Still going west, young man?
When I grew up in the sixties and seventies, my surroundings breathed Americana. Not only in consumer goods but also in technology. Everywhere, the US was the shining city on the hill. So, it was obvious that I went there after my PhD for a postdoc in the lab of professors Bloembergen and Mazur, two Dutch scientists who had left their home countries for the immense opportunities science in the US offered.
In the sixties, following the invention of the laser, Bloembergen developed the field of non-linear optics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1981. Mazur took over the group after Bloembergen’s retirement. Both men enjoyed the challenges and opportunities of American science and society tremendously, as so many other talented men from all over the world did over the past decades.
I often find myself wondering whether these days I’d move to the US as a young scientist, now that populism, incompetence and the negative perception of science have struck the US especially hard. The present administration tries hard to make it unattractive. The number of US student visas issued fell by about one third in 2025. On top of that, the US government is restricting access to post-grad work for international students completing degrees in the US. Sharper limits will be established on how long international students can stay in America.
Then there’s the funding. The proposed budget for next year would cut overall government spending on R&D by 22 percent, with support for the NSF reduced by 50 percent, NASA by 22 percent and the DoE’s Office of Science by 15 percent, though Congress will certainly amend this. Whether or not this will significantly reduce the attractiveness of doing R&D in the US compared to the EU from an overall funding perspective remains to be seen.
A potentially more consequential change is the implementation of the recently published report by President Trump’s director of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios. Titled “Science, a new golden age,” it intends to make government R&D in the US even more productive (or productive again, from Kratsios’ perspective).
The document aims to be the successor of “Science, the endless frontier,” drafted by Vannevar Bush for President Truman in 1945. Bush had initiated the Manhattan Project and was an outstanding engineer and inventor, potentially the most impactful one after the war. His document laid the groundwork for the organization of US government R&D, for instance leading to the foundation of the NSF in 1950.
Kratsios studied political science, followed by a career in finance and venturing as a close collaborator of Peter Thiel. He proposes a major redesign of how the US funds and organizes research, with AI, private-sector R&D and mission-driven projects at the center. The reaction to it has been sharply mixed, but notably skeptical among academic scientists. Supporters see a needed overhaul.
The report identifies real problems, like slow grantmaking, incentives that can reward incremental work, concentration of research funding in established institutions, weak links between research and manufacturing, and the need to exploit AI. The biggest controversy is shifting money away from universities. There’s genuine merit to parts of the plan, but the proposed cure could dismantle parts of the research system that made American science successful in the first place.
All in all, I would go again if I could. The US still has boundless potential and if anything, recent developments underline the dynamism of its society. Lastly, populism, incompetence and hatred of science are on the rise in Europe too.
