Viewpoint—‘I love the poorly educated’: Trump is disinvesting in science education and innovation

I love the poorly educated,” Donald Trump once declared. That was back in 2016, during his first presidential campaign.

Now, a decade later, he and the rest of the MAGA movement have manifested that love into policy, with a series of changes that have hobbled America’s entire knowledge sector.

It’s been both disruptive and deeply damaging. For over a century, America’s knowledge economy has been our golden goose. Thanks to both private and public R&D, we have developed the strongest military, the most cutting-edge tech companies, and global dominance in the fields of science and medical research.

Today, as other countries invest in developing the technologies of the future, our advantage is being rapidly unwound. This, too, is not something that has just happened on its own. It was not inevitable. It was a choice. It’s the Great American Brain Drain, courtesy of MAGA.

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In the past year, the federal workforce lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s, according to an analysis in Science. … The losses were disproportionately large in some agencies; the National Science Foundation lost about 40 percent of its doctorate-holding experts, for instance.

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