On paper, little appears to have changed for UMass Chan Medical School over the past year, despite the cascade of paused and terminated grants and swift, unpredictable policy shifts that followed President Trump’s return to office. The amount of bread-and-butter RO1 awards it received from the National Institutes of Health in the 2025 fiscal year dropped only 1.6% from 2024.
But the reality is far different: That figure is padded by the NIH’s transition to multiyear funding, where the budget for awards is allocated entirely in the first year. This means the school only has $75.4 million of the $88.6 million available to use this year. Add in the confusion all universities are feeling over how much federal funding they can count on in coming years — though Congress rejected the most severe research cuts advanced by the Trump administration — and the picture is very different.
“One of the issues with federal funding is the uncertainty of when institutions, such as UMass Chan, will receive award money,” said Michael Collins, the chancellor of UMass Chan. “We have numerous grants that are in the NIH review process that would have already been awarded in previous years, but currently we do not know when the award money is being released.”
Unable to rely on federal grants, universities and medical schools like UMass have been looking elsewhere for support. Could private philanthropy help fill funding gaps? Could the private sector help fund basic research? Those avenues have so far not made a material difference, so Collins and Victor Ambros, a UMass Chan molecular biologist who won the Nobel prize in 2024, have been advocating for another entity to help stabilize the science funding ecosystem: state governments.
Massachusetts and a handful of other states are considering initiatives to increase funding for scientific research as uncertainty around federal dollars has grown. Ultimately, state budgets are unlikely to ever match that of the federal government, but some states with large scientific ecosystems are hoping they might be able to support their universities and research institutions.
“States stepping up, I think, is really important,” Ambros said. He has been pushing for Massachusetts to pass the Discovery, Research, and Innovation for a Vibrant Economy, or DRIVE, initiative, which would make $400 million available to universities in the state. “The DRIVE initiative is really, really appropriate. I would like to say it’s timely, but I think it’s actually long overdue because institutions like ours at UMass Chan have been really in a bind for many, many, many months,” he added. Due to budget shortfalls and uncertainties last year, the school furloughed or laid off 200 employees. It also downsized its Ph.D. class to 13 students this school year, from 73 the prior year.
Collins is hoping state money would allow him to offer faculty bridge funding while they await NIH funds that have been approved, as well as support to early career faculty by providing them funding to do experiments that would help them gather data to use in applications to the NIH. According to data shared with STAT, UMass Chan has 40 grant proposals pending in the NIH review system that have received fundable scores by both study sections and advisory councils — the two panels that provide peer review for grant applications. They total $152 million — around $30 million in the first year they are awarded. But it’s difficult to say when, or if, that money funds will materialize.
Historically, state and local governments have played a small role in science funding. In 2023, the most recent data available, they made up just 0.7% of spending on research and development. But Ambros sees an injection of funds from states as a potential way to improve morale. “The sooner the DRIVE funds materialize, the quicker we can transform the narrative,” he said. “We’ll look back and say, ‘Those years were really incredibly hard, but look how we came out the other end because the state stepped up.’”
Similar proposals have been made over the past several months across the country — in New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, and California. Researchers and policy experts in those states argue that diversifying sources of funding can make universities resilient to changes in the future. The ideal mix of funders would include state and federal governments, foundations, philanthropic individual donors, as well as business and industry, “because they all have their own interests,” said Rory Cooper, assistant vice chancellor for research at the University of Pittsburgh, who has advocated for a $50 million proposal from Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) to support life sciences research.
Campaigns to build support for state funding of science may also help persuade the public of the value of research spending. In pushing for funding from the federal government, advocates tend to lean on discussing potential cures and discovery, but “state governments tend to be much more prosaic about ‘Well, we just want more jobs for our state citizens,’” said Jeffrey Alexander, the director of innovation policy at RTI international, who recently wrote about state science funding in Science.
More localized funding could also be more targeted at the needs of specific communities, added Ivy Estabrooke, a policy expert at RTI and co-author on the Science article who formerly led a Utah science and technology initiative. For example, in Utah, research could focus on local air and water quality issues. “The state can address issues that really impact their population uniquely that the federal government might not see as a priority,” she said.
But there is also a fear among some that promoting funding from other sources could weaken the ability of the federal government to set national priorities and feed arguments that funding from the federal government is not as necessary as it once was.
“That type of rhetoric appears to be in vogue in this administration, and in vogue in the more conservative leaning think tanks in D.C. about science funding — that there’s so much money in philanthropy now, there’s money from other places,” said Kenneth Evans, a science and technology scholar at Rice University. He pointed to statements made by Michael Kratsios, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, “about getting more bang for your buck and bringing in other players.”
Moving the focus of science funding away from federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health is a prescription made in Project 2025, the policy playbook for the second Trump administration written by the Heritage Foundation. Specifically, it calls for allocating funding from the NIH as block grants to states, which could then decide how to disburse the funds. Another blueprint for NIH reform, written by Martin Kulldorff, now an official at the Department of Health and Human Services, calls for decentralizing the NIH by breaking it into four, smaller, regional institutes.
“Federal funding for research is irreplaceable. It’s critical because it sets national priorities, and it sets us up as one of the most competitive countries for advancing biomedicine,” said Shruti Naik, an immunologist who founded New York Cures, to advocate for a $6 billion proposal to fund medical research. She underscored “that states will never be able to replace [federal funding], and it’s actually quite dangerous to say, ‘Now we want it to all go to states.’”
New Yorkers fret NIH will shift money to other states
Many of the states considering science funding proposals are top recipients of federal research funding, and they worry that the administration wants to change that. In the past several weeks, NIH director Jay Bhattacharya has repeated a refrain that he aims to spread out funding throughout the country.
The agency has not released detailed plans for what this will mean for grantees as their proposals work through peer review, but it has created a sense of concern for researchers in states that have historically received large amounts of funding that it could mean even tougher odds going forward.
“NIH has always been very much a merit-based system, and now they’re introducing things that could be interpreted as more politically minded methodologies to determine where grants go,” said Jonathan Teyan, CEO of the Associated Medical Schools of New York, which has been championing the $6 billion proposal to create the Empire Biomedical Research Institute.
New York is the second leading recipient of NIH dollars, but in 2025 it had $2.8 billion in funding from the agency terminated, according to SciMap, which tracks funding cuts. “This unified funding strategy seems to indicate that they want to not send as much NIH dollars to those places where they’ve historically been well funded,” Teyan said. “That’s concerning. We have a lot of infrastructure that’s been built up over many, many decades. We have a huge scientific workforce here in New York, and so any thought that we are going to be sending NIH dollars elsewhere, particularly based on things that are other than merit, it’s concerning.”
The New York proposal seeks to provide scientists “R01 type funding” for large projects to see if they are feasible, to support training programs, and to facilitate collaboration across institutions in the state. While states are generally inclined to fund more clinical and translational research, which would have more immediate payoffs for taxpayers, the plan also specifically calls for funding basic research that seeds clinical discoveries.
Naik sees the funding as a chance for the state to double down on areas of research that it has become a leader in. The state trains 1 in 11 Ph.D. students across the country, and has an extensive clinical trial network because of its numerous medical schools.
Texas and California lead the way
Texas is one of two states that has had long-standing programs to fund science. In November, the state voted to approve $3 billion over 10 years to fund dementia research. The Dementia Prevention Research Institute is modeled after another initiative in the state, the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas, or CPRIT.
CPRIT, which was created in 2009, has disbursed billions of dollars and in doing so has made Texas a hub of cancer research. It was successful in attracting talent from across the country, including a future Nobel laureate.
The two initiatives show a state can successfully fund large research programs, but Texas’s size gives it advantages over smaller states, including financial resources and a large population that could participate in clinical studies.
One argument for state research funding is that it will help them recruiting top talent from elsewhere. That strategy could work better now than at any time in the past, said John Quackenbush, a prominent computational biologist. His lab, currently housed at Harvard University, has been battered by cuts from the Trump administration and what funding he has left would dry up by the summer. He’s had to shrink his lab, put off publishing research because of the high costs of putting out papers, and now is set to move to Texas as part of CPRIT.
It wasn’t a decision he made lightly — he is very involved in his community, serving on the local board of health, and has enjoyed collaborating with researchers across Boston. He loves the area so much that he’s considering commuting from there to Houston. “I would have stayed here for far less,” he said. “All I really wanted to do was to be able to rebuild my research program and have funds to get me through the next few years to be able to survive.”
Private foundation grants are too small to sustain a large lab, and require applying for many such grants. And a financial package he was offered to move to Oxford University in the U.K. didn’t make sense financially. But the funding from CPRIT, $8 million over five years, was just too enticing in an environment where other funding is too tenuous.
“I keep on coming back to the idea that having at least five years of stable funding, probably more, at a level that’s going to allow me to really innovate is an incredibly attractive proposition,” he said. While DRIVE is promising, and he would have jumped at the chance to keep his lab in Massachusetts, it is only an idea right now.
“If I could whisper in Governor [Maura] Healy’s ear, I would say ‘Look, please really push this initiative forward, because you don’t want to see the environment here degrade more than it has to, right?’” he said.
CPRIT was created to compete with another state’s initiative, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which was approved by voters in the early aughts in response to President George W. Bush placing restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research. The institute has helped fund academic research, and increasingly biotech companies, that use embryonic stem cells. (This year, the NIH further restricted their use.)
Many of the researchers that spoke to STAT see CIRM as a model, though California is also an outsized state. John Thomas, president and CEO of CIRM, agrees. Being willing to fund basic research, with uncertain payoff to taxpayers, is a testament to Californians, he said. “There’s this frontier mentality, being on the cutting edge of Silicon Valley and now biotech,” he said. “The ability by the electorate to to take a chance on next-generation technology in various fields pervades these elections, and we’re very proud of that out here.”