo ago
  Do you think that's what is going on here?
  • sanskritical 9mo ago
    In my experience legitimately talented people are staying, and the guy whose impressive education credentials seem to train him mostly how to write very wordy excuses for his shortage of actual work product is going back home. Maybe you have a different experience, but my experience is something that seems to be echoed among a lot of people in my social circle. My experience is that people with talent are both driven and valued. Someone who might disagree with the current administration politically but is doing exactly what they want to do with their life in a role that generates measurable utility for the taxpayer is not packing up and leaving, nor losing their job. But many pieces of gristle are getting trimmed off the American government.
    • nialv7 9mo ago
      what you are saying is idiotic. people who are in demand can find work anywhere, they are the kind of people who will leave as soon as they feel their work environment has become even remotely uncomfortable. people who stay are more likely to be those who can't find job elsewhere.
      • sanskritical 9mo ago
        I think people who will leave as soon as they feel their work environment has become even remotely uncomfortable are likely sitting in a comfortable sinecure, and it isn't the role of the taxpayer to provide sinecures for people with doctoral degrees. Government workers are meant to serve the government, and the government of the United States is By the People. The People voted for the administration and if someone can't work for the company because you dislike the guy running it, well, it sounds infantile to me. Someone so fragile as to not tolerate political disagreement and reasonable scrutiny and auditing should not be receiving a salary from public funds.
        • notahacker 9mo ago
          Yes, I'm sure it's "infantile" for people at the NIH to resign because they believe their work is being censored for conflict with the administration's preferred pseudoscience. Could you sound any more like a Lysenko propagandist in the USSR if you tried?
        • toyg 9mo ago
          Your guy has armed goons with "absolute immunity" literally executing people in the streets, after threatening to invade neighbours and allies, appointing shockingly-unqualified loyalists at the very top of national institutions, and generally gutting the rule of law. It's a bit past "tolerating political disagreement", man.
          • giardini 9mo ago
            Well, that went south quickly! Glad to hear a British viewpoint now and then, but of course any problems stateside will be handled and voted on by Americans rather than Brits. Unless possibly you have dual citizenship (Brit & USA) perhaps? FWIW Britain has plenty of history of what you term "armed goons with "absolute immunity" literally executing people in the streets, after threatening to invade neighbours and allies, appointing shockingly-unqualified loyalists at the very top of national institutions, and generally gutting the rule of law." You Brits almost have a monopoly on tyranny of various forms, having gone through most of them in bloody civil wars yourself. Hardly a model to follow, n'est-ce pa?
    • Braxton1980 9mo ago
      How can your limited experience make any claims about the government workforce as a whole. It requires a decent amount of time to understand if someone is talented and that talent is being used to better their job. >but is doing exactly what they want to do with their life in a role that generates measurable utility for the taxpayer is not packing up and leaving How would you know? Some people have very strong convictions and as another comment stated if a person is talented it increases the chances they could find another job similar to their desired work
    • sdenton4 9mo ago
      This doesn't match my experience at all. Mid last year I helped run a workshop on AI explicitly for laid off federal science workers. The people involved were clearly extremely intelligent and knowledgeable, passionate about their research areas, and harboring an immense amount of institutional knowledge. They showed great curiosity and adaptability in the workshop. It was obvious that they were a set of very bad fires.
• dtdynasty 9mo ago
  Why wouldn't stem PhDs follow some bell curve of quality? I'm sure many PhDs that are leaving don't contribute but some of them do. I personally don't see a reason for it to be skewed for only PhDs which don't contribute to leave.
  • recursive 9mo ago
    These things are not in conflict. It's possible that PhD quality has a regular distribution, and that most of them aren't contributing much.
    • dtdynasty 9mo ago
      I agree with this. I guess you already believe they follow a bell curve.Then from your former comment you also believe it's worth it to lose many PhDs that don't contribute to also lose the few that do. I guess the conflict is my value judgement that it's good to keep PhDs that don't contribute if it allows US to keep the ones that do contribute. I believe so for 2 reasons. - Distinguishing between contributors and non contributors at scale is difficult. - the value of research can be large from a few contributors.
• Retric 9mo ago
  That’s a straw man argument. Losing 10 people becomes a question of their individual qualifications, losing 10,000 people and this is no longer about individuals. Some of the people who left where underperforming but a significant percentage where extremely underpaid while providing extreme value to average Americans.
  • moduspol 9mo ago
    The number seems arbitrary. Maybe we should be subsidizing until we have 100,000 more. I'm always skeptical when something is presumed to be a universal good in a way that's unfalsifiable. What metrics would you expect to see if we had too many STEM PhDs? What metrics can we expect to improve if we had more of them?
    • ixtli 9mo ago
      I think your comment is more a refutation of the top level than the person you're responding to. I think people are right to assume there is already a serious throughput issue with scientific research, especially so-called "basic" research in the US and seeing a mass exodus from the government is troubling because public funding is what, historically, generates the big breakthroughs. What the person you're replying to was likely trying to say is that once you get into this size of layoffs its no longer about the individuals and their performances and a claim that all 10k of them are on one side of a theoretical "bell curve" (which btw i havent seen evidence can actually be measured) is big and needs evidence.
      • tmp10423288442 9mo ago
        > public funding is what, historically, generates the big breakthroughs Without an opinion on the rest of this, public funding in the US doesn't produce big breakthroughs from scientists employed by the government, but rather by funding university research. It appears that, after the administration canceling a significant proportion of grants in 2025, that science funding has largely been maintained or increased from pre-2025 levels for 2026, although how the 2026 funding gets spent, and whether it is all spent, is an open question.
• ixtli 9mo ago
  It sounds like you're saying that this is a step in the direction of "fixing" academia. I don't see any evidence of that, all i see is fewer scientists receiving decreasing funding in a state where weve already been slashing basic research investment for generations. Also, there is no evidence that the ones that are leaving are the least productive. Intuitively it's likely the opposite: the ones who have the most potential will find work elsewhere and will be the first to leave. EDIT: I would also like to say that i have never seen evidence that we can measure the performance of 10k PhDs in a single dimension at all. So a claim that this could be good for scientific research and development seems unprovable at best.
  • sheikhnbake 9mo ago
    It also flies in the face of China's currently accelerating pace of research and breakthroughs by producing insane numbers of STEM majors and PhDs
    • JuniperMesos 9mo ago
      China is famous for low-quality research and bad papers, which is exactly what you'd expect from a system that grants an expanded number of formal credentials to people who aren't actually doing good scientific research.
      • roughly 9mo ago
        China was famous for low-quality products as well.
        • layer8 9mo ago
          While there have been substantial improvements, it still deserves its fame.
      • bigyabai 9mo ago
        Be that as it may, China also has persistent threat actors outfoxing American cybersecurity in the form of Salt Typhoon. The cards are on the table, and the US is already undoubtedly losing several fronts of asymmetrical warfare.
• yodsanklai 9mo ago
  Academia may be broken, but a lot of bright students still pursue PhDs and it's better to have them in your pool of candidates rather than not.
• JohnLeitch 9mo ago
  [flagged]
• imglorp 9mo ago
  Can we agree academia is the worst system, except for all the others? In the last century, the US led so many tech fields because of both academic and corporate research and the people to do it. Let's fix that system if needed and keep it well stocked. The alternative is ignorance, leading to unskilled industries and an easily misled electorate.
  • Braxton1980 9mo ago
    Wouldn't an easily misled electorate benefit the political party that lies the most?
    • imglorp 9mo ago
      That is kind of my point. That party has been attacking the education system in all forms for decades (imo) for exactly that reason. They have razed everything from school lunches to loan programs. This affects everyone.
    • sizzzzlerz 9mo ago
      We have definitive proof of that viz a vis, trump and his idiot magats.
  • ixtli 9mo ago
    10k PhDs lost isn't a step in the direction of fixing anything, though. There is little to no evidence that the people leaving aren't the top performers, let alone the bottom.
    • bayarearefugee 9mo ago
      > There is little to no evidence that the people leaving aren't the top performers, let alone the bottom. According to the article, the majority of the losses were voluntary (people quitting or accepting buyout offers) and not people who were directly laid-off. While this isn't direct evidence of where these people sit on the spectrum from top to bottom performers, my anecdotal life experience suggests that when losses like this are voluntary its far more likely they are top performers who have plenty of options elsewhere (either in the private sector, or in other governments). Also (and also anecdotally) this brain-drain doesn't just apply to direct government workers. I know of several people who worked in (and in some cases headed up) prestigious university research labs in the US who have left in the last year after massive funding cuts. Most of them were immigrants who went back to universities in their country of origin, some after having been here for decades.
• Braxton1980 9mo ago
  Do you believe that 100% of the people who left were useless?
• thrance 9mo ago
  Usually, when a system is broken, the correct course of action is to fix it. Not destroy it utterly.
• quietsegfault 9mo ago
  The problem with this framing is that it treats a mass exodus as if it were selective pruning. Losing 10,000+ STEM PhDs in weeks isn’t a quality filter. We’re hemorrhaging institutional capacity. We lose researchers who understand decade-long datasets, technical experts who can evaluate contractor claims, and people who can actually critique scientific literature when making policy decisions. Where’s the evidence these specific 10k were the low performers? The more likely scenario is that better performers left because they have options, while weaker performers stayed. If the issue is quality, you’d want systematic performance review, not mass departure driven by factors unrelated to competence.
• bryanrasmussen 9mo ago
  hmm, I was thinking >The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that in a large enough set of something there should be considered to be a normal distribution of high quality, medium quality and lower quality members in the set, unless one can show the distribution is biased in some way.
• morelandjs 9mo ago
  The tail of the distribution justifies the entire distribution. I agree that a large percentage of PhD research is inconsequential, but a small percentage is massively consequential. It’s ok to whiff on a thousand STEM PhDs if you pick up one Andrej Karpathy (for example).
  • ixtli 9mo ago
    People have really messed up views about hiring in general. I wish more people understood what you are saying here.
  • cbb330 9mo ago
    The US doesn’t have enough money to fund the entire distribution And as a tax payer I prefer discretionary spending for high performers.
    • titzer 9mo ago
      > for high performers. Like $40k bonuses for ICE agents. Incidentally, $40k is about the stipend for a typical PhD student. I'll take a smart student doing nothing but eating food and digesting theorems over the absolute chaos that is being funded by our tax dollars.
  • JuniperMesos 9mo ago
    Maybe this is true for academic institutions granting the PhDs (although even this I am skeptical of, training a PhD costs a lot in terms of time, money, and human effort). But that doesn't mean it implies that the federal government needs to employ a thousand STEM PhDs just to get someone like Karpathy - indeed, Andrej Karpathy does not work for the federal government! He made his name working in the private sector!
  • gopher_space 9mo ago
    The number of people capable of identifying potentially consequential research is smaller than the number of people performing consequential research. And they’re all busy with their own projects.
  • 9mo ago
• malfist 9mo ago
  You don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because some PhD students make "low quality science" doesn't mean we end academia. After all, who is going to do the high quality science if you get rid of all the scientists?
  • mike_hearn 9mo ago
    Lots of scientists work in industry. Look at AI, rocketry, semiconductors, drug design, robotics, anything related to manufacturing. Academics are in the minority in these fields. You could eliminate all such jobs and there'd be plenty of science being done.
    • malfist 9mo ago
      That's applied science. You don't have companies doing basic research because it isn't immediately profitable. You have to do both, basic research to learn things, and applied science to utilize it and make it commercially valuable.
      • mike_hearn 9mo ago
        Businesses have a long history of funding research with long time horizons. Look at quantum computing. Whether that's basic or applied, well who really cares? The distinction is an academic invention because there's no definition of what basic research means and how it's different to applied. Was the transformer algorithm basic research? It's certainly become a fundamental general algorithm, but read the paper and it was designed to help Google Translate.
• iammjm 9mo ago
  Ahh yes, clearly any government would greatly benefit by having way fewer highly educated conscientious people working for them /s
  • sdenton4 9mo ago
    We should round up and reeducate people with glasses. /s
  • giardini 9mo ago
    Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B
• tzs 9mo ago
  I fail to see how any of that is relevant to what the article is about, which is people who were already employed by the government leaving.
• BoredPositron 9mo ago
  Peter Gregory reincarnated.
• foxyv 9mo ago
  You're kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Sure, some PhDs are in underwater basket weaving and barely warranting the title. However, most PhDs are extremely valuable. They are pushing the boundaries of our knowledge to improve society. Some part of the hatred for the current academic system stems from legitimate concerns about how it operates. However, I think this hate is mostly driven by rampant anti-intellectualism. Fueled in part by pseudo scientific scammers trying to sell you supplements on TikTok and religious demagogues.
  • giardini 9mo ago
    foxyv says "most PhDs are extremely valuable" Can you defend this statement?
    • foxyv 9mo ago
      Sure! If you look at the device you are using to make this comment, you will find that almost all of the technology used to create it has been invented by persons with PhDs. Lasers, internet, electron guns, integrated circuits, transistors, lithography, etc...
• jayd16 9mo ago
  Saying "oh these are just the bad STEM PhDs" seems like a ridiculous exercise in sour graping.
• airstrike 9mo ago
  No, the implicit assumption is that losing these 10k PhDs is worse than not losing them.
• biophysboy 9mo ago
  People have tabulated the value of the academic pipeline, from grant to paper to patent to stock valuation. It is overall very valuable, even if you grant the very real issues with our hyper-competitive grant system. This intellectual capital is valuable, despite whatever the latest populist memes about professors claim.
• ajjahs 9mo ago
  [dead]
• atonse 9mo ago
  You may be right in the general sentiment that not everyone with a PhD is a desirable candidate, but even if half of them were, that would be 5,000 fewer and that isn’t insignificant, especially in STEM fields.
• paulpauper 9mo ago
  10k PhDs would mean 10k dissertations. I thought the popular narrative is that finding new knowledge has become too hard or much harder than in the past, so how are these grad students finding stuff that is new? Are these dissertations extremely incremental or just repackaging/regurgitating stuff?
• cbsmith 9mo ago
  I have yet to hear a criticism of academia where it sounds like we're better disproportionately losing people with PhDs than without them, particularly since most of those people got their PhDs quite a while ago. PhDs seem to be quite employable by private industry, where competency is still valued.
• gizzlon 9mo ago
  > The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ No, not really? That would be true if we were talking about hiring anyone with a STEM PhD. Or 1 random person. In this case we have people leaving, and it's a group. So it's more like: The assumption that 10k PhD's, that we saw fit to hire in the first place, as a collective, are worth the cost. Seems likely that they are: The cost is low, let's say $2 billion per year? For reference, Trumps Big Bill includes $300 billion in new defense spending and "over a ten-year period is estimated to add roughly $3 trillion to the national debt and to cut approximately $4.46 trillion in tax revenue". Also, let's say there were too many, and you should get rid of 10 000 of them. I doubt the guy who keeps rambling for 1 and a half hour [1] and keeps getting "Greenland" and "Iceland" mixed up, is going to do a good job with it. 1: Seriously, I dare you to try to watch it, I tried. At least hes "draining the swamp" /s https://www.youtube.com/live/qo2-q4AFh_g?si=Hwu3MSXouOfEfJCa&t=237 https://www.youtube.com/live/qo2-q4AFh_g?si=Hwu3MSXouOfEfJCa...
• TheOtherHobbes 9mo ago
  Most PhDs don't move the needle because the point of a PhD is to learn how to do research, not to produce ground-breakingly original work that reinvents the entire scientific order. That's orthogonal to domain expertise and general ability. If you can survive a PhD there's an adequate chance you know more about your subject than an undergrad and are more capable of focused independent work. That's what employers are buying. Which is why STEM PhDs still get more attention from the private sector than generic mass-produced undergrads.
• epistasis 9mo ago
  > The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ, No, you're making a completely illogical jump there, that is absolutely not assumed in any way. The assumption, if there is one, is that the position that the work PhD was doing in the government served the public good, more than they were being paid. US Government science positions are not academia, so your second sentence does not even apply to this! Unless your assumption is that if the person was trained with science that did little then their training can not be applied to anything that is worthwhile, which is an obviously false assumption. Arguments with these sorts of gaping logical holes are the only defenses I ever see of cutting these positions. I have searched hard, but never found a defense that bothered to even base itself in relevant facts, and connect through with a logically sound argument. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it sure is damning when in a democracy there's not even a fig leaf of an intellectually sound argument backing a drastic and massive change in policy.
• ActorNightly 9mo ago
  >Academia is a badly broken system, Why do you feel like you can state this like its fact? Just to save you energy, state that you are conservative first before writing fan fiction fantasy like that, because it will save people a lot of time assuming that you are speaking some sort of facts.