What Is a Government Without Experts?
I think often of a line I came across years ago, when researching presidential science advisors: "Richard Nixon did not want science advising and took steps to be sure he would not get it." This is that, only blown up, Big Bang-style.
In a functional, boring era, one that exists parsecs away from this one, we generally rely on the government undertaking certain tasks. Gathering and disseminating economic data, ensuring the water coming out of the tap is drinkable, and so on. Then there are the forward-looking things, the research and innovation and general Make-Life-Better sorts of tasks that help push the wheel of progress forward. While there are many thousands of people with many varying job titles involved in making these things happen, the mundanity and the ingenuity involved spring from a degree of expertise: we trust that behind the scenes — again, in a now-fictional non-collapsing universe — there are people who know how to gather and interpret that data, and ensure clean water, and direct innovative research, and so on. In this universe, we get to see what happens when you fire all those people.
Okay, not all those people; just a lot of them. An analysis from Science published on Monday found that 10,109 people with a PhD in STEM or adjacent fields left the Trump administration in its first year (more or less — January 1 through November 30, 2025). Some of those were RIF'd, some resigned or took other jobs in places not run by monsters and ghouls, some took early retirement or other buyout sorts of options — but overall, 14 percent of all the PhD-level STEM employees inside the federal government took their doctoral expertise elsewhere. This isn't something that's easy to quantify, but this has to represent one of the biggest self-imposed brain drains a country has undertaken in human history.
The hardest hit agencies are pretty much the ones you would expect: the National Institutes of Health, under the combined "leadership" of Jay Battacharya and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., lost more than 1,100 doctoral-level employees. The previous year, during the Biden administration, it lost 421 — but that's just normal churn, since it also hired more than 500 others, a number that dropped substantially last year. In 2025, across 14 agencies that Science examined in detail, the PhDs lost outnumbered those gained by something like 11 to 1.
Other devastated spots included other RFK Jr. fiefdoms — 760 gone from the Food and Drug Administration, and 519 disappeared from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the biggest casualty by far was at the National Science Foundation, where 205 STEM PhDs departed last year; that's 40 percent of all the people with doctoral training at NSF. That agency is simply not the same place it was a year ago; not by a long shot.
No one was really spared — there have been big cuts to PhD-level employees at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Forest Service, the Agricultural Research Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Geological Survey, and so on. Essentially, any part of the government that has a scientific component is far, far worse off from an expertise perspective than it was a year ago.
I think often of a line I came across years ago, when researching presidential science advisors: "Richard Nixon did not want science advising and took steps to be sure he would not get it."
This is that, only blown up, Big Bang-style, to the entire administration, the entire government. The things that people with expertise tend to say do not sit well with an administration bent on the sort of ignorant, burn-it-all destruction we're all watching every day now. Hence, the people with expertise must go. And go they have.
