American science to soon face its largest brain drain in history

> How many of those were hired due to diversity programs?

This is an incredibly obnoxious and uninformed comment. NASA does not hire incompetent people because of "diversity".

> The parallel with Hitler really does not apply. The US won't be sending scientists working on nuclear weapons, stealth aircraft or profitable endeavors like GPUs.

Also an uninformed comment. The physicists that came to the US and UK and then worked on weapons programs were not for the most part working on weapons programs in Germany. They were just able to transfer those skills into the Manhattan Project, radar, or other programs.

It's also a very shortsighted view. R&D isn't just a bunch of eggheads grinding out a cleary-defined end like, say, nuclear weapons and making it happen. It's thousands of unseen shots on goal, most of which miss, but you get a handful of high-leverage innovations out of it.

What this pullback in US scientific funding does is reduce the number of those shots on goal. It undoes what the US prioritized from World War II onwards: that scientific innovation is foremost a strategic asset, not strictly a moneymaking venture. You saw that on display with the recent B-2 sorties over Iran: those could not have happened if not for highly specialized researchers slowly contributing to that body of work over decades.

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I don't even know what you mean by "let those kind of people go". If they can't get funding, they won't become scientists in the first place. If they lose funding, the US can't just prevent them from moving overseas. It's (still) a free country! And a large proportion of them are foreign-born anyway.

Geoff Hinton couldn't get a job doing AI research in his native UK, so he moved to the US, where there were a lot more opportunities. At that time, neural networks weren't seen as particularly promising. Decades later, it paid off big. That's the kind of thing that will happen less and less (or work in reverse, with US researchers taking jobs overseas) since there will be far fewer funding opportunities.