LONDON — Help Wanted. Looking for American researchers.

As President Donald Trump cuts billions of federal dollars from science institutes and universities, restricts what can be studied and pushes out immigrants, rival nations are hoping to pick up talent that has been cast aside or become disenchanted.

For decades, trying to compete with U.S. institutions and companies has been difficult.

The United States was a magnet for top researchers, scientists and academics. In general, budgets were bigger, pay was bigger, labs and equipment were bigger. So were ambitions.

In 2024, the United States spent nearly $1 trillion — roughly 3.5% of total economic output — on research and development. When it came to the kind of long-term basic research that underpins American technological and scientific advancements, the government accounted for about 40% of the spending.

That’s the reason political, education and business leaders in advanced countries and emerging economies have long fretted over a brain drain from their own shores.

Now they are seizing a chance to reverse the flow.

“This is a once-in-a-century brain gain opportunity,” the Australian Strategic Policy Institute declared, as it encouraged its government to act.

Last week, at the urging of more than a dozen members, the European Union announced it would spend an additional 500 million euros, or $556 million, over the next two years to “make Europe a magnet for researchers.”

Such a sum is paltry when compared with U.S. budgets. So it’s understandable if their appeals are met with a request to “show me the money.”

After all, salaries tend to be much lower in Europe.

In France, for example, a 35-year-old researcher can expect to earn around 3,600 euros (about $4,000) a month before taxes, according to the French Education and Research ministry. A postdoctoral fellow at Stanford would stand to earn the equivalent of around 6,000 euros (about $6,685) a month in the United States.

Still, there is interest.

Of 1,600 people who responded to a March poll in the journal Nature — many of them doctoral or postdoctoral students in the United States — 3 out of 4 said they were considering leaving the country because of the Trump administration’s policies.

And Europe’s more generous social safety net can make up for a large part of the salary differential, said Patrick Lemaire, the president of the College de Sociétés Savantes Académiques de France, an arm of an international council that represents about 50,000 academics in France.

“There is much less money in Europe, and the salaries are much lower,” he said. “But you also have very good social security and health care, which is free; school and university tuition are free.”

In addition to the EU as a whole, nations like Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Norway, Portugal and Spain pledged last week to put cash on the table to attract U.S. researchers. Australia, Austria, Belgium, China, Ireland, South Korea and Sweden have also talked about starting programs directed at attracting researchers, scientists and students in the United States.