About one in ten. That is the share of its young grantees that the Serrapilheira Institute, a Brazilian nonprofit that backs science, says left Brazil amid the instability of the Bolsonaro government. Their destinations: the United Arab Emirates, Portugal, the Netherlands and the United States.
Now Brazilian scientists are watching Washington and recognising the script.
What Brazil lived through
Hugo Aguilaniu, writing in Stanford Social Innovation Review, says the United States is going through what he calls the most drastic attacks on science in its modern history, with budget cuts, weakened transparency and expertise painted as partisan. He says that for many Brazilians it feels disturbingly familiar. Brazil came out of four years under Jair Bolsonaro in 2023.
Between 2019 and 2022, he writes, the government cut the budgets of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, the two main federal science funding agencies, to a fraction of what they had been. Universities were harassed and researchers labelled ideological enemies. The environmental agency IBAMA, which monitors and fines breaches of environmental law, was dismantled, and the government celebrated an 80 percent drop in IBAMA fines on rural properties. Deforestation, wildcat mining and invasions of public land followed, along with social conflict.
Thousands of scientists saw projects collapse and laboratories dismantled, Aguilaniu says, and only a few international partnerships could offer even temporary refuge. His proposal is a network of private foundations offering emergency fellowships abroad, one that could run both ways and host US researchers whose work becomes politically untenable. Brazilian philanthropy, he notes, is small: the largest private funders are a sliver of the public science budget and could never replace federal money.
Partnerships already wobbling
The worry is not only historical. Valor International reported in May 2025 that researchers at the University of Campinas, who have worked for five years on the US-led DUNE neutrino experiment, a $3.7 billion project with around $2 billion already invested, were uneasy about its future. Dirceu Noriler, a UNICAMP engineering director, said the US Department of Energy, which funds DUNE, expected a 13% budget cut the following year. His colleague Thiago Alegre was blunter: “nothing is really protected these days.”
Paulo Artaxo, a physicist at the University of Sao Paulo, said several Brazil-US partnerships in health, environment and climate had already been cut off. At the CNPEM research centre in Campinas, director general Antonio Jose Roque da Silva said the team building Orion, a biosafety level 4 pathogen facility, was working to re-establish dialogue with NIH and CDC scientists.
The science ministry’s Carlos Eduardo Matsumoto was frank about the likely result: “some doors will eventually close.” Brazil, he said, will have to seek alternatives, and China, already its second most important partner in co-authored papers after the US, is one.
Sources
- Science Philanthropy in a Democracy Under Pressure (Stanford Social Innovation Review, by Hugo Aguilaniu)
- Brazilian researchers fear end of U.S. partnerships in science (Valor International)
