BRASÍLIA — The young researchers left first. About one in ten grantees from the Serrapilheira Institute, a Brazilian nonprofit science philanthropy, packed up and fled the country. They scattered to the United Arab Emirates, Portugal, the Netherlands, the United States.
That was the Bolsonaro years. The damage was done.
Now Brazilian scientists watch the United States and see the same pattern. Budget cuts to federal research agencies. Transparency undermined.
Scientific expertise framed as a partisan weapon. It is a playbook Brazilians lived through between 2019 and 2022.
The scars are still fresh. Under former President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s government slashed budgets for its two main federal science funding agencies — the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development. Both were reduced to a fraction of their former size.
Universities faced harassment. Researchers were branded ideological enemies. The environmental enforcement agency IBAMA — the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources — was systematically dismantled.
IBAMA monitors and fines breaches of environmental law. The administration celebrated an 80 percent reduction in IBAMA fines on rural properties.
The result was immediate and brutal. Deforestation exploded. Wildcat mining surged.
Public lands were invaded. Social conflict spiked.
The instability drove young scientists out of the country. The Serrapilheira Institute’s data made it concrete: roughly 10 percent of its young grantees left Brazil. The lesson for science philanthropy is blunt.
Waiting for the political storm to pass is not an option. By the time the storm clears, the researchers are gone. The infrastructure is wrecked.
The forests are burned. Brazil is still recovering.
The country’s scientific community knows what is at stake when a government treats research as an enemy. It is not abstract. It is a lab that closes.
A student who cannot finish a degree. A deforestation fine that never gets issued.
In the United States, the current administration is imposing what many call the most drastic attacks on science in its modern history. Brazilian researchers describe a familiar dread. They have seen this before.
They know how it ends. The Serrapilheira Institute’s experience offers a concrete warning. When the funding dries up and the political pressure mounts, the people who can leave do leave.
They do not wait for the next election. They go where the science is still science.
The cost is not just lost research. It is lost capacity. Lost trust.
Lost time. Brazil’s environmental enforcement is still rebuilding.
Its universities are still trying to attract back the talent that left. The deforestation data from the Bolsonaro years will take years to reverse. Philanthropy can move faster than government.
That is the point. But it cannot replace what a government destroys. It can plug gaps, support individuals, keep projects alive.
It cannot rebuild a dismantled agency. It cannot make up for an 80 percent drop in environmental fines.
The Brazilian scientists watching the United States know what is coming. They have already lived it. The question is whether the philanthropic sector can act before the damage becomes irreversible.
The clock is running.
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