Senate Bill 829 would create the California Institute for Scientific Research, which would give grants and loans to universities and other organizations and companies.
The bill targets mostly public health and environmental areas already facing cuts by the Trump administration, like disease prevention and weather forecasting.
San Francisco Democratic Senator Scott Wiener — chair of the Senate budget committee — co-authored the bill and said he wants to curb the impact of the federal government’s unpredictable cuts.
“They could blow a huge hole in our budget,” he said. “We don't know what they're going to do, we don't know if they're going to succeed, and we don't know when they're going to do it.”
Erin O’Neal is the director of the Capital Center for Law and Policy at the University of the Pacific. She said that a lot happening at the federal level right now, including cuts to research funding, stand to negatively impact the state’s finances.
“The ability of Californians to continue to safeguard public health, to have innovation on the research and development front — I mean — this obviously also has economic consequences for the state. California's research is an economic generator,” she said.
But she added that the new bill could create major costs for the state on its own.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office forecasted a balanced budget for this year, but shortfalls in the years to come, and that was before fires broke out in Los Angeles or the new Trump administration began making cuts.
The legislation would task CalRx — the state’s project for making and delivering low-cost medicines — with procuring and distributing vaccines.
Senator Wiener said cuts and rhetoric on vaccines from the Trump administration motivated him to include them.
“It's horrifying and so we don't know what the future holds for vaccines at the federal level,” he said.
At the same time, Wiener has pushed back on CalRx. While the program has been successful in dispensing Naloxone, it’s been slow to follow through with Governor Gavin Newsom’s directive to create and distribute insulin.
“If there's a different way to do it, that's fine. I'm not I'm not religious about these things. I just want to get it done,” he said.