One year into President Javier Milei’s presidency, scientists are exiting the country in the face of big budget cuts

‘There will be nothing left’: researchers fear collapse of science in Argentina

One year into President Javier Milei’s presidency, scientists are exiting the country in the face of big budget cuts

It has been one year since libertarian President Javier Milei took office in Argentina, and the nation’s science is facing collapse, researchers say. Milei’s agenda to reduce the country’s deficit and lower inflation — which had topped 211% last year — has meant that, as his administration’s slogan says, “there is no money” for science or anything else.

“We are in a very, very critical situation,” says Jorge Geffner, director of the Institute for Biomedical Research in Retroviruses and AIDS (INBIRS) in Buenos Aires. He adds that the Innovation, Science and Technology Secretariat, once the country’s main science ministry but downgraded by Milei to a secretariat with less power, is working with a budget that is one-third lower than last year.

Argentinian scientists who are paid by the government have lost up to 30% of their income, Geffner says. (As of 2022, the government funded about 60% of research and development in Argentina, and the rest came from the private sector and international contributions.) As a result, the country is facing massive brain drain. At INBIRS, about half of its staff members are either considering finding jobs in other countries or already doing the paperwork, Geffner adds.

“With six more months like this, there will be nothing left” of the scientific community, says Mariano Cantero, director of the Balseiro Institute in Bariloche, Argentina, which trains physicists and engineers.

The chainsaw strategy

Milei promised to take a “chainsaw” to the Argentine government’s spending when he campaigned for president, to bring the economic crisis under control. Although the monthly inflation rate has dropped from 25.5% last December, when Milei took office, to 2.7% as of this October, poverty in the country has increased by 11 percentage points. Argentina’s gross domestic product is expected to shrink by 3.5% by the end of 2024, but recover by 5% in 2025.

The slashing of budgets has hit science particularly hard. The National Agency for the Promotion of Research, Technological Development and Innovation, which is the main funder of research projects in Argentina, has nearly halted work under Milei, despite 85% of its money coming from international agencies such as the Inter-American Development Bank. Alicia Caballero, who was president of the agency, resigned in September because the government did not authorize her to use the agency’s budget.

Luis Moyano, a physicist who studies artificial intelligence at Bariloche Atomic Centre, decided to leave the country for Spain, given that his salary wasn’t enough to rent a house for his family. Moyano previously lived in Spain and other nations, but returned to his home country of Argentina in 2016 because of a government programme called Raíces, or ‘Roots‘, that sought to reverse brain drain. “As a scientist, I can say that we have never been in an ideal situation [in Argentina], but all is worse with the new government,” he says. He expects to earn at least four times as much money in Spain as he now receives in Argentina.

Officials at the National Agency for the Promotion of Research, Technological Development and the science secretariat did not respond to Nature’s queries but instead pointed to a strategic plan released by the secretariat.

Scientists as ‘scoundrels’

Some scientists say that times are tough for them in Argentina, not just for financial reasons, but because they are under attack. Manuel García Solá, a former board member of Argentina’s main science agency, the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) based in Buenos Aires, resigned in November. In a letter and in public interviews, García Solá said that Milei’s government was reviewing research projects on an ideological basis — for instance evaluating them for signs of communism and other ‘deviations’ — and rejecting them if they didn’t align with the government’s political agenda.

Milei has not minced words about his feelings towards scientists. Rather than having their research subsidized by the government, he said during a forum in September, “I invite them to go out into the market. Investigate, publish and see if people are interested or not, instead of hiding like scoundrels behind the coercive force of the state”.

Since Milei took office, CONICET has lost at least 140 full-time workers, mainly administrative personnel, and has awarded only about half of the research grants that it did in previous years. A recent estimate from a group of university-based researchers in Argentina suggests that the agency has overall lost about 1,000 workers, including interns and contractors such as scientists and technicians.

Officials at CONICET did not answer Nature’s queries by the time this story was published.

Another way that some scientists say they feel belittled by Milei is the President’s stance on climate change. Milei has repeatedly said that he doesn’t think that humans are causing global warming and that what the world is experiencing is instead part of a natural cycle, despite an abundance of scientific evidence to the contrary. On government websites and in official documents, the situation is labelled “climate variation” rather than climate change.

Last month, Milei pulled Argentina’s delegates out of negotiations at the United Nations COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, where world leaders were discussing how to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and pay for such efforts around the globe. The move came hours after he spoke with US president-elect Donald Trump, who has signalled that he will remove the United States from such negotiations when he takes office next month. Trump and Milei have expressed mutual admiration for each other.

At the UN COP16 biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, in October, Argentine officials presented a plan to protect biodiversity without mentioning climate change, which the majority of scientists agree is a driver of species loss. “The speech of Milei officials is against science and nature, and it has its consequences,” says Alejandro Valenzuela, a biologist at the National University of Tierra del Fuego in Argentina.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03994-y

This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Martín De Ambrosio