Scientific expertise is fundamental to the ability of many federal agencies to fulfill their missions. Agency scientists inform decisions that keep our air and water clean and our food safe, track disease outbreaks and ensure that we have effective responses, and tackle pressing scientific issues like climate change.
It is critically important that our federal agencies have the scientific capacity they need to fulfill their science-based missions and protect the public. A loss of expert scientists means a loss of scientific research and slower progress on critical issues of public health and safety.
The Trump administration attacked science, federal scientists, and their work on an unprecedented scale, and this pattern of attacks damaged our nation’s science capacity. Here, we provide analyses showing the number of scientists lost or gained across and within science-based federal agencies under the Trump administration.
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Citation
Carter, Jacob, Taryn MacKinney, Gretchen Goldman. 2021. The Federal Brain Drain: Impacts on Science Capacity, 2016-2020. Cambridge, MA: Union of Concerned Scientists. https://www.ucsusa.org/node/13931
Related resources
UCS: What We Do
August Congressional Recess Action Toolkit
Advancing the Scientific Integrity Act
