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This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichtman.

Today in the podcast, at one of the biggest national science gatherings, the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, its CEO, Sudeep Parikh, gave a rousing speech to scientists.

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.

Sudeep 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 Parique is the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,

an executive publisher of the Science Family of Journ journals. He's based in Arlington, Virginia.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Flora, thanks so much for having me.

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

This next month is probably one of the most important months in the history of science and technology in this country.

That's an arresting statement. Tell me what you mean. Yeah. You know, we've seen a lot of,

I'll call it, activity in the last 30 days. And much of it seems arbitrary and indiscriminate,

you know, 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 will let go in this.

That doesn't change the funding level yet.

We have a what's called a continuing

resolution that is funding the U.S. government right now, and it ends on March 14th. And March 14th

becomes a really important day because that's the day that we have to have a new spending

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