Under the populist presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazilian higher education found itself having to deny all sorts of wild claims. That public universities were growing marijuana. That academics were using gender ideology to indoctrinate students into “cultural Marxism”. And even that Covid-19 vaccines turn people into crocodiles.

Some of the specifics may be unique to Brazil, but the scenario will be very familiar to US scholars living under the equally anti-science leadership of Donald Trump. As well as spreading wild conspiracy theories, Bolsonaro’s government, in power between 2019 and 2023, slashed the federal science budget by 90 per cent, interfered in university governance and tried to limit academic freedom.

“Really, the only good thing is that it lasted only four years because had it lasted more than this, I don’t know whether we [would have been] able to recover,” said Sandhi Barreto, a professor of epidemiology at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Belo Horizonte, who remained in the country under Bolsonaro even as many of her colleagues fled.

Brazil has tended to swing regularly between left-wing and right-wing governments, but Bolsonaro and his ministers represented a new type of threat, Barreto told ̽����Ƶ.

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“They have no compromise, no interest in social development,” he said. “They want to destroy. They think that everyone has to fight for himself and that [we live in] a barbarian time. They don’t believe in public policies. They don’t believe in public institutions. They don’t believe in education. They don’t believe in public health. So this is something very different. We can move from left [to] right wing, but not this…These extremists do the most damage.”

Bolsonaro was defeated in the 2022 presidential election and currently faces the prospect of decades in jail for his role in allegedly plotting to seize power and assassinate his left-wing opponent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. As he awaits a verdict from the country’s Supreme Court, the 70-year-old’s best hope of avoiding a long jail term appears to be Trump, who has on Brazil in response to its “witch-hunt” against Bolsonaro.

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Meanwhile, Lula, who was previously president between 2003 and 2011, has been trying to restore order. Claudia Bauzer Medeiros, professor of computer science at the University of Campinas, said the 79-year-old has tried to improve support for higher education, including more funding for teaching and research, and has opened the possibility of providing additional funding through other ministries. This has led to better-funded labs, more scholarships and a programme to working abroad.

But “perhaps the most important difference is the recognition of the relevance of higher education, to a certain degree also influencing public opinion”, Medeiros added.

Alicia Kowaltowski, professor of biochemistry at the University of São Paulo, agreed that there has been a “world of difference” between Lula and Bolsonaro in terms of general atmosphere and political climate: “Much of that exhausting anti-scientific chatter disappeared when Lula came into office again, and it was a relief for us.” 

But Kowaltowski warned that “not being horrible as a leader” is not enough, and Lula has not yet made what she considers serious investments in education and research. Federal funding for research and universities has recovered only very slightly, to the levels of the first Bolsonaro years, and Brazilian institutions still face “excessive bureaucracy” around the acquisition of laboratory equipment, she said.

Part of the explanation for Lula’s underwhelming investments in higher education may be the combative congress that legislation has to pass through. But even with favourable political winds, Kowaltowski conceded that Brazilian science would struggle to fully recover from Bolsonaro. For instance, under his presidency, Brazil went from being a country with an “outstanding public vaccination programme” to one in which there was a real danger of preventable diseases resurging. 

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“Research and higher education infrastructure is fast to destroy and slow to build, especially without a concerted action to reverse the damage, and in a country that had vulnerable institutions to start off with,” she said.

Medeiros, who is also a fellow of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, agreed that it would be “impossible to fully undo the damage” inflicted by Bolsonaro.

“Every time a government [is elected] that does not recognise the value of science and education, a slump occurs, with dismantling of research projects, discontinuing of certain degrees, closing of labs and brain drain. To me, a full recovery is not something measurable, because it takes years, sometimes decades, to ensure quality in education and research.” Brazil cannot know “what might have been” – how many bright people left or were put off from immigrating because of the empty laboratories they could see from the outside.

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“We are much better off than we were in the previous years, but full recovery would require a much longer period than just a president’s four-year mandate. It is the entire system that requires long-term stability,” added Medeiros.

Rodrigo Lacerda, a physics professor at UFMG, estimates that while Brazil has recovered about 70 to 80 per cent of what it lost under Bolsonaro, it will never fully heal. But this, he added, is partly universities’ own fault for “staying within their shells” when they should be engaging with the public much more and making a much greater social and economic impact. “This is something in the university that we need to work on. It’s not enough just to publish papers: we need to return something to society.”

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Trump, of course, attained presidential office before Bolsonaro did, in 2016. Indeed, when Bolsonaro was elected in 2019, he was widely depicted, by friends and foes alike, as the “”. But Bolsonaro went much further than Trump did during his first term in office to actively damage universities and science; so much so that, in this arena at least, Trump might almost be depicted as the American Bolsonaro.  

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So what does the Brazilian experience tell us about how well US research will recover from Trump’s attacks on leading institutions, and his plans to slash the science budget and ban researchers from investigating a swathe of topics, such as gender and ?

Both Trump and Bolsonaro have a particular dislike of climate science. , a policy fellow at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute, the Bolsonaro administration tried to discredit data related to deforestation and fired the officer behind it. In an August blog on the LSE’s website, she wrote that the Trump administration is also “aggressively rolling back climate action”, including erasing scientific data, slashing research funding, and removing terms like “climate change” from federal websites. Nor is he averse to firing the bearers of bad news, as Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), .

On the other hand, the Brazilian sector’s determination to fight through the “bad times” was strengthened by academics’ concerns for the environment in a country with rich biodiversity, according to Sónia Ribeiro, professor at the Centre for Technology and Innovation in Environmental Modelling at UFMG. And she was not alone in suggesting that the US system’s far superior infrastructure should put it in a better position to stand up to authoritarianism.

But Kowaltowski worries that academics in the US are unaware “how fast things that take decades to build can be destroyed” and are therefore not doing enough to push back.

“Mostly, they seem to me to be scrambling to save their own labs, which is understandable, and hoping for a change in Congress in two years to reverse the tide. I think they are vastly underestimating how far destruction can go in that time, and how far destruction has already set in. The news I see as an outsider…is devastating.”

Far beyond a “brain drain”, she warned that Trump’s policies are acting as a “brain repellent”, dissuading scientists even from attending conferences in the US. And she called on US scholars to be more vocal about the restrictions and challenges they are facing.

John Aubrey Douglass, senior research fellow and research professor at the University of California, Berkeley, also sees the potential for long-term damage in the US – particularly if the huge proposed cuts to basic research funding are enacted. Cuts of such scale would have a lasting impact even if a post-Trump administration reversed it, he said. And equally damaging is the White House’s “anti-science rhetoric”, which is eroding public trust.

“There are parallels between the US and Brazil on the damage right-wing, anti-science nationalists have wrought on the scientific community, but I fear that the Trump administration is in a league of its own when it comes to the assault on science and universities in a short six-month period,” added Douglass.

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Ribeiro’s advice for US colleagues is to not put “all [their] eggs in one basket” and to diversify their funding sources. “Partnerships is the most important thing that you can have in these insecure moments,” he said. “If you can’t do one thing, your partner can do it. The university has to support the researchers and students with international collaborations, which are a way of survival or resistance if you can’t resist alone.”

For her part, Medeiros is very pessimistic about what is happening in the US, but she urged colleagues there to try not to be discouraged. Instead, they should focus their energy on making society as a whole understand the value of the higher education system. “This can influence public opinion to prevent a few catastrophic decisions – even if [it is] not enough to make a big difference,” she said. “Unfortunately, just like here in Brazil, too many people [in the US] think that the higher education system was created by some elite for that elite, and there is no interest in maintaining such a system.”

Bolsonaro is barred from standing in next year’s presidential election, but the anti-science sentiments he fanned and projected cannot so easily be removed from public circulation. And even if, in theory, Trump is blocked from running for a third term by the US Constitution, his America First ideology is likely to be taken up by his anointed successor.

Indeed, both Trump and Bolsonaro may end up backing a member of their own family to run in their stead in the next presidential election. And their ideology is spreading, too; in Brazil’s neighbour, Argentina, for instance, chainsaw-wielding president Javier Milei is currently cutting his own swathe through higher education and research after being elected in 2023.

As Barreto put it, a “bad seed” has been planted in the political soil. And even scientists struggle to predict what it may grow into – and how poisonous to science it may ultimately prove.

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