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Vice President JD Vance showed some mind-numbing ignorance in a recent attempt to downplay reports that his administration has caused a “brain drain” — or an exodus of expertise leaving the United States’ scientific fields — by suspending research grants and targeting student visa programs.
Reputable voices in academia have highlighted the Trump administration-fueled crisis and its potential to inflict lasting damage on the future of American science. But in an interview Thursday with the right-wing outlet Newsmax, Vance waved off those concerns with some jingoism and what appears to be thinly veiled racial bigotry:
First of all, I’ve heard a lot of the criticisms, the fear that we’re going to have a brain drain. If you go back to the ‘50s and ‘60s, the American space program, the program that was the first to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens — some German and Jewish scientists who had come over during World War II, but mostly by American citizens who had built an incredible space program with American talent. This idea that American citizens don’t have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants and professors to do these things, I just reject it. I just think we should invest in our own people. We can do a lot of good.
Vance, who previously delivered a speech framing universities as “the enemy” in American society, went on to suggest that U.S. colleges may not be producing “good science” because, according to him, many schools discriminate against white and Asian people. This was an especially ironic claim given it’s his administration that is currently threatening to pull student visas from thousands of Chinese students. But let’s sit with his “why can’t Americans do this” question for a moment, shall we? Because it sounds patriotic — but it's fundamentally idiotic.
For one: Vance's comments were surprisingly dismissive of contributions from the more than 1,500 German scientists, some of them Nazis, brought to the United States as part of an operation known as “Project Paperclip” (the vice president isn’t exactly known for giving accurate lessons on American history). But to be clear: There’s an illustrious history of immigrant scientists coming to the United States and making tremendous contributions to the American way of life. But aside from that, Trump’s crackdown on science is also causing American scientists and aspiring scientists — the ones Vance claims to care about — to reconsider their career path.
The Boston Globe highlighted that trend in a recent report sourced from more than two dozen young scientists, who said they’re considering going abroad to find jobs or, potentially, abandoning scientific research entirely due to the Trump administration's actions.
Across New England and the country, thousands of budding scientists have awoken to a stark new reality, one they never could have imagined just six months ago. Funding for laboratories that focus on everything from the genetic causes of aging to cancer is drying up. Jobs in biomedicine are vanishing. Medical schools are rescinding offers of admission and once-thriving scientific internship programs are shutting down for lack of money. In university hallways, cafes, and cafeterias, from Cambridge to Providence, students are commiserating and strategizing over their increasingly precarious futures.
And other nations see opportunity in the United States pursuing an anti-science agenda under Donald Trump.
As I wrote in a recent Tuesday Tech Drop, foreign science organizations are licking their chops at the chance to poach American scientists who may be looking to take their expertise elsewhere. All of this highlights the ignorance in Vance’s idea that American science will chug along undeterred as Trump’s administration cracks down on academic freedom.
The notion that American scientists will be eager to work in an increasingly repressive environment — one in which their research can be irreparably quashed and their foreign-born colleagues can be unceremoniously booted from the country —seems utterly detached from reality.