Earlier this month, UC San Diego celebrated the $5 million renewal of a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that helps the university recruit early-career life sciences researchers.
Only a few weeks before, however, NBC7 San Diego chronicled how NIH had dramatically reduced cancer research funding to UCSD and the region’s other major life sciences research institutes, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
These two headlines point to a larger contradiction affecting one of San Diego’s most important federal relationships: Congress is investing more in health research than ever before, but the executive branch is making those dollars harder to spend. Whether—and how—that tension ultimately resolves could have far-reaching effects on our local economy.
NIH and San Diego
Each year, NIH—part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—awards billions of dollars in research and training grants to universities and other medical research institutions. As the world’s largest single public funder of health and medical research, NIH’s grants support everything from basic investigations of molecular biology to testing of drugs in clinical trials.
Over the past several decades, federal policymakers from both parties have supported spending more on NIH-funded research. The agency’s budget grew from $11 billion in 1995 to $49 billion in 2024, a 120 percent increase after adjusting for inflation. Amid this growth, NIH has maintained a rigorous process for awarding grants, subjecting new applications for funding to extensive scientific and technical review that sets the international standard.
San Diego has benefited greatly from Washington’s growing commitment to the NIH. The county ranked 9th nationwide in total NIH grant dollars received in 2025. UC San Diego alone received $576 million in grants, followed by the Scripps Research Institute ($164 million), Salk Institute ($61 million), and Sanford Burnham Prebys ($45 million). These grants help seed the discoveries that fuel the region’s life sciences industry, which BIOCOM tallies at upwards of 2,000 life sciences companies, supporting 167,000 local jobs—more than 10 percent of the local workforce.
Changes Under Trump II
Since taking office in January 2025, the second Trump administration has offered much less support to NIH than previous administrations—even the first Trump administration. This posture has shown up in a few different ways.
First, DOGE moved to terminate thousands of NIH grants that investigated the extent and impacts of health disparities by race and gender, which the administration said ran afoul of new executive orders abolishing federal “DEI” activities. A recent report by researchers at UCSD and other institutions found that these terminations disproportionately impacted minority researchers.
Second, the administration attempted to slash the permissible rate of indirect costs on grants to higher education institutions. Universities rely on NIH grants to pay for not only direct costs of a specific research project, but also lab maintenance, equipment, rent, and administrative support. States, universities, and medical associations immediately challenged that policy in court, and it was blocked earlier this year.
Third, the administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposed a nearly 40 percent reduction in NIH funding, a dramatic U-turn from the agency’s steady upward budget trajectory. Congress ultimately rejected that proposal, and actually provided NIH with a slight increase in its budget for the current year.
Fourth, Nature recently reported that NIH has lost nearly 20 percent of its staff in the past year due to resignations and layoffs. This, on top of an extended government shutdown late last year, has impacted the agency’s ability to make timely grant awards. Through the first 7+ months of this fiscal year, NIH has awarded fewer than half the average number of new grants it had awarded the previous five years.
These policies represent part of a larger tapestry of Trump administration actions that have aimed to defund U.S. colleges and universities, which collectively receive about three-quarters NIH grant and contract dollars. Along the way, funding for biomedical research has absorbed some collateral damage.
Impacts on San Diego (So Far)
In a previous D.C. Explained column, I reported that overall NIH funding to San Diego institutions eventually held steady in 2025, at more than $1 billion. As usual, much of that funding represented annual payments on grants originally awarded in previous years. But the number of new and competitive NIH awards to San Diego—in effect, the pipeline of new science—shrank, from 571 in 2024 to 467 in 2025.
This slowing trend appears to have continued into 2026. A little more than halfway through the federal fiscal year, NIH has awarded 531 total grants to San Diego-area recipients, down from 665 in 2025 and 776 in 2024 at the same point in those years. The total dollar amount of those grants is roughly the same as last year at this time, but that may reflect recent NIH policy changes that give more awardees their entire grant amount up front. This leaves fewer dollars to be distributed in future years, and creates steeper odds for early-career researchers to get funded in the first place.
What’s Next
The slowing pace of NIH grantmaking has not escaped Congress’s notice. In March, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya testified before House appropriators, committing his agency to spend its full $49 billion budget by the end of the fiscal year. And earlier this month, Bhattacharya faced skepticism from Senate appropriators over the administration’s renewed push to cut NIH’s budget, this time by nearly $6 billion.
Although San Diego institutions may weather the federal storm for another year, some state lawmakers want to insulate California’s life sciences industry from Washington chaos over the longer term. Last year, state legislators introduced a bill (now S.B. 895) to create California’s own version of NIH within the University of California, funded by a $12 billion bond measure that voters would also need to approve this fall. The measure is not without controversy, but it offers a reminder that California has provided its own critical support for biomedical research in the past.
The ultimate prognosis for San Diego life sciences won’t be dictated by year-over-year NIH or state funding totals alone. But down the road, those trends could have major impacts on the early-career researchers, breakthrough discoveries, and world-leading companies that shape our region’s identity, economy, and fiscal health.
