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A California science bond measure to counter the Trump administration’s research cuts is back from the dead after state lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom reached a deal last week to place the $7.5 billion request to voters on the March 2028 ballot.
Senate Bill 895 by Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco, passed the Legislature with minimal opposition and bipartisan support on Monday and now awaits Newsom’s signature.
It has been in the works for more than a year and began as a $23 billion bond proposal but got a steep haircut mid-year, down to $12 billion. After failing to clear a June legislative deadline to get on this year’s ballot, the bond proposal appeared moribund — and was slashed to $5 billion.Â
But Wiener and a united front led by the University of California and the union representing graduate students, two forces that are often at loggerheads, continued working to restore the bill. Both significantly benefit, as the money fuels scientific discovery while also supplementing the pay of graduate students conducting essential research for professors.Â
The summer hustle paid off: For the first time, leaders of the Assembly, Senate and Newsom are all backing the measure, which was heavily amended in the past two weeks.
“We have performed a ritual legislative resurrection of the bill,” Wiener quipped at a press conference Friday.
The measure would allocate $1 billion to the UC and California State University to build more science facilities and create a system of scientific panels to review research proposals based on their scientific merits. The bulk of the funding would pay for a wide array of priorities such as biomedical research, wildfire prevention and water supply. Portions of the bond would also support science breakthroughs that can be commercialized and provide opportunities for early-career researchers.
Bonds are a kind of debt that government agencies issue and then pay down over time.Â
Public or private research companies, universities, academic medical centers, institutes, and organizations would be eligible for the grants or loans under this bond measure. A newly formed California Foundation for Science and Health Research Council would write more specific rules on how the money can be used.
Why backers say the bond is needed
Wiener and the coalition in support of the measure view it as a backstop against the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to terminate existing and new research funding for the UC and other campuses.
Trump’s Department of Justice has argued in courts that grants the administration canceled violated his prohibitions on research into diversity issues and climate change. Many of the grants sought to better understand diseases, and focused on new disease-fighting drugs, cancer and dementia. About half of the UC system’s spending on research comes from the federal government — in 2024-25 that totaled around $3 billion in federal grants. Â
Last year the White House suspended or cancelled more than 1,000 California science grants from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. The Trump administration admitted in court filings that it used bulk keyword searches for terms related to DEI and climate change to target grants to cancel. Most of those have been restored for now through various court orders after professors sued last year. But at least one major case is unresolved.Â
The Trump administration seeks to further expand control over federal research by proposing to require political appointees to decide which science grants are funded, departing from a practice in which peer-review scientific committees select the worthiest grants.
Trump’s desire to bring federal science increasingly under his control spurred esteemed U.S. scientists to move to other countries that recently passed budgets to entice researchers to relocate. Dr. Harold R. Collard, vice chancellor for research at research powerhouse UC San Francisco, said at Friday’s press event that the Wiener bond measure could keep more researchers in California and attract new ones. Experts say every dollar of NIH spending amounts to $2.57 of economic activity.Â
How the measure came back from dead
The measure initially sped through the Senate but stalled in the Assembly. Political insiders suspected that the holdup was over worry it would compete with the Assembly’s priority bond, an $11.25 billion ballot measure for this November to expand housing construction and affordability in California. Supporters of that measure feared it might be defeated if another large bond was on the ballot.
“I think there’s some legitimate political concerns about placing something competing with the housing bond,” said Chris Micheli, a veteran lobbyist and law professor, in an interview in June when Wiener’s bill was derailed.
Wiener validated that suspicion on Friday. “We already placed a housing bond on the ballot. There are a lot of items on the state ballot, and you know I understand why some people were concerned about placing yet additional items on the ballot for November, and that’s why we were able to, after the deadline passed, work collaboratively towards March of 2028.”
The housing bond experienced a similar journey: It got skipped over by political leaders in 2024 to make room for two $10 billion bonds for school construction and to combat the effects of climate change.Â
This November voters will see another science research bond. That measure, Proposition 38, is backed by a billionaire funder and would approve $8.4 billion for research into immunology and immunotherapies, with an emphasis on Alzheimer’s, cancer and heart disease. Half of that funding appears to benefit just one institute that is significantly supported by that billionaire funder, CalMatters reported. Â
Wiener doesn’t think that Prop. 38 will compete with his bond effort some two years later. “That ballot measure primarily funds one particular institute. It’s not a broad science policy funding measure, and so it’s just very different,” he said on Friday.
The onus will be on the coalition backing the bond to convince voters to pass it in 2028, he added.
