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The DOGE cuts were purely performative. Anyone trying to cut the federal deficit without tackling the absurd ballooning elder care costs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid portions that go to elders) isn't serious. Science is an extremely tiny slice of the federal budget, but it happens to be one where the effects of cuts won't show up for a decent amount of time. This is in contrast to something like tariffs, where Trumpian buffoonishness is almost immediately apparent in a number of ways.
Jewish nuclear researchers that fled Nazi Germany helped produce the atomic bomb. I'm not saying the current crop of researchers are doing stuff that's that serious, but having scientists flee your broken sectarian country is generally a bad thing.
I wouldn't worry too much about a "brain drain." It's telling that their go-to example of "brain drain" is a European who came to America and is considering returning. Here's what he says:
Sounds to me like there aren't many such positions in Europe, he's holding out hope they create them. I've heard IRL from scientists that it's pretty difficult to get jobs - many wind up writing apps as a result. Maybe that's a failure of society, if so, it's not one that can be placed at Trump's feet. (I say this as someone who doesn't like Trump.) It's not just tuna researchers either, see this video about astrophysicists, which is clearly a market where the supply of astrophysicists far exceeds the number of astrophysics jobs society is willing to fund:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=n8cEZM1lN5g
I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but someone with a PhD in physics- any physics subfield- almost certainly has economic opportunities for 'very strong math background person' which far exceed any salary that academia could conceivably offer. I suspect other hard science PhD types have a similar situation, even if it's something as boring as running quality control analysis on pharmaceuticals.
It seems like 'scientists doing commercial rather than research work' may not be entirely due to the lack of opportunities to do research.
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I can list a number of more serious cases of brain drain, though they have nothing to do with DOGE. For example, Dr. Wu Yonghui, former Vice President of Google DeepMind, «has joined ByteDance as the head of foundational research for its large model team, Seed, according to Chinese media outlet, Jiemian.» That was around January. By now, they've created a model Seed-Thinking-v1.5 that's on par or better than DeepSeek R1 with 2x fewer activated parameters and 3.5x smaller, trained in a significantly more mature way, here's the tech report; they have the greatest stash of compute in Asia and will accelerate from now.
That's off the top of my head because I've just read the report. But from personal communication, a great ton of very strong Chinese are not coming anymore, and many are going back, due to the racism of this admin, general sense of meh that the American culture and way of life increasingly evoke, and simply because China can offer better deals now – in terms of cost of living, public safety, infrastructure, and obvious personal affinities. This isn't like the previous decade where only ancient academics retired to teach in Tsinghua or whatever, these are brilliant researchers in their prime, carrying your global leadership on their shoulders.
If I were American, that'd worry me a lot.
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Interesting video, thanks for sharing.
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This is such a fucking weird angle, I don't understand why progressives keep deploying it. No, they were explicitly what the people asked for - an end to stupid frivolous spending. Not an end to social security and Medicare. Nobody asked for that. They just wanted to stop the USG from spending American tax dollars to fund ridiculous frivolous bullshit like communist rap albums and teaching lesbian farmers about sustainability.
And considering your position on Trump, the idea of you wanting him to go after Medicare and social security is confusing. It's like you actually don't give a shit about the economy, you just want Trump to do more big things "where Trumpian buffoonishness is almost immediately apparent in a number of ways", because the only thing you care about is being outraged and outrage at trumpian buffoonishness often has a curious way of dying out with the start of a new media cycle.
I feel like you're not really disagreeing with me on the key argument. I'm sure there's thin slices of fat that could be cut across the USFG, but it's not going to be significant enough to meaningfully impact the deficit. So sure, cut the communist rap albums. Just don't pretend it's anything other than a performative victory.
And no, I want both parties to get serious about tackling the deficit. It'll likely require a compromise of both some tax increases and spending cuts, and by virtue of how the budget currently is, some of those cuts will almost certainly have to come from elder care. The best time to stop kicking that can was 30 years ago. The second best time to do so is right now.
If Trump attempted this, he'd probably screw it up in dozens of ways. But that's just Trump being Trump. Bears shit in the woods, and Trump is a buffoon.
Sorry it took me so long to reply, I started writing one last night but I was being lazy and writing it in the website and brave refreshed and I lost it.
You know it's not going to happen though no matter who is in charge though so why would you want him to try it if he's just going to fuck it up? I can tell you my reasoning - I don't know if tariffs would work, they seem crazy to me but so does printing infinite money and that's the only other option I ever see offered! To be fair, this isn't my wheelhouse, maybe in economist circles everyone knows a way to fix it that isn't either tariff negotiations or 'hum loudly enough that you are distracted from the topic', but in the msm I only hear about how crazy and destructive Trump is, and no alternatives except shit like 'do a vat instead' and other solutions that amount to maintain the status quo.
I assumed the doge cuts were meant to be performative, meant to be bread and circuses in preparation for hard times. Because we aren't fixing the economy without hard times. But now he's rolled back the tariffs, which given how Trump operates likely means an internal pillar of support collapsed. And yet even still, the amount of effort his opposition had to deploy to disable him is insane! So I return to the hill I always die on - I think Trump plays up his buffoonery so people underestimate him, but maybe he is just a dummy. Whatever he is, his opposition aren't any better, they are just better at hiding their fuck ups. Either way it looks like we aren't getting the economy fixed without a proper disaster.
Your comment is excessively fatalistic. Countries undo their bad decisions all the time. Massive peacetime deficits were not a normal occurrence in this country for the first couple hundred years of its existence. Whether the US will cut its current deficits is up to the electorate. I'm not particularly hopeful about the prospect given that the current electorate is full of populist idiots that would punish politicians for making the correct long-term decisions vis-a-vis deficit reduction, but it's certainly theoretically achievable. Tariffs are not the way to get there, as the amount of money raised would be comparatively tiny relative to the damage done.
The US isn't printing "infinite money", as that would have resulted in hyperinflation (inflation of high single digits or low double digits doesn't count as hyperinflation).
Lmao yep I agree one hundred percent. Except for the populist modifier, that's just your nail. Unless 95% of the country are populists now. Or are you suggesting that the democrats (who think populists are evil) would cut ss Medicare or welfare were they in power?
You call me excessively fatalistic, but I think you are being naive. Trump is a symptom, not the cause of our leaders' incompetence. (After all if the universities could fix the economy, why didn't they when Biden was in charge?) I am actually not completely blackpilled by that realisation however, because there is a silver lining to learning that our elite human capital are just idiot narcissists - it means you can let go of the idea that there could be a society of people who don't punish politicians for making the correct long-term decisions. Due to the confluence of unintended second order effects, perverse incentives and incompetence, our society is fucking atrocious at producing people who won't punish politicians for making the correct long term decisions, but it's even worse at producing politicians who will make the correct long term decisions.
Leftists have their own version of populism which is mostly focused on billionaire-bashing. The left hasn't been particularly interested in balancing the budget since Clinton, and he was basically forced to do that by a Republican Congress.
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Of course cutting Medicare would be a terrible idea, the point is that you can't cut the federal budget significantly by only going after things nobody cares about. The republicans have been doing this exercise of thinking up some ridiculous thing the government is tangentially "funding" (sex change surgeries for underwater feminist studies basket weavers in Burundi) for as long as I can remember. It's a silly talking point and everyone should see though it. But at least the Tea Party republicans didn't follow through by indiscriminately cutting everything. They had the decency to lie to their voters and maintain the status quo once they reached office.
Not all the people. I proudly made the correct vote in 2024. I warned my coworkers and anyone who would listen that tariffs would be a disaster. It's not our fault that 51% of the people in certain states made a dumb choice.
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The claim was that they were gonna meaningfully cut the deficit (Elon originally gave a figure of 1 trillion at least).
If they merely wanted to cut a left wing patronage network to size they could have said that and aimed lower.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-lowers-doges-estimated-savings-again-2025-4
Some people may have also wanted to starve the beast but the point was sustainability.
If the argument is that people expected the government to do this by cutting mosquito nets to Africans and sinecures to left wing professors and not welfare then that is really just the oldest argument against populism: what you actually get if you try to come up with policies based solely on what's popular with people leads to incoherence and stupidity.
It's clearly a case of hopes and wishes against basic reality. Attacking waste is popular, attacking the deficit is popular in theory. It would be awesome if people teaching Afghans conceptual art were squirreling away hundreds of billions.
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The point is it's a tiny share of the budget and much of it is not frivolous spending. If you want to reduce the deficit, these cuts are definitely not necessary, while cuts to social security Medicaid, and Medicare are unless you want massive tax increases.
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It’s a position of inconsistency. The biggest fish in the Waste/fraud/abuse category are in welfare and entitlements. In fact at least a two-thirds of our budget goes to mandatory entitlements, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, without getting into welfare payments. To talk about cutting the waste in government spending without touching those things is inconsistent. It’s like having a family budget, and saying you’ll make big changes to protect yourself from too much debt, and never getting around to asking if you’re spending too much on housing. No, that’s not serious. It’s not something as inessential as the makeup buying, but if you’re really needing to cut spending, it all has to be on the table.
I'm not happy about it, and agree it is unserious but the other unserious position in this fight is the idea that anyone actually thought Trump was going to cut Medicare, social security and welfare, regardless of how much waste him and Musk claimed they would take care of. And while I understand why people who support Trump or conservative goals would be annoyed, I can't imagine why anyone who thinks Trump is a buffoon would want him to go after Medicare and social security unless they wanted more outrage.
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"Hardcore fiscal conservatism deeply unserious" looks fairly consistent to me. Maybe they've just lost control of the party and nobody cares.
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This is very common, though?
Hence all the back and forth about "you're accusing me of eating too much avocado toast, but I can't rent a tiny apartment for less than $3,000 a month." Or people with 30 year mortgages -- they aren't usually just going to sell their home and move to a cheap house in the rust belt.
In the case of home economies, the solution is often more earners -- move in with their SO, crowd more roommates in, AirBNB the casita. In the US economy, the main thing coming up is increased automation, and I'm a bit surprised that after hearing so much about US economic policy changes, and so much about AI driven economic changes looming, that there seems to be so little overlap in the conversations as of yet. Or perhaps I've just missed them?
I mean taking in another roommate, renting out an unused room, or the like are dealing with the cost of housing in that example. But I guess it’s a poor choice for the situation. My point is that about half or more of our federal budget goes towards entitlements enacted decades ago when our demographics were vastly different and we steadfastly refuse to adjust them for the reality we’re in now. Sure, in 1960, we could probably afford to have seniors retire at 65 and we had a glut of 20-30 something people entering their prime earning years. Especially since most people didn’t live much past 70. Now, we have retirees drawing out their SS, Medicare and so on for something like 20 years at a time when there are not nearly as many young people to prop up the system. Seniors comfort themselves that they’re only getting what the6 put in, but really if you live 20 years post retirement and get colas on top of your earned benefits, then you’re taking more than you ever put in. And we’ve refused to do anything substantial about it. The retirement age, if we were to keep it in line with what the age of retirement was in 1950 would be nearly 80.
Another way to put this (and more important, given that Medicare is a bigger problem than Social Security.) is that retiring people today mostly paid for 1970s-2000s healthcare and expect 2020s healthcare in return.
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