This week, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 895 atop the Golden Gate Bridge, the final bill signing of his last regular legislative session.
The University of California-backed bill creates a ballot measure that will, if approved by voters, create a $7.5 billion science and health research bond that could be used to support researchers doing work that has fallen out of favor with the federal government — specifically, the National Institutes of Health, which is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research.
But both voters and researchers will have a long wait before seeing any effects. The cutoff to make this November’s ballot was in June. So the measure won’t go before voters until the March 2028 primary.
The measure, authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, would create what some describe as a “mini NIH” — a California-based foundation that can fund a broad range of science and health research ranging from cancer and HIV to climate change and wildfire prevention.
The bond has been scaled back significantly since Wiener introduced it in January. It began as a $23 billion proposal, was reduced to $12 billion by the time it passed the state Senate in May and ultimately landed at $7.5 billion in August.
If voters approve the measure, the new foundation would distribute money to universities, academic medical centers, research institutes and private research companies across California. $1 billion of that bond is specifically reserved for research facilities, including $250 million for the UC system.
Even so, the bond would be no match for the federal funding UCSF relies on, according to Dr. Hal Collard, the university’s vice chancellor for research.
UCSF alone receives around $900 million annually from the NIH, Collard said, while its total federal research support comes to a little over $1 billion a year. Across the UC system, Collard estimated annual federal research funding at roughly $7 billion to $8 billion — about the size of the entire proposed state bond.
“There’s really no replacing the federal government here,” Collard said. If federal funding undergoes major changes, he said, “it’s going to have a big impact on us.”
Last year, UCSF ran 25 to 30 percent behind its recent-year pace for new and renewed federal awards, while also receiving 103 grant termination notices tied to Trump administration executive orders. Most of those were reinstated later after legal challenges, but more than two dozen grants remained lost at year’s end.
Dr. Monica Gandhi, who directs UCSF’s Center for AIDS Research, said she hoped the bond measure would give her and her colleagues a viable route to additional funding, without fear of a “chilling effect” on their research.
She said there is “an unpublished list of banned words” that researchers advise each other to avoid when writing NIH grants, including language referencing “diversity,” “equity and inclusion” and “LGBTQ” populations. “What happened is everyone now writes grants that carefully avoid those words,” Gandhi said. “It’s just an unwritten understanding.”
A lawsuit filed last month alleges the NIH is continuing to screen grants using 235 keywords — including “gender,” “Latinx” and “climate change” — to flag proposals for termination, denial or renegotiation. The plaintiffs allege the screening can continue even after a proposal has passed scientific peer review, which departs from longstanding precedent at NIH.
Yet the legislation’s language leaves unanswered how the bond’s money would be directed, according to Collard.
One key question, he said, is whether the foundation will concentrate on fields receiving less federal support, or set broader priorities of its own.
“If diversity, equity, health disparities are priorities of the state of California,” he said, the new fund could support research in those areas.
In other words, the bond could give California a greater ability to decide, independent from the federal government, what research merits public support, Collard added.
The bond would also require researchers who receive state money to explain how any new treatments or technologies they develop would be made affordable to Californians. If that research later makes money through licensing or royalties, the state could get a share back.
For Collard, the bond’s biggest achievement is its potential to make California “a real player” in “directing” funding for biomedical research that improves health outcomes.
He said he is not concerned about the year-and-a-half wait. “Really what we’re talking about is a generational change,” he said. “The time frame here is one of my lesser concerns.”
