Science Friday
Hosted by Flora Lichtman
The CEO of AAAS is cautiously optimistic about federal funding for science, even as uncertainty makes research challenging.
3,443 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
Hey, I'm Flora Lixman and you're listening to Science Friday. Last year around this time, about 30 days into President Trump's second term, we had on Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the AAAS, on the show, and he issued this warning.
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.
So much has happened since January 2025, so I wanted to take stock. Where are we now with science funding? What has been the fallout of Doja's early work in 2025? And where does the science research community go from here? Sudip, thank you for joining us again.
Thanks for having me, Flora. What a treat.
The pleasure is all mine. Okay, let's start with a temperature check. You know, when we talked to you the last time, about a year ago, you sounded worried and you were quite forceful. How are you feeling today?
Yeah. Look, damage was done in 2025, and I want to start by saying that my colleagues in the scientific enterprise, they feel it because of the uncertainty that was there. They feel it because of grants that were either terminated or slowed down before they finally made it out the door. They saw it in reduced numbers of students going into the sciences. So let me just say that upfront. That said, the quote that you played is about funding for science, and we are just about at the point where we're going to finally get final numbers for the US investment in science for fiscal year 2026. And I have to say, it looks really promising.
You know, I said that we could change all of that with votes of the legislative body and the stroke of a pen. Well, the legislative body, our Congress, just released numbers for a big part of the scientific enterprise, the National Science Foundation, NASA, other parts of federal funding, and they look good. What they show is that the bipartisan support for science in Congress is not just still there, it actually is strong. It is strong. We're going to end up seeing small increases in some of these agencies.
Yeah, let's get into the details. Tell me, break it down for us. What do we see right now, as of this recording?
What we're seeing right now, and so this as of as of the time that we're talking is that is that Congress has released bills that fund the National Science Foundation and NASA. Both of those look relatively flat. NASA has a small, less than 1% decrease. The National Science Foundation has a decrease of about 3%. All in the education part of NSF, the science portion being flat. The Agricultural Research Service has a small increase. The Department of Energy Office of Science has a small increase. The National Institutes of Standards and Technology actually has a relatively large increase. And we're waiting to see the big, sort of the big domestic discretionary science agency,
which is the National Institutes of Health. But my expectation is that we're going to see a small increase there as well. So that is remarkable. When you think about where we were the last time we talked, Flora, it was it was touch and go. I will say that it didn't happen by accident, and it wasn't that politicians suddenly came to their senses. It was the fact that there was advocacy. It was the fact that we went to the trouble of saying, why should we be champions of science? And there was a concerted effort to do that.
Who was doing that work?
Yeah, I will, I'm proud to say that I was doing part of that work. I will say that patient advocates were doing that work in a way for the National Institutes of Health that is just remarkable. You know, it's one thing for a scientist to say that we need funding for science at the National Institutes of Health. But you could view that as, gosh, you just want to fund your own science. But patients, patients make the why possible, which is why are we doing that research? Why is it important? And when you see some of the the advances that we saw this year, for example, baby KJ in Pennsylvania and the cure of a metabolic disease for for an infant.
This was a gene therapy.
Exactly.
For a disease that a baby had, and it was really a remarkable story. We covered it on Science Friday.
Yeah, and this was customized treatment. Customized treatment to cure a person, a human.
Yeah.
And so we know that's the downstream of what can happen if you invest today. And so patients were able to make that case. When it came to the physical sciences and NASA, what we saw was industry. We saw philanthropy. We saw the private sector speaking up on behalf of the science that the federal government invests in. And then we saw scientists themselves making the case for what is possible because of all the prior investment that we've made. We are on the cusp of remarkable things. And, you know, the only reason we're here is because of investments that the US government made, nobody else.
You know, on Thursday, January 8th, the House passed these appropriation bills. And I was looking at the votes and they weren't even particularly controversial.
They sailed through, essentially.
They sailed through. Isn't that something? It's, I think it's really telling. You know, there were points during this year, and when I say that damage was done in the early part of 2025, the work of Doge was really nonspecific. It was just going through the federal government and turning off contracts, turning off grants. And to some of us, it seemed almost random in terms of the way it was taking place. And much of that has now calmed down. I will say there's still policies that I worry about and there's still policies that I will have conversations with the administration about. But some of that has calmed down.
And so then what we've had is the Appropriations Committee. I testified at a hearing in April of last year and I saw bipartisan support. I saw the Republicans and Democrats asked me together to come and testify at that hearing. And we talked about NIH and NSF in the same breath and the reasons for supporting those agencies. And so I think, on the whole, When I look at this, I look at the resilience of the American scientific enterprise, of the scientists in that enterprise, the graduate students and postdocs, and I see it working its way up into the legislation that has been passed, legislation that not only has money in it, but that also has protection against some of the more damaging policies. Some of those protections are in there.
I see an enterprise that is resilient and strong and that will continue to be competitive worldwide. Now, there is still damage that is done, and we can talk about that if you want, but those are things that we can work through. If you lose dollars, you never get them back.
Yeah, well, I wanted to talk about some of the damage because I think one of the things that we have heard over the last year from scientists is that it is so difficult to deal with the uncertainty around funding. Can you speak to that?
Yeah, uncertainty is a really crazy thing. So let me give you a really specific example. The National Science Foundation funds something called graduate research fellowships. And these are fellowships that go to our best potential graduate students in the country. They're going to go in every field: mathematics, the physical sciences, biology, the life sciences, social sciences. And we funded 2,000 of them in 2024. 2,000, the 2,000 top, top young graduate students. In this year, because of all the uncertainty, the National Science Foundation had to pull back on what they were going to fund because they couldn't, they didn't know for certain what they were going to get from Congress. And so they cut that down to 500 at first.
So really, taking a three-quarters cut to the total number of these fellowships. Now, at the end of the day, I think we've ended up somewhere around 1,500. And because of the funding level, I expect that maybe even more of those will be restored. But what does that mean? It means that you've lost this ability to plan. If you're a graduate student and you don't realize and you don't know if you have the the money yourself for graduate school, or you don't know if your your scientist advisor has the funding for your research, it's really hard to plan. And so we lose that generation of scientists, that generation of cream of the crop scientists. We see that all across the board. And so certainty has been a really powerful part of our scientific enterprise.
For 80 years, we've sort of known. It might not be giant increases, but we knew that there was stability. I'm hoping that we return to an era of stability. I think Congress's vote of confidence makes a big, big difference.
You know, you spoke in front of Congress last spring and said that the US was in danger of losing its status as a leader of global research, a leader of scientific in in the scientific research fields. What's happened? Have we? Are we?
Yeah. Yeah. It's a more complex story than than just a simple yes or no. You know, what I said in that hearing is, look, if you if we adopted the recommended numbers from the administration, which was a cut of over half to the National Institutes of Health, over half to the National Science Foundation, that we would no longer be in the race, that there was no way to be competitive with China, with other parts of the world, if we're going to do that kind of damage to our scientific enterprise. That did not happen. That did not happen. And so, yes, we are still in that race. We are still, we are still a behemoth when it comes to the sciences in the world. That said, when you look at the bleeding edge, when you look at the the breakthroughs
of the year that are in Science Magazine this year, the breakthrough of the year itself was the fact that solar energy is now creating more electricity than coal worldwide. That is a remarkable thing, a really remarkable thing. But Where is that happening? Well, the vast majority of it is happening in China. The vast majority of it. They're putting online solar energy production at a much faster pace than we are. When I look at a series of indicators that were put together by the, by some folks in Australia about who is leading in certain critical areas, material science, mathematics, biology, China was leading in many more of them than the US is.
And so we have to be thinking about that. Now, it's not because I think that you have to win for winning's sake. It's because I think that the country that is leading in those areas is also the first to turn them into things that are valuable for society, whether they be products that grow our economy, whether they be innovations that power our national security, or whether they be things like a cure for baby KJ. Those are all things that the benefits will accrue to the country that leads.
We have to take a quick break, but don't go away. More on this when we come back.
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I mean, can we recover? Let's talk about renewable energy, because, you know, we're investing in oil at the moment, oil in Venezuela. Do you see us recovering leadership in that field?
There are spaces. Look, there are things that I'm excited about even. The Genesis Mission that's been described by the Department of Energy. The undersecretary for energy is a guy named Dario Gill, has put forward this idea called the Genesis Mission, which is this idea that we're going to grab data from across all the different parts of the federal government enterprise and use those to enhance the AI work that we can do so that AI can be used in the sciences. It's really a terrific idea. It's at the bleeding edge. And when I look at things like the material science needed for the next generation of solar energy, the next generation of energy storage, we have the opportunity to compete there.
The challenge is, everybody else isn't standing still, and that this stuff takes money. It takes dollars, it takes resources. You know, sometimes, a long, long time ago, I worked on the Appropriations Committee in the Senate. And I can remember senators saying that, you know, policy is money. If you don't put money somewhere, then that's not really your priority. It's not really the thing you care about. And so, funding matters. And so, as we're thinking about renewable energy, as we're thinking about the life sciences, if we don't put federal funding there, then we can say all the things that we want to say, we're not going to keep up with our competitors.
But why is it cool to be like, well, let's cut the NSF's budget by 50%? You know?
What's the culture around that?
Yeah, you know, it's easy to make fun of things, Flora. I mean, you've seen it. You've seen it in the in some of the fun stuff that we want to talk about in the sciences. You know, there are projects that you can easily make fun of. There are projects about lizards and projects about, you know, shrimp running on treadmills and that sort of thing.
Those are our favorite studies on Science Friday. I'll have you know.
They're the fun ones, right? I mean, some of them are really, um, they catch your attention. They're also easy to make fun of in terms of why are we wasting our tax dollars on them? And the thing we have to remind ourselves of is that some of the most important things we're building our economy on today were made fun of when they were being studied at first. AI is the perfect example. Jeff Hinton's work being funded when he was out alone in the wilderness, thinking about AI and how it looks like a brain map. He was alone and it was easy to make fun of and could have been seen as a waste of money. And so I think we have to be able to make that case, but it's a perpetual issue.
And we always have to be willing to speak up on behalf of that incredible discovery science, basic science that forms the basis of not today's economy, but the economy for my kids.
I want to talk about trust in science. Do you have a prescription for how to deal with that? This problem?
If I did, then, you know, I would have, I would have already written that prescription and would be, would be running off with it. Here's what I think. I do think there's an answer. We are living in a world where trust is not just given because of a certificate or a diploma or a name brand. And I think that is across everything, not just science, across every institution. And I think that what has really been able to build trust is relationships. And so those are the kinds of relationships that you have in person. But also, it's relationships like people build with you, Flora, in long-form venues where you can have a conversation and you can get to know the authentic person that is doing the science
and get to see what their motivations are. And I think that many scientists have not been eager to participate in those. And so the narrative, the story gets told by others. It gets told by others. And so there are some people who would say that we haven't made any scientific progress since the year 1990. I think that's baloney. When I look at the level of discovery that has happened, when I look at where we are in the physical sciences, the mathematics, and the biological sciences, we are in a remarkable, remarkable place, and the pace of innovation is growing. Now, does that mean that there's not a lot of slop out there? There is. There absolutely is. And so we have to be able to find the signal in the noise of all of that. It is there.
And so what I hope that we can get to in trust in science is that if scientists are more engaged and able to build those relationships either in person or virtually through long form, that we start to rebuild that trust, not around institutions, not around brand names, but around actual scientists and actual people.
Individuals.
Individuals, because that's where it's at right now. And, you know, and we can't long for the days of 20 years ago. I think we have to lean into where the world is, because that's a bigger, broader societal trend, not one about science itself.
You know, it seems like you are hopeful about where we are today, but I suspect you feel like there's probably more work to be done. Are there things you're worried about?
There are. Now, like I said, the funding levels for this year, they make me feel pretty good. The challenge is, the minute they pass, we're going to step into execution, and that's going to bring up a lot of challenges. Will the agencies spend that money? Will certain projects, certain things that are related to atmospheric research, will they be canceled? And so we have to be vigilant for that. We also have to be vigilant in terms of the morale and the resilience of our young scientists. Even with those dollars passed, there's still a lot of challenges to getting them funded. And so we've got to make that happen. And so the work continues. I'm going to continue to energetically advocate on behalf of science, and I know that many, many others will.
Sudha Perik is the CEO and executive publisher of the AAAS. Thank you for joining me today.
Thanks so much, Flora.
This podcast was produced by Kathleen Davis, and we love hearing from you, and you can reach us 24/7 on our listener line, 8774-SY-FRY. We'll see you next time. I'm Flora Lichtman.
Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated