# Megatrends One Year Later – #27: America’s Retreat – What I Predicted, and What’s Actually Happening
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“By abandoning its R&D leadership, the US is ceding the future of global innovation and success to its competitors.” - Futurist Jim Carroll One year ago, in August 2025, I published Megatrend #27: America's Retreat as part of my 30 Megatrends series. Time to grade myself. Here's how I framed it in the original post: It's pretty clear the United States is accelerating its retreat from global R&D leadership through unprecedented 2025 policy reversals and funding cuts in critical sectors like biomedical science, climate technology, and electric vehicles. In stark contrast, competitor nations are executing ambitious, state-directed industrial strategies to capture dominance in future technologies, fundamentally redrawing the global innovation map and challenging America's long-held technological hegemony. Start with the piece I already had right: the FY2026 federal budget proposed roughly $44 billion — 22% — in cuts to non-defense R&D, with NSF facing a 57% cut, NIH 41%, EPA 34%, and NASA 24%. By early 2026, more than 10,000 people with STEM PhDs had lost or left their jobs to federal workforce cuts, and American scientists are submitting 32% more job applications abroad than a year ago. The European Commission answered with a $566 million fund built specifically to lure them, calling America's approach a "gigantic miscalculation." But the brain drain is a symptom, not the disease. The OECD confirmed in 2025 what I'd flagged as a risk back in 2017: China's R&D spending overtook America's for the first time, crossing $1.03 trillion against the US's $1.01 trillion, and on a purchasing-power basis the government-research gap has closed even further — China's public R&D outlay now runs 1.6 times the US figure. That's not a prediction anymore. That's the OECD's own accounting. Green energy investment moved the same direction. The US posted its first-ever recorded year-over-year decline in clean-energy investment in 2025, and American developers cancelled more clean-energy projects that year than the rest of the world combined. Chinese firms, meanwhile, accounted for 55% of the nearly $1.1 trillion in clean-energy manufacturing investment announced worldwide from 2019 through 2025. Conferences and travelers are voting with their feet too. The Academy of Management — 13,500 attendees — is pulling its annual meeting out of the US entirely from 2027 through at least 2031, citing visa wait times and immigration enforcement, and booking Vienna, Toronto, Frankfurt and London instead. International arrivals to the US fell for nine straight months heading into 2026, a slump the Commerce Department itself now prices at over $20 billion in lost export income by year's end. The prediction about sporting events was the one I called wrong in the original post — 2026 reopened that question. ICE confirmed its agents would be posted at World Cup stadiums, Germany and the UK issued formal travel advisories over US enforcement policy, and players from Iraq, Iran, and Senegal were detained or delayed at the border before ever reaching a pitch. The World Cup itself didn’t relocate. The welcome mat did. The skills gap I flagged is now a strategy gap too. Germany rebuilt its entire approach — shifting from retraining people after they lose a job to preventing the loss in the first place — while Japan stood up a cross-ministerial task force to train workers directly into AI, chips, and quantum, and South Korea built a national AI Action Plan with its own compensation system for AI-driven job loss. The US response remains what OECD analysts call a patchwork: real federal programs, but no coordinated national strategy to match them. And the new multinationals I predicted are already on the board. Three Chinese automakers — BYD, Geely, and Chery — cracked the global top 10 by market share in the first half of 2026. BYD alone passed Ford in volume, up from a 0.6% share a decade ago to 4.8% today, and says it plans to overtake Toyota within five years without needing the US market at all. Verdict: This is the one I most wish I'd gotten wrong. I didn't — and it's bigger than the scientists. The money, the conferences, the visitors, the skills strategy, and the next generation of multinationals are all reading from the same script: relocate, and don't wait for Washington to reconsider.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/09/megatrends-one-year-later-27-americas-retreat/