California’s $23 Billion Plan to Restore Federal Cuts to Scientific Research

Democratic lawmakers in California want the state to restore funding for scientific research that has been slashed by the Trump administration, creating an ambitious plan to use tens of billions of dollars in voter-approved bonds to fill the void.

Supporters of the proposal said it would effectively create a state version of the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, two of the nation’s largest institutional funders of scientific and public health research. The move follows California, Washington and Oregon’s announcement that they would form a health alliance to review scientific data and make vaccine recommendations for their residents, in an attempt to bypass vaccine skeptics in the Trump administration.

The plan to back scientific research calls for lawmakers to pass, and for voters to approve in a 2026 ballot measure, a proposed $23 billion in bonds, financing that will allow the state to make grants and loans to universities, research companies and health care organizations.

It would be the largest state effort of its kind, and is considerably more aggressive than one floated in Massachusetts in July, when Gov. Maura Healey made a $400 million proposal for research there.

In California, the federal cuts have been deep, and are expected to worsen. At one site alone — the University of California, Los Angeles — the Trump administration has already sought to freeze roughly $584 million in federal research grants, state lawmakers said.

The legislation behind the restoration effort — written by State Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco and Assemblyman José Luis Solache Jr. of Lynwood, in Southern California — was made public late Friday, when the authors formally introduced it. The bill will not come up for consideration until January, after the state’s legislative recess, and will require the approval of a supermajority of the Legislature to be placed on the 2026 ballot.

There is no guarantee that it will pass the Legislature or the voters. The proposed bond amount is very large, even by California’s vast standards. In 2020, voters rejected a $15 billion bond to support higher education. And last year, a $6.4 billion bond backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to fund treatment and housing for homeless people with severe mental illnesses and addiction barely passed.

However, the proposal’s backers, including the United Auto Workers, which represents tens of thousands of graduate students and other academic workers, are optimistic.

“It should be up to Californians, not Donald Trump, to decide whether or not we fund lifesaving research in cancer treatment, disease diagnostics, chronic diseases, climate science, wildfire preparedness and more,” Mike Miller, the director of U.A.W. Region 6, which represents some 76,000 academic workers in the state, said in a statement.

Democrats hold a legislative supermajority in Sacramento, and organized labor is both one of the state’s most potent lobbies and one of its most reliable sources of campaign volunteers. If the initiative makes it onto the ballot, it would require only a majority vote to pass. Democrats outnumber Republicans about two to one in the state’s electorate.

Californians have passed similar ballot measures before. In 2004, the state’s voters approved a ballot measure to support research on human embryonic stem cells after President George W. Bush’s administration restricted the use of public money for such research, citing opposition to the destruction of human embryos.

At the time, the $3 billion bond measure was the largest state-run scientific research effort in the country. In 2020, the state’s voters authorized another $5 billion in bonding to finance the research, along with potential treatments for brain and nervous system diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and dementia.

Now, scientific research has become a critical economic engine in the state, fueling jobs from the Silicon Valley’s tech giants to the vast farms of the Central Valley.

“As Trump and his cronies destroy federal science capacity and slash research funding for universities, California should double down on our global leadership on science,” Mr. Wiener said in an interview. “Scientific research is one of the pillars of the California economy.”

The proposal comes as the Trump administration and the University of California — the largest recipient of National Institutes of Health funding — have been locked in a standoff over the Los Angeles campus’s record on antisemitism and as the government conducts investigations into other campuses. The federal government has already demanded more than $1 billion from U.C.L.A. to resolve the dispute, more than it is known to have sought from any other university.

The U.C. president, James B. Milliken, warned last month that “a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians.”

The university system has been in talks with the federal government, even as it has studied its legal options and sought to prepare legislators for a potentially costly response to the threats from Washington.

In a letter late last month, nearly three dozen legislators pleaded with Mr. Milliken and other university leaders “not to back down in the face of this political shakedown and to stand by Californians and their values.” The Legislature, the lawmakers added, “stands firmly behind you.”

In a response a few days later to Senator Wiener, who chairs the Joint Legislative Budget Committee, Mr. Milliken made clear just how much help he might ultimately need from Sacramento. If federal funding to the universities essentially vanished, Mr. Milliken wrote, U.C. “would need at least $4-5 billion per year to minimize the damage of that loss.”