Nearly a fifth of scientists are considering abandoning the U.S.

Are you referring to the chart that illustrates funding as a percent of GDP? If so, I think that the numbers may be larger than you think. Half a hundredth of a percent of the US GDP is still 7.5 billion dollars per year.

To put this into perspective: The entire annual NSF budget is $7 billion. From Wikipedia:

"With an annual budget of about US$7.0 billion (fiscal year 2012), the NSF funds approximately 20% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities.[1] In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing."

The entire NIH budget is 30 billion a year. NASA's is 18 billion.

The second chart of the article shows that adjusted for inflation, the purchasing power of scientific funding has decreased from 10-30% since 2004.

The article is pretty bad, but I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the issue. If you work out the numbers, it's still an alarming problem.

I think that the article should do the math for the audience to better report on the problem though. Five minutes of following links looks like the Salon article is a summary of the Huffington Post article, which is a summary of the original report by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB).

At least 40% of the people I went to (grad) school with were non-natives. Many of them (about half) went back to their home country (to get academic jobs, typically). So, it could simply be that the base rate of people leaving is 20% now, just like it was before, and the article is reporting on a non-issue.

Then again, I left academic 6 years ago for the exact reasons listed- I wasn't able to spend my time doing science.

> they're unhappy about something

emphasis added

> the percentage of people who said they were leaving the country when Obama was (re)elected.

I don't get this. Most of these people were presumably conservatives, that were unhappy with Obama's election, but at the same time, most of their ideological/political views would seem incompatible with living anywhere other than the US.

[ I realize that this is probably horrible stereotyping, but I would be interested to talk to someone that held this view. ]

Story time? I'm a graduate studentat a US college. I study quantum computing, and have for the past year. I went into quantum computing despite the primary investigator being unsure of HHS funding situation, because it was something I had wanted to study for a very long time and I liked the opportunity too much to pass it up.

In July, my advisor told me that our funding had been retroactively taken by the sequester. He had lost funding for 4 graduate students and two postdocs. I am currently transferring to another school as a result of this.

The most promising locations are nearby Toronto and Madrid. Spain. They're broke, but they still fund science better than we do. I guess.