In March last year, Wali Malik, a robotics engineer in Cambridge, Mass., 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 A.I. 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 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, M.I.T., 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.
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 percent of European start-ups 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 A.I. talent has reached fever pitch.
“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 four-year fellowships for 25 American scientists. “This could be a chance to reverse the migration flow,” Fassmann told DealBook.
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.”
