Crise de financiamento na Argentina desencadeia nova onda de protestos

Two years after Argentina's scientific funding collapse, researchers are protesting against the government's failure to restore cut grants and boost salaries, as mandated by a 2025 law. The Argentine scientific community is taking to the streets once again. Faculty members and university staff from across the country went on a six-day strike on April 27 and plan to march to the Casa Rosada, the presidential residence in Buenos Aires' Plaza de Mayo, on May 12 to protest salary deterioration and federal government cuts to science funding.

This will be the fourth march in defense of education, public universities, and national science since April 2024. Daniel Tomsic, a neurosciencer professor at the University of Buenos Aires and a strike participant, says, "We live under a regime that undervalues science, culture, and the scientific system." In his 30 years at the University of Buenos Aires, he adds, "I have never seen a crisis like this."

At the end of 2023, following the appointment of Argentina's President Javier Milei, the government began freezing scientific research funding as part of an effort to reduce the country's deficit and inflation. Since then, researchers' salaries and other public university staff salaries have dropped between 30% and 40%, according to the Ibero-American Center for Research in Science, Technology, and Innovation (CIICTI).

Despite the obstacles and lack of funding, "we are survivors; we continue attempting to achieve the best science possible," says Tomsic. Researchers and faculty are leaving the country, and the National System of Science, Technology, and Innovation— the entire network of public and private institutions responsible for scientific research—has lost more than 6,000 professionals since December 2023, according to a May CIICTI report.

The funding crisis has caused a brain drain—especially of postgraduate students—seeking jobs abroad, either in the private sector or outside the scientific field, Tomsic explains. On December 4, 2025, the Argentine government announced it would not allocate any public resources to scientific research in 2026 unless the project had a private partner and focused on agribusiness, energy, mining, or health.

The federal budget's science and technology allotment could fall by half, dropping from 0.3% in December 2023 to 0.147% in 2026, a historic low, as per a May CIICTI report. After months of back-and-forth, federal courts suspended the implementation of a 2025 law this past week, which set up inflation-adjusted salary raises for university staff and resumed research grant funding.

The Interuniversity National Council, representing Argentina's public universities, appealed the decision and called for this year's demonstrations. A similar protest last year drew over a thousand researchers from all over Argentina. Tomsic and other University of Buenos Aires professors have been on intermittent strikes since the beginning of classes in March.

During the work stoppages, they suspended all teaching and administrative activities but continued some research and public lectures in Buenos Aires' Plaza Italia. Milei's government argues that private companies should finance science, says Mariano Belluscio, a CONICET researcher at the Institute of Physiology, Molecular Biology, and Neurosciences at the University of Buenos Aires.

Before becoming president, Milei proposed privatizing the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), the main employer of researchers in Argentina's public science system. However, this argument shows that "the government does not fully understand how the scientific system works— you need a little bit of everything for it to evolve," Belluscio says.

Companies are having trouble meeting demand because a large number of researchers are competing for their funding, Belluscio adds. One private company that previously granted Belluscio a scholarship limited submissions to clinical and translational work due to an overwhelming number of proposals, Belluscio reports. As a result, some research lines are falling behind due to lack of funding, Depino notes.

"We are waiting for the storm to pass to decide how to proceed," she says. "But if this situation continues for much longer than four years, it will be very difficult."