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The Trump administration’s attacks on US academia are hurting Europe’s scientific community, even if they prompted more American researchers to relocate to or seek funding from the EU, a top official has warned.
Since taking office in 2025, President Donald Trump has cut funding to American universities and scientific research programmes deemed not in line with his policies, including on topics such as diversity and climate change. Brussels has responded with a “Choose Europe” strategy, which has led to a surge of interest from US academics applying for European grants.
“There is no silver lining to the situation in the US,” said Maria Leptin, the president of the European Research Council, the bloc’s main funding organisation for basic research.
“We all collaborate with each other, we all depend on each other’s insight, inspiration, intuition and on each other’s success. So science in the US being curtailed or impeded has an effect on all of us,” she told the Financial Times.
The ERC is set to launch a new grant as part of the “Choose Europe” strategy, which offers more generous and lengthier grants for leading researchers.
But Leptin cautioned against seeing the attacks on US academia as a net win for Europe. Meanwhile, China is increasingly important in the global research scene.
“They’re a leader,” Leptin said. “They can just jump way ahead [of us]. They’re doing that in many fields now.”
European and expat Chinese scientists who had moved to set up labs in China were surprised to see the government in Beijing was granting them the scientific freedom needed to make discoveries, she said. But she also warned against being “naive” about intellectual property theft and other risks when it comes to research co-operation with China.
Europe, she said, had to retain the talent needed to innovate. Politicians often thought “we’ll let someone else do the primary discovery and we can then just exploit it”, Leptin said, “forgetting that in order to exploit scientific knowledge that was generated elsewhere, you yourself have to have the people who are skilled in using that knowledge”.
She pointed to the important role research plays in industrial innovation, from artificial intelligence to quantum communications. “You build on the innovation and it percolates throughout.”
The EU’s priority should be to remove barriers for scientists to move freely and have their research recognised across the bloc, she said. Freedom of research, she stressed, was not just about the absence of censorship but also about infrastructure, funding and labour mobility.
“Not all EU member states offer ideal conditions for fundamental research, for blue-sky research, for academic freedom, for career prospects,” she said.
Short-term, highly targeted grant schemes are another constraint. Relying on funding that is limited to two years often meant “you can only do boring bread and butter stuff”, Leptin said.
“This bread and butter stuff has to be done. It’s absolutely essential for the research enterprises. But you can’t do the kind of research that really breaks new boundaries.”