At science fair, UC Berkeley researchers lobby for $23B bond to offset President Trump’s cuts

Scarlet Sands-Bliss, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, typically gets up at 6 a.m. to make the drive to rural Lake County, where she’s researching how community members can prepare for extreme heat events. Last Monday evening, after a long day of meetings with tribal representatives and behavioral health workers, she hit the road again, racing down country byways to a pop-up science fair and lobbying event in Sacramento.

Along with a couple dozen other students and postdocs from universities across California, she was there to present her work to state lawmakers and urge them to set up a $23 billion scientific research fund, at a time when the federal government is stepping back its support.

It’s not the kind of advocacy Sands-Bliss originally envisioned when she embarked on a public health career. “I have some professors at Berkeley who really believe that we’re scientists and it’s not our job to discuss the implications of our work,” she said.

But she now believes the survival of her field might depend on her speaking up. “As a young person working in climate, everything feels really urgent,” she said.

Early-career scientists like Sands-Bliss are helping lead the campaign to set up the California Foundation for Science and Health Research, which would dole out grants for projects in health, agriculture, earthquake and wildfire safety and other fields – with priority going to ongoing studies that have seen their funding axed by the federal government. Legislation authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener would place a bond measure to fund the proposed foundation before voters in November.

The bill’s supporters say they are responding to the second Trump administration’s disruption of research in California. The administration has canceled or threatened to cancel federal grants for studies not aligned with the president’s priorities — including those that deal with diversity, race and gender disparities, or climate change.

In doing so, it has cast a wide net. Efforts to study the effect of wildfire smoke on developing fetuses, find new antibiotics to treat tuberculosis, combat infertility and help small farmers market their produce all saw federal funding paused or canceled in California last year, according to researchers at the science fair.

As of December, UC Berkeley had lost more than $50 million in federal research grants. (The university received $473 million in total federal research dollars for the 2024-25 fiscal year.) Researchers have scrambled to remove language from grant proposals that could draw federal scrutiny.

Many grants have been restored. After Trump officials tried to claw back more than $500 million in research grants from UCLA, accusing it of failing to combat campus antisemitism and demanding it pay a $1.2 billion penalty and make changes to admissions and hiring, a federal judge last fall ordered them to return the money.

But scientists see an uncertain future as the president has proposed slashing overall science funding, directed political appointees to vet grant applications for “anti-American” ideas, and appointed a Health and Human Services secretary who has booted experts from advisory panels, replacing them with vaccine skeptics.

“It’s like they’re Neanderthals who want to bring us back to the Middle Ages, where we’re un-curing diseases,” Wiener said on Jan. 26 as he strolled from poster to poster at the fair set up inside the California Federation of Labor Unions office. Around him, scientists talked with other lawmakers and their aides about their studies.

Wiener said he first floated the idea of a state science fund early last year after becoming “very upset and angry” at attacks on university research and federal science agencies, and was surprised to quickly hear from the United Auto Workers union, which represents scientists at the University of California and in state government.

The University of California also joined the coalition, partnering with the union at the same time as they are sitting across the table from each other in sometimes-contentious negotiations over wages and benefits for graduate student workers, whose contract expires this month.

“Reductions in federal funding are already disrupting critical UC research that supports thousands of jobs, drives medical innovation, and leads to life-changing solutions that benefit everyone,” UC President James Milliken said in a statement about Wiener’s proposal.

‘We had to take the word “climate” out of everything’

Researchers at the Jan. 26 fair had spent the afternoon visiting lawmakers’ offices to lobby for the bill. A look around the room gave a sense of the kind of projects that have lost favor under the current administration.

Some, like Sands-Bliss’s, could be linked directly to climate change. The remote Lake County community where she works has suffered from wildfires and heat waves, which scientists predict will continue to increase in frequency and severity as a result of human-caused global warming. The extreme weather especially affects farmworkers, seniors and unhoused people, Sands-Bliss said.

One staff member at a local senior center, she said, has had heatstroke several times and now can’t go out in the sun for more than 15 minutes at a time. “Everyone has some experience like that to tell,” she said.

Up until a few weeks before Sands-Bliss started her doctoral program in the fall, she said, she wasn’t sure if the funding for her position was secure. “We had to take the word ‘climate’ out of everything,” she said. Instead, “we talk about rural preparedness for extreme weather events.”

Ultimately, the funding was maintained.

Another grant recipient, a UCLA project examining ways to prevent HIV transmission among formerly incarcerated people, seemed innocuous enough. But some program funds came from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, part of a larger grant to Charles Drew University, California’s only historically Black college. The Trump administration revoked that larger grant in March.

The grant was eventually reinstated, said Gabriel Edwards, a Bay Area-based scientist who works with the UCLA team. But the months-long disruption meant the researchers had to scrap a planned partnership with a Skid Row community organization to match study participants with peer mentors.

Projects like Edwards’ and Sands-Bliss’s could get a boost under the proposed California Foundation for Science and Health Research, which has drawn support from a swath of Democratic legislators and a few Republicans, but would need to compete for voters’ attention in a year that could see multiple bond measures on the ballot.

As envisioned in Wiener’s bill — which could change significantly as it makes its way through the Legislature — state grants would be awarded by a majority-scientist council appointed by the secretary of Government Operations, who in turn reports to Gov. Gavin Newsom.

California would recoup some of the profits from any inventions developed with the state funds, and, if they are pharmaceuticals, could choose to manufacture them itself and distribute them at a discount to Californians.

How UC Berkeley could stand to benefit from the fund

As the state’s flagship public research university, UC Berkeley would likely be a major beneficiary of the proposed fund. Stable funding could help labs plan for the future in a field where experiments often take years to execute, said Christopher Rae, a UC Berkeley postdoctoral researcher at the fair. He’s investigating potential new treatments for tuberculosis, a disease caused by a bacteria that the World Health Organization says infects about a quarter of the world’s population.

Rae said the federal government temporarily revoked one of his lab’s three major research grants from the National Institutes of Health in 2025. The research survived, but the lab has frozen hiring for new graduate students and postdocs due to concerns that other grants could be put on hold, a decision that will likely affect its output three to five years into the future, he said.

Public funding is key for developing antibiotics that are important for fighting disease but might not be profitable for drug companies to pursue, Rae said. He earned his Ph.D. in the United Kingdom, and said federal cutbacks have caused him to consider job options outside the U.S. more seriously.

“The countries and the institutes that put the money towards the things that they care about will be the places that scientists like me end up going,” he said.

Cuts in federal research funding to UC Berkeley, whether threatened or real, have “induced high levels of anxiety and uncertainty, with many graduate programs limiting acceptance of graduate students,” John Aubrey Douglass, a senior fellow at the university’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, wrote in an email.

Science bond could compete on a crowded ballot

Voter enthusiasm for a science bond might depend on how Californians are faring economically in November and whether a separate tax on billionaires also makes it on the ballot, Douglass said.

That measure, backed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, would levy a one-time 5% tax on Californians worth more than $1 billion and use the money to offset looming federal cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.

Lawmakers have also floated issuing a $10 billion bond to pay for affordable housing construction and assistance to homebuyers and renters. That bill is making its way through the Legislature.

Bonds require the state to go into debt, so they’re often opposed by fiscal conservatives. But they have become a common way for the state to finance large infrastructure projects, such as building and repairing schools.

To make it to the ballot, Wiener’s measure must first win support from two-thirds of California legislators and Gov. Gavin Newsom. A majority of voters would then need to approve it.

Two Republican legislators have signed on as co-authors, an indication of the bipartisan appeal that basic research can still have, even in a polarized political climate.

Assemblymember Josh Hoover, a Folsom Republican, said he coauthored the bill because he has a family member with dementia and has seen the difference that innovations in medicine have made in that person’s quality of life.

“I’ve talked to a lot of Republicans in Washington that do support the research,” Hoover said. But he said they often raise concerns about fraud and waste. “The federal politics are often a lot more complicated and challenging than what we can do at the state level.”

Congress pushed back on Trump’s proposed deep reductions to funding for the National Science Foundation and NASA in the 2026 budget, instead passing much more modest decreases, which the president signed into law last month.

Texas voters opted in 2023 to direct annual interest from the state’s rainy day fund to an endowment for research at public universities. And Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey has proposed a $400 million state fund for studies at hospitals, universities and independent labs, and to hire early-career researchers.

If California were to set up its own research fund, it would continue a trend of the state going its own way on health and science. Newsom has joined with other blue states in the West Coast Health Alliance to coordinate vaccine policy separately from the federal government. The state also signed on this month to the World Health Organization’s Global Outbreak Alert & Response Network, an early warning system for health emergencies, after the United States pulled out.

“If California’s economy is bigger than most other nations, and those nations are putting money into research, then California certainly could,” Rae said.

___

Berkeleyside partners with the nonprofit newsroom Open Campus on higher education coverage.

___

This story was originally published by Berkeleyside and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.