Making Sense Of Federal Cuts To Science—And What Comes Next

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Flora Lichtman. Last week, at one of the biggest national science gatherings, the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, its CEO, Sudip Parikh, gave a rousing speech to scientists.

SUDIP PARIKH (FROM RECORDING): Destruction for the ill-conceived notions of cutting costs didn’t put an American on the Moon. And it didn’t wipe smallpox from the face of the Earth.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Sudip was referring, of course, to the Trump administration’s cuts to jobs and proposed spending cuts across the federal science and health agencies. We’ve heard a lot about these cuts over the last few weeks, as well as cancellation of grants that include certain prohibited words, disappearing data from agency websites.

So today, we’re drilling down. What is happening, and how should the science community respond? Dr. Sudip Parikh is the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Executive Publisher of the Science family of journals. He’s based in Arlington, Virginia. Welcome to Science Friday.

SUDIP PARIKH: Flora, thanks so much for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I want to start out by playing another clip from your speech that really struck me.

SUDIP PARIKH (FROM RECORDING): This next month is probably one of the most important months in the history of science and technology in this country.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s an arresting statement. Tell me what you mean.

SUDIP PARIKH: Yeah. We’ve seen a lot of– I’ll call it activity– in the last 30 days. And much of it seems arbitrary and indiscriminate, not really showing signs of a strategy for how to make America competitive. I am incredibly sad and frustrated for the scientists and researchers and others who were let go in this.

That doesn’t change the funding level yet. We have what’s called a continuing resolution that is funding the US government right now, and it ends on March 14. And March 14 becomes a really important day because that’s the day that we have to have a new spending bill for the United States government. And that will set spending levels for the rest of fiscal year 2025 for the federal government and the federal agencies.

And so if the numbers that are provided in that spending bill are lower, based on the actions that we’ve seen over the past 30 days, those would get locked in, and it would be really hard to pull back out of it. Those spending levels take a long time to increase, and the United States has been investing in science for 80 years. And we could tear a lot of that down with the stroke of one signature and the votes of the legislative body.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah. I mean, during your talk, you said that you don’t want science to be on the back foot. So what is your specific call to action for scientists?

SUDIP PARIKH: Yeah, there’s a lot of things for scientists to do. The first is to ensure that we’re telling our stories and telling our stories in multiple spaces. And so I always encourage scientists to speak with their representatives in their home districts. So when you are– wherever you live, find out who is your member of Congress and go have a discussion with them about what science is doing, first of all, in your community.

What is the research that you do? How does it benefit your community? How does it benefit the country? And what effect the cuts that are proposed might have on your own community. It’s important to make sure to make that connection to the community, though. Telling the story of the scientist is one thing, and it’s very important.

But a lot of this is, really important to every American. Our entire modern society is based on science and technology, the investments that we’ve made throughout the past. But sometimes we’ve lost that connection. So that’s one thing, is to tell our stories to our representatives.

The second is, and some folks will, make this very active. There are going to be folks who are going to want to speak out publicly. And I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with that. I think it’s important to be thoughtful in what we say. And I think that sometimes that does provide some pressure.

And then there are those who need to be working in Washington to ensure that energy gets translated into specific and concrete asks of Congress and of the executive branch. And so all that needs to happen in concert over the next three weeks.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You said there’s nothing wrong with speaking out publicly. And it catches my ear because it wouldn’t occur to me that there would be something wrong with speaking out publicly. Can you just expand on that a little bit?

SUDIP PARIKH: Yeah. I think there’s sometimes a worry that speaking out publicly is going too far. It’s going over a limit. I just think that scientists in general, we like the safe space of our laboratories and our research ecosystems. But there is certainly something important about participating in the public discussion, the public discourse.

FLORA LICHTMAN: The argument being made by this administration is that there’s a lot of waste in government, including at science and health agencies. And there’s been a lot of criticism of how the administration is going about fixing that. But do you think there’s something to the premise that science could run more efficiently?

SUDIP PARIKH: Absolutely. Everything can run more efficiently, and science is no exception. And that requires looking at it with focus and with a strategy involved and looking at where we’re trying to compete globally and then making decisions about how you prioritize spending. And I don’t think that means cutting spending. I think that means prioritizing spending.

But what we’ve seen in the last 30 days is not that. What we’ve seen in the last 30 days is incredibly arbitrary. I mean, I just look at some of the cuts at the National Institutes of Health, cuts of potential leaders for the Center for Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias, which is a priority for everyone. These diseases don’t know politics, and they’ve had bipartisan support.

But because the new leader is just coming in and is still in their probationary period, they’ve been let go. That’s arbitrary. It shows no relationship to what we actually value as a country and what we see as priorities for what we need to be investing in. And so we’ve got to make sure that when we do the work of saying, How do we make science even more responsive to the country? we do it in a strategic way, not an non-strategic way.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, how would you make science more responsive to the country? What would you do?

SUDIP PARIKH: I think that science has to be rooted in our communities. And so we have several things. One is for the past 80 years, we as a nation have been investing in basic research sometimes that sounds even a little silly, but it ends up leading to many new things.

So, for example, we had scientists going out into the ecological systems of America and around the world looking at different bacteria. And then we were sequencing their DNA, and we saw random repeats in their DNA. And that turned into eventually gene editing technology called CRISPR, which is being used to cure sickle cell anemia right now. That connection is just extraordinary. And it comes from basic research. And so we’ve always had this investment in basic research.

But then we also need to be responsive to our communities. We know that we want to be globally competitive. And so as you look around the country, I see efforts, for example, in western North Carolina, where the textile industry has really suffered from global competition, efforts made to invest in science and technology to say, what are high-value things that we can do in this country with textiles that can compete globally?

And that means listening to the community around and saying, what is it that you care about? Where do you feel like you have energy and knowledge that we can bring to bear for the United States to be more competitive and to build up our economy? And so that connection to our communities is something that we’ve lost over time as scientists. And I really hope over the next few years, as we come out of this and we look forward, that we are rebuilding those connections because there are scientists almost in every neighborhood in the country.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you think that this lack of connection to community is partly why we have this, why we are seeing distrust of science and expertise and universities?

SUDIP PARIKH: I think that’s a big part of it. If you look at the relationships that you build, you build them based on knowledge of people. It’s not advertising campaigns. It is about relationships that are built over time. Trust is gathered in teaspoons and lost in buckets.

And so you have to build those relationships. And you can’t do that unless you’re actually showing up as a scientist. Showing up at a PTA meeting at your child’s school. Showing up at the city planning meeting as you talk about what should be in your neighborhood.

And then you can have a conversation about what it is you actually do. And that connection when it’s lost, makes it– we’re so good at science and technology that we make it invisible. Our water is clean. We have plentiful food. We have clean air. We have an economy that is bustling. These are things that rely on investments in science and technology by our federal government.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, how do you fire scientists up to go be engaged with their communities? Fire them up! Here’s your chance. We have a lot of scientist listeners. Get them going!

SUDIP PARIKH: Look, the scientific enterprise is probably the most powerful thing we’ve ever built as humans for progress for the planet. It’s built up economies. It’s pulled people out of extreme poverty. It’s made it to where we can then think about art and music and other things that we really appreciate in life. It’s created that.

And as scientists, we are the ones who are helping to build that, and we’re helping to expand that base of knowledge so that something new comes along. And if we don’t tell our own story, who will? Who will tell that story? Who will tell the story of how the basic research leads to the cure? No one else. We have to do that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I want to go back to some of the problems and how you might solve them. What do you think are the legitimate challenges to the scientific system right now, besides engaging with community? Where are the problem spots that needs fixing?

SUDIP PARIKH: Yeah, I’ll give you two really concrete examples. One is administrative burden on our scientists. Our scientists right now– we did some studies, and we realized that about 40%, 46% to 50% of their time, is spent on administrative tasks.

So can you imagine? Imagine if the next person who’s going to do something profound, somebody like Einstein, that instead of being in the laboratory that night, she’s filling out paperwork for travel. That’s my nightmare. I hope that doesn’t happen.

But that is administrative burden, and it can be relieved. Part of it is just saying, hey, can we standardize all the forms across government that are about biosketches for proposals? Can we have the same one for the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce, and the National Institutes of Health? That would be incredibly empowering for scientists if we could reduce that burden. Imagine giving that active scientist another 15% or 20% of their time back to actually think about science.

The second thing is that we have to make it to where the sciences are actually a profession that you’d want to go into. One of the things that really worries me is that we’ve made it to where if you want to be a scientist, it’s kind of a trial by fire.

If you didn’t, in the seventh grade, take Algebra I. Maybe you had a bad math teacher in sixth grade. Maybe something happened at home in the seventh grade that wasn’t good, and it held you back a little bit. If you don’t get into Algebra I in seventh grade, the chances of you becoming an engineer go down by drastic percentages. That shouldn’t be the case. There should be many, many journeys into the science and technology fields.

The second part of that is, how in the world is someone who perhaps has never gone– no one in their family has ever gone to college before– if they get through college, and we say, OK, now you’re going to spend four or five years in graduate school. And then we’re going to ask you to do postgraduate training. And during that time, we’re not going to pay you very much. In fact, you may need support from your parents.

If we require a parental safety net for every scientist, it limits– it completely limits the talent pool for the folks who can go into it and then help us make that next discovery. And when we do that, when we make it not a great profession, here’s the thing I think we miss.

Michael Faraday was asked 150 years ago, what good are electrons? What are you doing with this stuff? And his answer was something I love, which is he said, I don’t know, but someday you’re going to tax it. And that’s what we’re missing. That’s what science and technology do. They are so disruptive, they can make step changes in our economic growth. And that’s how. It’s not a zero-sum game. It is actually expanding the world for everybody. And science and technology can do that in ways that nothing else can.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You’ve worked in government yourself. I mean, from 2001 to 2009, you were a science advisor to the Republican leadership in the US Senate Appropriations Committee. The politicization of science isn’t brand new. I’m thinking of long-standing debates about teaching creationism in schools or the use of embryonic stem cells. What’s your perspective on how things are different now?

SUDIP PARIKH: One of the things that really makes me feel good is during my time on the Appropriations Committee, I realized there were good people, people of goodwill, on both sides of the aisle, trying to figure things out for 95% of things, particularly in the sciences. And they wanted to support Alzheimer’s research. They wanted to support science done by NASA.

But then there were 5% of things that are very political, and they become enmeshed in culture wars. They become enmeshed in the world around us. And what I’ve learned is that those things are sometimes– there are currents that are just too strong for any one sector to affect.

And it means sometimes that science is one piece of the equation. And that can be frustrating for scientists. It can be really frustrating. It’s frustrating for me. But I think that we’ve gotten this far. Look at the world we live in. Galileo and Isaac Newton would be amazed at how far we’ve gotten. And I think now we’re the generation that has to see that we can get to the next level. And that’s quite a responsibility.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What’s your message to young people who might be rethinking going into science right now?

SUDIP PARIKH: Yeah, this is the thing I worry about most. I worry that just some of the things that have happened over the last 30 days have been– they’ve been hard. They’ve been hard for the community. There’s a lot of angst and a lot of anxiety, and I feel it too. I feel it too.

What I would tell those early-career scientists is that we are at the beginning of a story. The next story is still being written. I think the next three weeks matters. It matters a lot. But then there’s more chances to engage. There are more opportunities to engage.

And this is not a time in world history for us to pull back from our time in science and technology. If it weren’t for that political climate, for that budget climate, just think of the opportunity. Just this past week, a neutrino was observed coming from somewhere out in space that had the highest energy we’ve ever seen.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Amazing story.

SUDIP PARIKH: And it was–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah.

SUDIP PARIKH: Yeah, it was an amazing story. And it was discovered by this partly built machine in the Mediterranean.

FLORA LICHTMAN: In the bottom of the sea, yeah.

SUDIP PARIKH: The bottom of the sea! What an extraordinary time to be doing science. And so if curiosity is your thing, if wanting to expand the knowledge base of humanity is your thing, if wanting to help build a better world is your thing, man, there’s not much better than science and technology.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Thank you, Sudip.

SUDIP PARIKH: Thank you. What a wonderful conversation.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I agree. Dr. Sudip Parikh is CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Executive Publisher of the Science family of journals. He’s based in Arlington, Virginia.

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