When it comes to Trump’s brain drain, “the damage is already done”

On January 28, Dr. Troy Jacobs was in Ethiopia getting ready to board a plane from Addis Ababa to Washington, DC, when his phone and computer suddenly stopped working.   

Jacobs, a pediatrician and recognized expert in the field of child survival, had been a contractor with the United States Agency for International Development’s maternal and child health office for 17 years. After months of careful and expensive planning, Jacobs had landed in Ethiopia just a few days earlier, intending to spend several weeks doing rural field visits while accompanied by a security detail due to ongoing civil conflict.

Jacobs and other USAID contractors were about to complete a long-awaited demographic health survey, providing a detailed look at a population affected by deep poverty, long-term conflict, displacement, and hunger. It would have been the first such survey since 2019 and would have been especially valuable to show how Ethiopians were affected by Covid and how organizations like USAID could do the most to help going forward.

Instead, Jacobs and the other USAID workers crowding the airport had been called back t0 the United States. Standing in the boarding line, they quickly realized that all of their government devices had stopped working. When he looked at his phone, he briefly saw a message that he no longer had access to USAID systems. 

Jacobs hoped it was a glitch, the kind of thing that can happen when you’re traveling. But by the time he touched down in Washington, Jacobs learned that he’d been terminated, part of the first wave of cuts to federal agencies conducted by the Trump administration and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency. 

“We were an easy target,” he says, because contractors are at-will employees. All the work they’d done “is gone,” he says. “It’s not just Ethiopia, but other countries, too.” 

Just a few weeks ago, a departing worker at the General Services Administration, another early DOGE target, needed to pass along some important files: memos, meeting minutes, items that had been flagged for more research. But they quickly realized that there was no one left to give them to. “We have people being axed midstroke,” the worker told Mother Jones, “like a movie where a neutron bomb exploded and nobody is left, but the dinner plates are still on the table and the laundry is in the washer.”

Under the second Trump administration, similar stories are playing out across virtually every federal agency as workers stream out all available doors, pushed out by layoffs, reductions in force, and “Fork in the Road” buyout and retirement packages. Thanks to President Donald Trump and DOGE’s oft-stated mission to shrink government and make it more “efficient,” the departures mean large parts of the federal government are essentially fading to black, with services, functions, and research projects going offline, one after another after another. And like areas going dark on a map during a power outage, the government is losing access to vital knowledge from longtime employees, as well as essential information, both domestically and internationally, that federal researchers have gathered over decades and is unlikely to ever be reassembled. In science, land management, international aid, emergency response, national parks, and federal infrastructure, the effect is the same: a sudden, widespread uncertainty about basic things we used to know. 

“What we’ve seen in the last three months or so are really troubling developments,” says Brandon Lardy, senior manager for research and data science at the Partnership for Public Service. As the nonpartisan nonprofit—which supports civil servants and educates the public about government’s vital role in society—has watched federal employees leave or be fired in droves, Lardy says, “we’re worried this is the start of a really problematic loss of talent and knowledge in government.”

Close your eyes and point in almost any direction, and you’ll find an area of knowledge loss. A Yale University program tracking Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russian forces has been discontinued after federal funding was cut. Milk testing has been suspended at the Food and Drug Administration due to deep staff cuts in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which investigated and worked to prevent firefighter deaths, has been gutted, as has the NIOSH-funded firefighter cancer registry. The Prison Rape Elimination Act Resource Center has been defunded, meaning the government will no longer track investigations under the law act or provide resources for anyone sexually assaulted while incarcerated. US Geological Survey workers told NPR that some offices, especially in remote areas, were unable to perform routine water quality tests. The agency’s biological research funding has also been cut. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will stop updating a database that tracks the costliest climate disasters, just one of a number of databases the agency will no longer keep up.

“Experience is being lost,” a State Department employee told Mother Jones recently. “And real Americans will suffer.”  

There are “so many things” that are now gone, former USAID contractor Jennifer Mason laments, that at the very least could have been given “to the world.”

Mason’s work focused on family planning; like Jacobs, she was in Africa when she lost access to her email and phone as she made her way back from Angola. She’s especially dismayed by the halting of the demographic health surveys, which can provide vital data on the health and economy of many countries.

“It’s the only source of information that many countries have,” she explains. “Many countries don’t do a census. There’s conflict, they’re impeded, or they don’t want to bring to light the true nature of their ethnic or tribal issues.

“Health governance tools and resources and materials and trainings that were the gold standard for this type of work—they’re all gone. Just gone off the Earth. They took them away. I still exist. I could help to re-create some of these things. But why do this? Why was all of that knowledge and experience and expertise thrown away?”

Throughout the federal government, knowledge loss has been most visible in the sciences. Cuts at HHS, particularly into vital cancer, diabetes, and aging research, have been relatively well covered. The US has also been arresting and indefinitely detaining immigrant scientists, like Harvard Medical School’s Kseniia Petrova, who’s been in custody since February for failing to declare frog embryos she was bringing from France at her boss’s request. (A vitriolic Department of Homeland Security press release defended Petrova’s jailing: “The facts of the matter are simple: Petrova broke the law and actively planned to do so. Her research does not make her exempt from the laws of our country.”) The federal government has also cut grants relating to the study of mis- and disinformation, part of a much longer legal assault from the right against academics doing this work.

“It should scare the crap out of anyone with half a brain cell,” a scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency says, “that our government is crippled. Our science is crippled.”  

Serious consequences will be felt in both the long and short term. Layoffs and early retirements at NOAA, for instance, have cost what one advocate estimated was 27,000 years in collective knowledge and experience. In the long term, cuts at the agency could deepen what experts call the “geodesy crisis:” A lack of knowledge about the Earth’s shape and features that could put the US permanently behind other countries, affecting both scientific research and military applications. 

Besides the Trump administration’s attacks on the hard sciences, DOGE also recently began laying waste to the US Census Bureau, bragging on X about discontinuing “wasteful” surveys by mocking questions about things like alcohol consumption and home internet use. But as the Associated Press pointed out, government surveys are used “to help Congress and federal agencies implement laws or develop policies,” as well as to understand basic information about the country. Changes at the bureau are raising concerns that the federal government won’t be ready for—or will elect not to conduct—the 2030 census, which is essential for allocating trillions of dollars in federal funding, as well as for redrawing congressional district lines.

Elsewhere, the cuts and overall knowledge loss could eventually prove deadly. An emergency management specialist at HHS told Mother Jones that constant cuts and voluntary departures have raised concerns that agencies across the government that play a role in emergency management won’t be ready in the event of a serious incident: a nationwide cyberattack, for instance, or another pandemic or a hurricane. This spring, as a result of “all the changes in administration and staff” according to the emergency specialist, some agencies did not participate in an annual Federal Emergency Management Agency training exercise known as Eagle Horizon; FEMA did not respond to a request for comment.

Emergency management workers often focus on continuity of government, the key services needed when something very bad happens. This kind of knowledge isn’t just nice, but essential. In the worst-case scenario, the HHS worker added, “no agency will be ready” in the event of a disaster.

“It is an utter catastrophe crawling towards us,” they said, “gaining speed.”

There are two distinct, but often overlapping, strains of knowledge loss at work: longtime employees leaving or being pushed out and research, science, and surveillance grinding to a halt.

Reductions in scientific funding can have inevitable, but delayed, consequences—like lighting the fuse on a stick of dynamite and simply waiting for it to go off. As part of the wide cuts at NIOSH, the National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory is being dismantled, which tests and approves respirators, including ones used by firefighters and miners and in hospital settings. NIOSH is one of the many HHS divisions that are being restructured by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into a new entity, the Administration for a Healthy America.

In practice, though, virtually everyone at NIOSH has been laid off, and workers familiar with the protective technology lab say it is clear that the respirator approval program is simply being cut with no replacement lined up. That means new products won’t be independently tested for safety, and without a list of NIOSH-approved products, it will be difficult or impossible for the public to figure out whether what they’re using works. A frightening but likely scenario is that miners or firefighters try to use a respirator and die because the equipment is faulty or counterfeit. 

“It’s going to get people killed,” one NIOSH employee told Mother Jones. 

While DOGE mows down government workers and programs at high speed, the Republican-controlled Congress is seizing the opportunity to do the same, canceling and attacking targets the right has had in its sights for years. Chief among them are environmental regulations and safety protections. The EPA’s Office of Research and Development, for instance, is on the chopping block, with employees bracing for massive cuts; Reuters reports that research on topics like air pollution has ground to a halt. The EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System, which provides scientific reviews on chemicals and contaminants that may be hazardous to human health, is also under attack by Congress. Matching bills in the House and Senate are meant to do away with the system entirely, with Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) arguing that the data the program provides is “flawed.” 

“I can’t tell you how heartbreaking and frustrating and exhausting it is to be a federal scientist,” one federal worker told Mother Jones recently. “I still love my job and the mission of my agency, and I truly and fervently hope I don’t lose it.” 

While crippling federal science, the Trump administration has also taken action against nongovernmental institutions. In addition to Trump officials’ attacks on leading universities, multiple scientific journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, have reported receiving threatening letters from former Acting US Attorney Ed Martin, demanding information about how they prevent bias and respond to allegations of misleading their readers. Martin claimed he was acting at the behest of Kennedy, who has no jurisdiction over private publications. 

Other ways that knowledge loss is playing out are both less covered and harder to quantify. At the National Park Service, for instance, “a significant number” of tribal liaisons have quit, according to one employee. Tribal liaisons are federal employees who work with Native tribes to make sure employees follow federal and tribal law on plant gathering and sacred sites and understand the details of the federal government’s obligation to protect tribal land and assets. 

The liaisons are also often tribal members themselves, and losing their historical and cultural knowledge, the worker said, is nothing short of a tragedy. “They understand the nuances of the land,” they said. “Without their knowledge, my ability to make decisions about resource management, land conservation, and interpretation of park history is gravely impaired.” A Park Service spokesperson declined to address any liaison departures, saying, “We do not comment on personnel matters.”

Similarly, an employee who works in infrastructure management for the US Forest Service said that whenever an older colleague chooses to retire, exasperated and demoralized by cuts, the agency loses knowledge that’s more or less impossible to replace.  

“Someone who’s worked in a particular forest for 20 years, you can’t replace that kind of knowledge,” they explained, “except with time on the ground. It’s not the kind of knowledge and information you’re going to write down in a book somewhere. There’s not a database of that stuff. It’s just the people doing it for a really long time.”

While DOGE has pushed through job cuts in the name of taxpayer savings, knowledge loss will likely cost the government money. There’s no better example than the IRS, where “the brain drain is real,” one worker told Mother Jones, with senior employees retiring or quitting for private-sector work. IRS examinations of large companies are grinding to a halt, the worker added, because approval for travel must now go through DOGE. “This is really hampering investigations,” the worker says. “People are leaving out of frustration because they can’t do their job effectively.”

The job losses at the IRS will “100 percent” affect the agency’s ability to perform audits and execute collections and enforcement actions, the worker said. Senior employees are “harder to push around,” they explained, and their loss means tax scofflaws will likely get away with hiding more money, “which, of course, benefits the rich people the most.”

The same worker says IRS employees have also observed extensive cuts and edits to their guiding document, the Internal Revenue Manual, which could affect how new employees understand their job duties and the Internal Revenue Code. At the moment, an online public version of the manual says some sections are unavailable while updates are being made “to meet policy changes from recent executive orders.”  

Lardy, of the Partnership for Public Service, says he’s “particularly concerned” that job losses across government leave other projects, including several public-facing databases that his organization recognized in February for their “transparency and accessibility,” vulnerable to elimination. “It could mean a lot of data products that are providing essential data to the public might start to go offline,” he warns.

“We need to prevent the further loss of this critical knowledge and expertise in government,” Lardy says. “We’d love to see the administration prioritizing keeping and maintaining the levels of knowledge that these people represent.”

That said, he acknowledges that “in the long term, some of the damage is already done.” In some cases, it will require rehiring and training “a new generation of public servants”—which, of course, the Trump administration has made clear it doesn’t want to do.

What’s happening to the US government—in science, in regulation, and in general knowledge—isn’t unprecedented. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s autocratic government, for instance, has conducted a prolonged crackdown on the independence of academic institutions, privatizing public institutions and appointing government ministers to their boards, which critics saw as a naked attempt to reward and consolidate power in the hands of Orbán’s allies. Similar to the anti-DEI crusade in the US, social science research in Hungary on gender or sexuality has been mocked, derided, and devalued. And just as the Trump administration has moved to cut funds from major research universities, in 2019, the Hungary’s science ministry began withholding funding from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, one of the country’s largest research institutions. Orbán’s moves have deepened his extended feud with the EU over scientific funding; some universities have been cut off from European subsidies over concerns about Orbán’s government and the rule of law. 

“In an autocratic state, any institution that has autonomy is a trap to the government’s power,” says Stefánia Kapronczay, referring to Orbán’s attacks on academic independence. Kapronczay is a human rights defender who co-led the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union for 12 years, while civil society organizations adapted to the country’s increasingly anti-democratic environment. Today, Kapronczay is an Obama Foundation scholar at Columbia University, working on projects concerning civic participation and democratic resilience.

As Hungary’s academic and research institutions became more restricted by the autocratic government, Kapronczay says, “we lost a lot of—and we keep bleeding—talented Hungarians who just don’t find good enough research institutes in Hungary.” One the one hand, she allows, “it’s a problem of a small country.” But she adds that it’s also clearly about the political climate. “If you can’t be sure the government will not cut your funding on a whim or you can’t be sure your research won’t be censored, you might be more prone to looking for opportunities elsewhere.”

There are, of course, more extreme historical examples. Early in the Nazi regime, Adolf Hitler and his deputies applied political pressure to universities, forcing the dismissal of Jewish and politically dissident professors, followed by students. Beginning in 1933, Jewish German scientists fled Germany in droves, as did others who saw the curtain of fascism descending over their research. More recently, Afghanistan’s science community collapsed when the Taliban assumed power in 2021, as public universities were closed and a broad ban on education for girls and women was enacted that will have generational repercussions. 

While no one suggests that the Trump administration has exactly Nazi or Taliban-esque ambitions, the long-term consequences of what has happened over the last several months are clear to scientific observers.

“Up to this point, we have been among the world leaders in terms of science and innovation,” says Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who argues that Covid vaccines were produced so quickly only because the National Institutes of Health had been studying mRNA technology for nearly 25 years. But now, as friends and acquaintances leave the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NIH in droves, he says he sees a “a real brain drain.”

“We’re going to suffer this massively, in both the short and the long term,” he says.

Beyond our borders, Mason, the former USAID family planning expert, says the rest of the world will also suffer. 

“We’re going to see a drastic decline in the quality and access to care” in her field, she says, especially in countries without the capacity to re-create what the US took away. “There are very few resources out in the world that were not somehow linked to USAID,” Mason says, leaving her convinced that global family planning is entering a dark age.

But in other fields, countries will continue the science and research that the US has thrown away. Federal workers who remain in their jobs say they’re already watching as we’re left behind. 

“The conversation has shifted,” an employee at the Department of the Interior who often meets with international counterparts said recently. While the federal government was once “leaders in much of what we did,” they say that role has shifted to Canadian officials and people who work in state agencies. “We just had to sit there, as none of the feds knew if we would have jobs in a month. The government is shifting to irrelevancy.”

Jacobs, the former USAID contractor, agrees. He’s now, he semi-jokes, an “unemployed pediatrician,” working to get Congress to understand the deep impact of these cuts.

“Life goes on, whether the United States is participating in it or not,” he says. “Global health continues whether the United states is funding it or not. I would hope as an American that we’re funding global health, but the reality is people are thinking about these issues and trying to move forward.” With or without the US, he says, “the world goes forward.”