I’ve always thought of myself as a glass-half-full kind of guy.

Science begs to differ. A news article by Monica Hersher and Jeffrey Mervis in the January 29 edition reports that the “U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office.” In 2025, 10,109 STEM PhDs left the federal workforce, three times the departure rate in the last year of the Biden administration. According to Hersher and Mervis, “these departing PhDs took with them a wealth of subject matter expertise and knowledge.” How much wealth? Hersher and Mervis total it up: 106,636 years of expertise and knowledge. How can we cure cancer in the face of such a loss? “Foolish MAGA” is the implicit admonition.

Now for the glass half full. Across the 14 government agencies surveyed by Hersher and Mervis, departures accounted for 14 percent of the total number of STEM PhDs in the federal workforce. That means that 86 percent of the STEM PhDs are still there! A few strokes on my calculator assure me that 62,098 STEM PhDs are still busy at work on all the good things they do.

Wait. There’s more! In 2024, the Biden administration went on a bit of a PhD hiring spree. Of the departures over the past year, retirement and resignation accounted for the most. Another large cohort of departures were temporary positions that rotated through the agency, often while on leave from regular university appointments. Another substantial number transferred to other government agencies. A very small number were Reduction in Force (RIF) departures, drawn most likely from those new Biden hires, who would still have been on probationary employment. Of those who quit, Hersher and Mervis cite “fear of being fired, the lure of buyout offers, or a profound disagreement with Trump policies” as the likely reasons.

So, it’s not like those 10,109 PhDs have been taken out and shot, or shipped off to the American Gulag. They’re still out there, either gainfully employed elsewhere or opting for a happy retirement—I wish them all the best.

Behind this little bit of Trumpocalypse agitprop sits an uncomfortable question: what is the right number of STEM PhDs? Ever since 1950, when the federal government took it upon itself to manage the nation’s scientific research, the answer has invariably been “more,” usually paired with the qualifier “urgently.”

Are we really locked into a perpetual shortage of scientific talent, however? Listen to the leaders, and you will be convinced the answer is “yes, trust us.” The problem is that the story keeps shifting.

At the end of World War II, there was an urgent need for scientists to help secure the peace and prosperity that would follow from minting all those brave explorers of science’s “endless frontier.” Demobilized World War II veterans would supply the bodies. Soon thereafter came the “Sputnik gap”, when the Soviets were beating us in the space race, and more PhDs were needed to close the gap. A few years later, the “missile gap” loomed, requiring even more PhDs to close. Later, it became an urgent priority to increase the number of PhDs awarded to black and Hispanic students—a shift driven by a range of questionable rationales. Among them was the push to designate more institutions as Hispanic-Serving Institutions, which, through dubious federal policy, unlocked substantial streams of targeted funding. That soon broadened into an “equity gap” where urgent social needs could only be met by including women and the sexually heterodox into the PhD pool. Presently, we are apparently facing a “publications gap.” Chinese scientists publish about a million scientific papers each year, while American scientists rack up only half that number. We urgently need to close this gap, we are told, or, as one commenter on a recent paper of mine noted, we’ll all have to “be learning Mandarin.” Inexplicably, the solution to that shortfall is to import more PhD students from China—that makes a lot of sense.

On the ground, meanwhile, every indicator points to there being a perpetual glut of PhDs on the American scientific market. For every new academic position opening, there are roughly eight times as many PhD students searching for it. No surprise that applicants for these positions typically number in the dozens or hundreds. Many newly graduated PhDs take on postdoc positions. That can be a good thing: the most creative and intellectually free years of my academic career were spent as a postdoc. But there is a price to pay for deferring the usual accoutrements of real life, like building a family or achieving financial security. In any event, an unemployed PhD is not exploring science’s endless frontier.

The rational solution to the PhD glut is to reduce supply: stop churning out too many PhDs. The trouble there is that universities and colleges are strongly incentivized to keep churning them out, particularly in the sciences. Each graduate assistant employed on a research grant counts toward the grant’s direct costs, to which universities can add a 50 percent overhead surcharge for reimbursement. If a grant pays a PhD student $30,000, for example, the university can add an additional $15,000 for overhead to the tab. That may seem like small change, but the take can be increased by hiring many graduate assistants. When they graduate, they will join that pool of excess unemployable PhDs: “disposable academics”, as the Economist describes them.

Having created the glut, the federal government stands ready to ride to the rescue: if there is a glut of PhDs, just increase demand! While some of the dwindling academic demand has been offset by higher demand from the private sector, the net demand for PhDs has been insufficient to keep up with the glut. Thus came the abomination of the “bipartisan” (read: uniparty) Endless Frontier Act, which proposed funneling $100 billion over five years into the new NSF Directorate for Technology and Innovation—now Technology, Innovation, and Partnership. The TIP directorate was established to fund commercial research and development, also known as picking winners and losers in what should be a competitive free market (remember Solyndra?). This was something the NSF’s founders specifically wanted to avoid, as it would undermine the independence needed for basic science to flourish. But never mind, the Green New Deal provided the urgent pretext to put all those excess, unemployable PhDs to work. As long as the research gravy train continues to roll.

To quote Pete Seeger’s 60s anthem: when will they (we?) ever learn? Never, it seems, is the answer. The PhD glut is a government-created problem, and the government will never solve it. The only solution? Get the government’s mitts altogether off of science and science education.

Follow J. Scott Turner on X.