Grounded: America’s War on Knowledge
How budget cuts, disappearing data, and a brain drain threaten science, democracy, and the future.
TL;DR: In just months, the U.S. has slashed science budgets, erased critical public data, and driven hundreds of scholars abroad, a coordinated war on knowledge that threatens both American leadership and democracy itself. If we don’t act now, the damage could take decades to repair.
When the people who watch the stars and the people who study tyranny both choose to leave America, it’s a sign that something is deeply wrong.
Across agencies and disciplines, the United States is dismantling the infrastructure of knowledge that underpins both its scientific leadership and its democracy. This is not just a budget fight, nor merely a cultural spat over “wokeness”. It is a coordinated assault on facts, expertise, and memory itself.
In recent months, we’ve seen an administration propose slashing NASA’s science budget nearly in half, lay off thousands of senior engineers and researchers, and erase decades of data from public websites. Federal agencies have quietly removed climate reports, hate crime statistics, and public health guidance from the internet. And as the damage mounts, America’s scholars, from climate scientists to historians of democracy, are packing their bags and leaving, many under programs explicitly designed by other nations to welcome U.S. exiles.
This isn’t just a brain drain. It’s a hemorrhaging of the very people and tools a democracy needs to understand itself, its planet, and its past, and the consequences will not be easy to reverse.
What follows is an accounting of that damage: how it began, how it’s accelerating, and why the world is watching America abandon its role as a steward of knowledge.
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NASA and the Assault on Science and the Fragile Resistance
Few institutions symbolize America’s scientific ambition more than NASA. For decades, its missions have expanded human understanding of Mars, of Earth’s climate, of the cosmos itself. But the latest federal budget aims to ground much of that work.
For Fiscal Year 2026, the administration has proposed cutting NASA’s overall budget by roughly 24%, slashing its science division by nearly half. More than 2,000 senior-level scientists and engineers have been targeted for layoffs through early retirements and buyouts. Flagship missions such as the Mars Sample Return, the Juno probe, and the MAVEN Mars orbiter face cancellation or indefinite delay. Even Earth-observing satellites, crucial for tracking sea level rise, ice loss, and greenhouse gases, are on the chopping block.
NASA’s climate monitoring programs are particularly vulnerable, and that vulnerability feels deliberate. These programs have long underpinned our understanding of global warming and its impact on everything from hurricanes to droughts. That the administration’s cuts strike hardest at this evidence aligns with its broader hostility to climate science, echoing past efforts to suppress uncomfortable truths in the name of industry and ideology.
We’ve seen this before: during the Reagan administration, proposed cuts to NASA and the EPA were justified as “budget discipline,” but critics warned of long-term damage to U.S. competitiveness and environmental stewardship. Then, as now, public outcry and Congressional pushback softened the blow, but not before significant harm was done.
See our previous reporting on cuts to NASA and research here:
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Today, there is once again resistance. The Senate Appropriations Committee, including several Republicans, has signaled its intent to reject the deepest cuts to NASA and the National Science Foundation, calling the proposals “dead on arrival.” Seven former NASA science mission directors sent an open letter to Congress warning that gutting NASA’s science programs would “cede the solar system to China” and erase decades of American leadership.
But the resistance is fragile. After all, Congress itself passed the broad budget framework that allowed these proposed cuts to move forward in the first place. And while appropriators have begun to push back, the administration continues to wield pressure and the possibility of procedural rescissions to keep agencies in line. Whether Congress holds the line or caves to political expedience remains to be seen.
What is clear already is that NASA’s mission has been politicized. The withdrawal of a qualified, Musk-aligned nominee for administrator and the appointment of a partisan interim leader underscore the extent to which ideology, not evidence, now drives America’s relationship with its own space agency.
The Broader War on Knowledge
The assault on NASA is only the most visible front in a much wider campaign against knowledge itself. Across the federal government, funding for science, public health, and education has been slashed, language has been censored, and experts have been silenced.
At the National Institutes of Health, research grants have been frozen or withdrawn mid-cycle, and entire programs studying health disparities and environmental risk factors have been defunded. At the National Science Foundation and NOAA, staff face layoffs while climate and biodiversity research is sidelined. Even the Department of Justice and the Department of Education have removed or rewritten guidance on hate crimes, civil rights, and diversity.
In parallel, an ideological crackdown has taken hold. Federal grant applications are now prohibited from including words like diversity, equity, inclusion, or climate change, echoing similar bans on "divisive concepts" in public schools and universities. The language of scholarship itself is being policed, forcing researchers to contort their work to fit political orthodoxy or risk losing funding.
We reported on the silencing of research earlier this summer. See that reporting here:
We have been here before. In the 1950s, the Red Scare and McCarthyism targeted intellectuals, academics, and scientists, branding them as subversive and driving many into exile. Careers were ruined not because of incompetence or corruption, but because they spoke the wrong words or asked the wrong questions. Then, as now, the chilling effect was deliberate, making researchers fearful of even approaching controversial topics.
Today’s attack on evidence-based knowledge is similarly ideological — wrapped in the language of “efficiency,” “accountability,” and “values,” but animated by fear of facts that threaten powerful interests. Scientists and scholars are again learning that their expertise, far from being respected, can make them targets.
The Quiet Erasure: Disappearing Data and a Warning Unheeded
If budget cuts and ideological purges weaken America’s capacity to produce knowledge, the quiet removal of federal data threatens to erase what remains of its memory.
Over the past six months, thousands of webpages and datasets have disappeared from federal websites. The EPA’s entire climate change portal vanished, replaced with vague promises of an update. DOJ statistics on hate crimes and policing bias were taken down without explanation. CDC guidance on Long COVID, HIV prevention, and transgender health was stripped from public view. Even NASA’s Earth observation and climate data portals have gone dark in places, leaving scientists and journalists scrambling to access archived versions.
This is not just technical housekeeping. Public data and guidance are the foundation of accountability, enabling citizens, researchers, and policymakers to understand and address the country’s problems. When they vanish, so too does the ability to act.
See our reporting from this spring about the removal of websites here:
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Archivists, librarians, and volunteers have mobilized to save what they can through the End of Term Archive, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and grassroots “data rescue” hackathons. But these efforts are incomplete and reactive, patching holes in a leaking ship.
And the U.S. should have seen this coming. In the 2010s, Canada under Prime Minister Stephen Harper shuttered government science libraries, destroyed decades of fisheries and climate records, and muzzled federal scientists, all to suppress inconvenient evidence. Years later, Canadian officials admitted that rebuilding those archives and research programs was far more difficult than expected, and some knowledge was lost forever.
The U.S. watched that unfold but did not heed the warning. Now, with more data at stake and weaker legal protections, it risks repeating and amplifying Canada’s mistake.
The Exodus: America’s Brain Drain
When the institutions of knowledge are attacked and the data itself is erased, the people who produce that knowledge eventually leave.
In the last six months, hundreds of U.S. scholars, including scientists, engineers, historians, and political theorists, have applied to “safe harbor” programs in Europe and Canada. France’s Safe Place for Science initiative alone has received nearly 300 applications, offering three‑year funded positions specifically to Americans displaced by cuts and censorship. Similar programs in Denmark, Spain, Germany, and Canada have quickly expanded to meet demand.
It isn’t just climate scientists fleeing. Biomedical researchers have decamped to Germany and Australia as NIH grants dry up. AI and robotics engineers have joined European labs. Historians and political theorists, especially those focused on democracy, authoritarianism, race, and gender, are quietly relocating after being told their subjects are “divisive.” One French university president likened the current exodus to the intellectual flight from Europe during the rise of fascism in the 1930s, a grim comparison, but one that resonates.
And indeed, that historical echo is hard to ignore. In the 1930s and 40s, authoritarian regimes in Germany and Italy drove out their brightest scientists and thinkers, who then fueled the scientific and cultural ascendancy of Britain and America. Today, the U.S. risks reversing that flow, hemorrhaging talent to countries that still value open inquiry.
The numbers are stark. A recent Nature poll found that three‑quarters of U.S. scientists are considering leaving the country; foreign job applications have surged by over 30% compared to last year. Dozens of prominent scholars have already departed, and hundreds more are actively planning their exits.
This is not just about individual careers. It is about hollowing out the intellectual core of America at a moment when it can least afford to lose it.
The Global Perspective
As America turns inward by cutting budgets, censoring language, and silencing experts, its allies have stepped forward to fill the void and to claim the talent it is driving away.
France has explicitly framed its Safe Place for Science program as a humanitarian and strategic move, with President Macron calling it “a moral and scientific duty” to shelter displaced American researchers. Canadian and European leaders have made similar statements, casting their nations as defenders of knowledge and free inquiry. The European Union has even likened its recruitment of U.S. scholars to the postwar Marshall Plan, but in reverse: now offering refuge and resources to intellectual exiles from the United States.
This is not only a gesture of solidarity. It is a geopolitical calculation. Nations that welcome America’s scientists and scholars stand to benefit not just culturally, but economically and strategically, inheriting the innovations, discoveries, and institutional memory that America is casting off.
It is a reminder of what happened nearly a century ago, when Germany and Italy purged their universities of Jewish and dissident intellectuals, and the U.S. became the world’s preeminent center of science and scholarship by absorbing that exiled talent.
Today, the roles have reversed. The U.S., by undermining its own intellectual foundations, is ceding its leadership to others, not just in climate and space science, but in AI, biomedical research, and even the humanities.
The world is watching America abandon its role as a steward of knowledge, and moving quickly to pick up what it has dropped.
Democratic Backsliding: Why This Is More Than Science
The attack on knowledge is not just about budgets, data, or even talent. It is about power and the erosion of the democratic principles that depend on an informed public and an independent intellectual class.
A functioning democracy needs facts to be discoverable, experts to interpret them, and citizens to trust both enough to make decisions. When facts are erased, when experts are silenced, and when dissenting scholars are driven out, the field is left open to propaganda and unchecked authority.
This is the real danger: that the U.S., like Weimar Germany before it, will allow democratic institutions to persist in name while hollowing them out in practice. In Weimar, courts still met, parliaments still voted, and newspapers still printed, but beneath the surface, expertise was undermined, truth was contested, and authoritarianism crept in.
The flight of historians and political theorists — the very people who study and warn against these patterns — is a warning in itself. If those who have devoted their lives to understanding how democracies fail no longer believe they can safely and meaningfully work here, we should pay attention.
This is not just a brain drain. It is a slow‑motion abdication of the democratic ideal that knowledge and truth matter, and that those who uncover them deserve protection, not persecution.
Why It Matters For Everyone
It’s tempting to see these developments as an abstract fight between politicians and academics, a conflict confined to elite institutions, distant from everyday life. But the consequences will reach everyone.
When NASA’s climate satellites are shut down, communities lose the ability to forecast hurricanes, floods, and wildfires. When EPA and CDC data disappear, public health departments are left guessing how to respond to pandemics or toxic spills. When the DOJ removes hate crime statistics, we blind ourselves to patterns of violence that demand accountability.
The erosion of knowledge undermines everything from disaster preparedness to economic competitiveness to national security. China and Europe are already moving to dominate fields the U.S. is retreating from, not because they’re smarter, but because they’re not cutting off their own intellectual limbs.
Perhaps most frightening, the damage is not easily undone. Once institutional memory is lost, once senior scientists retire or flee, once archives are erased, rebuilding takes decades if it happens at all.
For decades, Americans assumed that their leadership in science and ideas was inevitable, that no matter how bruised their democracy became, facts and reason would prevail. That assumption no longer holds.
This is not just about scientists, scholars, or data. It is about the ability of a democracy to understand itself, to see clearly, and to act wisely. Lose that, and you lose the republic itself.
Conclusion
Defunding. Deleting. Driving out. America’s greatest threat isn’t external; it’s its own war on knowledge.
In a matter of months, the United States has slashed budgets, erased records, and driven away the very people who give meaning to its democratic ideals. The scientists who study the stars, the historians who study tyranny, and the public servants who track storms and diseases are all under attack.
We’ve seen this before, in other countries and other centuries. When societies decide that truth is inconvenient and those who speak it are enemies, they don’t just lose their brightest minds. They lose their way.
It does not have to end this way. Congress still has the power to reject these cuts. Citizens still have the power to demand accountability, to insist that data be preserved, that experts be heard, that truth still matters.
But the clock is ticking. Once knowledge is gone, once the people who hold it are gone, no amount of money or regret can bring it all back.
If the people who watch the skies and the people who study democracy both believe the future is elsewhere, it is because they see what the rest of us refuse to admit. The question now is whether we will listen before it’s too late.
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Further Reading:
Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018.
Bermeo, Nancy. On Democratic Backsliding. Journal of Democracy, vol. 27, no. 1 (2016): 5–19.
Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017.
Bibliography:
Ravisetti, Monisha. “Senators Push Back on Trump’s Proposal to Cut NASA Science Funding by 47%.” Space.com, July 10, 2025.
Taylor, Adam. “Trump Administration Reportedly Planning to Cut 2,145 NASA Employees.” The Guardian, July 9, 2025.
“US Senators Poised to Reject Trump’s Proposed Massive Science Cuts.” Nature, July 10, 2025.
Witze, Alexandra. “75% of US Scientists Who Answered Nature Poll Consider Leaving.” Nature 640, no. 8058 (2025): 298–299. Summarized in Inside Higher Ed, April 1, 2025.
Bisserbe, Noémie, and Nidhi Subbaraman. “Europe Is Recruiting Academics Disenchanted With America.” Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2025.
“American Academics Seek Exile as Trump Attacks Universities.” Financial Times, March 2025.
“America’s Brain Drain Could Become the World’s Brain Gain.” Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2025.
“Hundreds of Scientists Accuse Donald Trump of Censorship.” The Verge, 2025.
“As the US Cuts Scientific Talent, Europe Launches an Initiative to Attract It.” Wired, May 2025.
“Britain’s Golden Chance to Attract Top US Talent.” Financial Times, June 2025.
“Science Policy of the Second Donald Trump Administration.” Wikipedia, last modified July 2025.
“Climatic Research Unit Email Controversy.” Wikipedia, 2025.
“Skilled and Mobile: Survey Evidence of AI Researchers’ Immigration Preferences.” arXiv (Apr 15, 2021).
Xie, Yu, et al. “Caught in the Crossfire: Fears of Chinese‑American Scientists.” arXiv (Sep 21, 2022).
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This is exactly what authoritarianism looks like.
Thank you for continuing to expose the dangers of right now - so much is happening and there are many distractions - but there are also many harmful impacts not immediately in public view.