In March last year, Wali Malik, a robotics engineer in Cambridge, Mass., received a call from a research institution in Austria, a country where he had never been and knew no one. “‘Hey,’” Malik recalled the man saying. “‘We have this position to build an institute from scratch, on A.I. and life sciences.’”
Malik wasn’t looking to uproot his life and move abroad. He was married with three children, and his parents lived in Washington. But with President Trump slashing science research, Malik rolled the dice.
“I had friends who lost their jobs,” he said. “I saw that happening in real time. I thought, ‘Let me entertain this.’”
So he made the leap. Malik signed on in May to head up a new robotics lab at Austria’s Research Institute for Biomedical Artificial Intelligence and moved his family to Vienna, sight unseen. His first task was to hire top scientists. He helped recruit a team of four — all from U.S. research labs at Yale, M.I.T., the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Francisco.
“No one in my field gets the opportunity to build something from Day 1,” he said.
Malik, 39, is just one example of what threatens to become a worrying trend: the departure of talented scientists from America for opportunities abroad. The Trump administration’s continued attacks on academia and its funding cuts to scientific research have provided an opening for other countries to poach the type of researchers who have helped make America the world’s leader in medical and technology breakthroughs. That brain drain could be very costly for the U.S. economy.
Experts are sounding the alarm. A study in September by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank, warned that without a reversal, the cuts to science could shrink the U.S. economy by nearly $1 trillion over 10 years. That could leave the U.S. lagging behind China, which is investing heavily in research.
And last month, the Partnership for Public Service, another nonpartisan organization in Washington, estimated that 95,000 employees had departed federal science agencies from September 2024 to December 2025. The report said budget cuts were “jeopardizing our nation’s research and development pipeline.” Trump’s proposed budget for 2027 includes new funding cuts for scientific research.
There is no precise tally of how many scientists have opted to leave the U.S. since Trump returned to office in January last year. But the funding cuts, and the White House’s aggressive immigration crackdowns, could also halt the inflow of top foreign talent. That means America could miss out on the next generation of innovators like Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella, all immigrants to the U.S. who went on to lead the world’s defining tech giants.
An unexpected gift
The lure of the U.S. remains strong, of course: Hundreds of foreign founders have moved their businesses to thriving tech and research hubs like New York or Silicon Valley, where venture capital is far more accessible. About 30 percent of European start-ups that were later worth over $1 billion left Europe between 2008 and 2021, the vast majority to the U.S.
But to the rest of the world, the Trump administration’s cuts to science seem like an unbidden gift. And several are making sizable investments to attract American talent — just as the race for A.I. talent has reached fever pitch.
“The last time there was such a huge opportunity was the Vietnam War, when lots of graduates were coming to Canada,” Canada’s industry minister, Mélanie Joly, told DealBook last year, describing the government’s plans to draw top U.S. scientists; it unveiled its $1.2 billion, 12-year program in December. “We want the best and the brightest,” she said.
Similarly, China last year fast-tracked relocation for scientists who had lost funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, where the Trump administration canceled or froze 5,844 research grants last year, according to data analyzed by the journal Nature. And in May, the European Union launched a 500-million-euro Choose Europe for Science program, prompting numerous institutions across the 27 E.U. countries to add further programs of their own.
Waiting for the midterms
“The U.S. was always the golden paradise for scientists,” said Heinz Fassmann, president of the Austrian Academy of Science, which last year introduced €500,000 four-year fellowships for 25 American scientists. “This could be a chance to reverse the migration flow,” Fassmann told DealBook.
When Malik told his colleagues that he was leaving for Vienna, “they were shocked,” he said. “But everyone said: ‘I wish I could come with you. I need to get out of here.’”
Even so, how big or long-lasting the migration of American talent might be remains uncertain. University officials in Europe say they will be closely monitoring the November elections in the U.S., believing that a Democratic wave could slow the exodus.
“We’re waiting for the midterms,” said Éric Berton, president of Aix-Marseille University in France, which started a program in March last year to hire U.S. scientists; six have arrived so far. “We are going to have a lot more applications if the Republicans win, so we will need a new program.”
A different lifestyle
Despite the new recruitment efforts, money remains a limiting factor in attracting large numbers of American scientists to Europe. Malik estimates that salaries for research scientists are one-third lower in Vienna than at U.S. research institutions. And European companies spent €270 billion less on research and innovation than their American equivalents in 2021, according to an E.U. report.
Publicly funded research institutes can afford only so many seasoned American recruits. “We can only go up to 10 or 12,” said Mehran Mostafavi, vice president of research at Paris-Saclay University, which posted positions for top American scientists after Trump’s cuts last year.
But Americans considering a move to Europe say they’re weighing lower earnings against more stable funding and a cheaper, more relaxed standard of living.
“I was motivated partly by a desire for a lifestyle more common in Europe,” said Lauren Altman, 31, an experimental physicist at the University of Pennsylvania who has been offered a post at Paris-Saclay. “I love walkability and public transit.”
Altman said she feared that the loss of hundreds of scientists could inflict lasting damage to U.S. research. “This is going to have long-reaching effects, not just on who’s getting hired now, but who’s getting trained 15 years from now,” she said.
Before he moved to Vienna, Malik had a stressful, 90-minute commute from his home in Northborough, Mass., to Cambridge, where he was senior director of lab automation at Tessera Therapeutics. He said he now had a more relaxed 40-minute train ride to work. His children, 11 and 9, are becoming fluent in German.
“For me, having more time to spend with the family, and spending weekends going to different countries, it is a great experience,” Malik said.
Still, he acknowledges the professional trade-offs. Malik said Europe lagged far behind the U.S. in scientific infrastructure like compute power. That, together with the need for capital when scientists try to scale up, could constrain governments’ ability to capitalize on luring American researchers.
“You can get people here,” Malik said. “The question is, can you keep people here?”
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Energy prices soared as war worries rattled global markets. The average price of gas in the United States hit $4.10 a gallon on Saturday. (It has climbed more than a dollar since the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran began on Feb. 28.) In a national address on Wednesday, President Trump claimed the war was “nearing completion,” and predicted that gas prices would soon fall. So far, energy prices are doing the opposite, as traders and analysts fear that Iran’s efforts to bog down ship traffic in the Strait of Hormuz will continue.
The jobs market rebounded. Employers added 178,000 jobs last month, blowing away Wall Street estimates and reversing a stretch of negative job growth. But the new report came with caveats: Wage growth slowed, suggesting that workers’ purchasing power could come under pressure with gas prices hitting multiyear highs. Also, economists are now paying closer attention to artificial intelligence’s effect on shrinking the labor market.
Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi. The decision, announced in a social media post on Thursday, ended a rocky 14-month tenure in which Bondi surrendered much of the Justice Department’s independence to pursue cases against the president’s perceived enemies, a move that demoralized many U.S. attorneys’ offices. Todd Blanche, Bondi’s deputy and a longtime lawyer who defended Trump in various criminal cases, will run the agency in an acting capacity. Trump has also weighed naming Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, as Bondi’s successor, The Times reported.
It was a busy week for deals. Elon Musk’s SpaceX filed for a confidential initial public offering and is aiming for a June listing. The rocket giant is seeking a valuation north of $2 trillion, according to Bloomberg. Also, OpenAI announced that it had raised an additional $12 billion to bring its latest funding round to a staggering $122 billion. McCormick & Company, the spices specialist, said it planned to tie up with Unilever’s food business to form an entity with some $20 billion in annual revenue.
Law firms under siege
In his half a century practicing law, Mark C. Zauderer has been the lead trial lawyer on many high-profile business cases, an eventful career that he chronicles in his upcoming book, “Counsel, the Courtroom Is Open.”
DealBook’s Sarah Kessler talked with Zauderer about how the industry has changed since he started as a law clerk to a federal judge in 1971, the impact of Trump’s attacks on big law and the threat of A.I. The interview has been condensed and edited.
You write that the “profession of law” has become the “business of law,” and that the quality of firms has suffered as a result. What do you mean by that?
When I started practicing, law firms were practices supporting businesses, but not businesses themselves. Lawyers might expect to spend their whole career at one firm, particularly if they became a partner. And they would only become partners when the firms were satisfied that they had been inculcated with the firm’s values.
I think lawyers began to see the rise of hedge funds and other institutions that their colleagues from law school joined, where they were earning big sums of money. We’ve seen firms become national and international.
You write that after Trump targeted law firms with executive orders barring them from entering federal buildings and meeting with federal officials, those firms’ reactions demonstrated how the culture of law has deteriorated. Tell me more about that.
Firms that once did primarily litigation have had their corporate practices grow over the years. And while litigators are very often adverse to the government — in that they’re litigating on behalf of clients who may be suing the government or may be sued by the government — corporate lawyers very much have to do business with the government. Their mergers or acquisitions have to be approved by government agencies.
I think the corporate factions in law firms have understandably said we need to do business with the government for our clients.
So you think the type of law a firm practiced factored into its response to the demands from the Trump administration.
A few of the firms that fought it were litigation-oriented firms. I think they assessed that courts would find it impermissible to close the courts to lawyers. Such an act would have been so fundamentally undermining of our justice system.
How do you see A.I. changing the way that law is practiced?
We know that lawyers are doing legal research in a way that they could not before. But beyond the research, they’re actually relying on A.I. for writing, and writing is the major tool of many lawyers. There are great dangers in that, in my opinion.
But I think the problem is deeper than that. I think that we’re going to find judges, as well as lawyers, delegating a lot of their reasoning to A.I. A judge who’s responsible for making an opinion may unconsciously, if not consciously, rely on A.I.
DealBook quiz
A two-person company with $1.8 billion in sales
This question comes from a recent Times article. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.)
In 2024, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, predicted that A.I. would enable the rise of billion-dollar businesses run by a single person. That same year, an entrepreneur named Matthew Gallagher used $20,000 and more than a dozen A.I. tools to create a telehealth start-up, Medvi. Gallagher now has one employee, his brother, and his two-person company is on track to bring in $1.8 billion in sales this year.
Medvi is a health-industry middleman. What type of products does it sell?
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