BRASÍLIA — The exodus of young Brazilian scientists began long before the deforestation numbers spiked. Between 2019 and 2022, as the federal government choked research funding, roughly one in ten grantees from the Serrapilheira Institute simply left. They went to the United Arab Emirates, Portugal, the Netherlands, the United States.
Anywhere but home. That flight is what Brazilian researchers now watch with dread as the United States embarks on what many call the most drastic attacks on science in its modern history.
Budget cuts. Undermined transparency. The branding of scientific expertise as partisan.
It is a playbook Brazilians already lived through. The damage under former President Jair Bolsonaro was systematic.
The two main federal science funding agencies — the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development — saw their budgets slashed to a fraction of what they once were. Universities faced harassment. Researchers were labeled ideological enemies.
The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, known as IBAMA, which monitors and fines breaches of environmental law, was dismantled in all but name. The administration celebrated an 80 percent reduction in IBAMA fines on rural properties. That number was not an accident.
It was policy. The result was immediate.
Deforestation exploded. Wildcat mining surged. Public lands were invaded.
Social conflict spread. The instability created a climate where young scientists saw no future.
The Serrapilheira Institute, a nonprofit that promotes science, tracked its own grantees. About 10 percent left Brazil. Now, with the current US administration imposing unprecedented budget cuts on federal research agencies, Brazilian scientists see a mirror.
The scars of that four-year assault are still fresh. They describe a familiar dread. What Brazilians learned is blunt.
Science philanthropy cannot wait for the political storm to pass. It cannot assume the institutions will hold.
The infrastructure that took decades to build can be dismantled in months. The researchers who leave do not always come back. The pattern is the same.
Cut funding. Undermine transparency.
Cast expertise as a threat. Celebrate enforcement reductions. Watch the environment burn.
Watch the researchers leave. For the United States, the question is not whether the playbook is being used. It is whether the country will learn from Brazil before the same consequences arrive.
The deforestation data from the Amazon is already a warning. The young scientists who fled to the Emirates or Portugal or the Netherlands are not a statistic.
They are a loss. Brazil’s experience offers no comfort. The damage done between 2019 and 2022 did not reverse when the government changed.
The research infrastructure did not snap back. The trust did not return overnight.
The young grantees who left did not all come home. That is the context now being watched from Brasília. A democracy under pressure.
A scientific community under attack. A playbook being run again, in a different country, with the same methods. The scars are still fresh.
The dread is familiar.
