For the first time in 2 decades, Argentina’s scientific community is experiencing substantial job losses and funding cuts as a result of austerity policies imposed by President Javier Milei, two recent analyses have found. Researchers worry diminishing prospects at home will lead more Argentine scientists to look for work abroad.
Argentina’s main science agency, the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina (CONICET), has lost about 1000 staff, or 9% of its workforce, since Milei took office in December 2023, according to an analysis released last week by the Ibero-American Center for Research in Science, Technology, and Innovation (CIICTI), a group of university-affiliated researchers in Argentina.
Overall government spending on research has declined by 31% over the same period, to about $1.2 billion, CIICTI reported late last month.
The cuts have left many Argentine researchers demoralized. They “are destroying the country’s scientific activity, and we are losing capital that will be very difficult to recover,” says immunologist Alejandra Capozzo of the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA). Capozzo has dismantled her own laboratory because of a lack of funds, she says, and her students have either moved to the private sector or to research groups abroad.
Milei swept into office last year promising to radically remake Argentina’s struggling economy, in part by slashing government spending. He also said he wanted to restructure CONICET, which he called “unproductive”—or even shut it down.
His government hasn’t gone that far. But it has reduced CONICET’s workforce through layoffs and by offering incentives for researchers to retire, the report by CIICTI’s Political Economy Science Group found. Overall, the agency’s workforce declined from about 11,800 to 10,750 over the past 10 months. The losses include 598 staff scientists and 457 early-career scientists on fellowships.
CONICET’s job cuts accounted for about 40% of a much broader loss in Argentina’s publicly funded science, according to CIICTI. Overall employment in the sector declined by 3.6%, from 75,051 in December 2023 to 72,355 in September. Agencies that saw their staff shrink include the National Institute of Industrial Technology, the Secretariat of Science and Technology, and the National Atomic Energy Commission (CNEA).
INTA—the country’s second-largest scientific institution, with 6900 employees—was the only one to gain staff. But that growth was accompanied by a buyout program that prompted about 250 more experienced researchers to leave, says physicist Diego Hurtado of the National University of San Martín. “This creates an internal brain drain,” he says. (INTA’s president, Juan Cruz Molina Hafford, resigned in October, citing “differences” with a government directive to cut staff by 10%.)
The employment situation has prompted many younger researchers to look for positions abroad. Last month, quantum computing specialist Alejandro Díaz-Caro left the National University of Quilmes after losing his funding and took a temporary position at the University of Lorraine in France. Díaz-Caro had returned to Argentina from France in 2014 thanks to the Raíces (“Roots”) program, a government initiative aimed at revitalizing the nation’s scientific community “I came back with the Raíces program, and I’m leaving with the ‘chainsaw program,’” he quips.
Díaz-Caro has helped two of his three graduate students move to Uruguay’s University of the Republic. The third is still in Argentina but has funding from Díaz-Caro’s new institution. Díaz-Caro isn’t sure where he will ultimately land himself. One possibility is Uruguay, where he already has collaborations, because his goal is to help support science in South America. Yet he is resolute: “I will not return to Argentina.”
Luis Moyano, a CNEA specialist in electromagnetism and artificial intelligence, has left as well. He had returned in 2019 after nearly 20 years abroad and became affiliated with the prestigious Balseiro Institute, but the spending freezes and deteriorating salaries under Milei have led him and more than 60 other researchers to resign. Now in Spain, Moyano says he has yet to find a job and “it’s unclear if I’ll be able to continue doing science.” He says he’s not going back to Argentina either, because “the government seems determined to diminish the value of a large part of scientific activity.”
Many researchers expect the exodus to continue. At the University of Buenos Aires, microbiologist Jorge Geffner says 40% of the roughly 60 scientists in his department are pursuing emigration. CONICET, meanwhile, has seen a 30% reduction in employment applications, suggesting it will be difficult for the agency to recruit new talent. The government’s policies represent “scienticide,” Geffner says. “We are already facing devastating consequences for the entire sector.”
