As many as 30,000 New York jobs could be at risk under President Donald Trump’s effort to slash billions of dollars of scientific research funding flowing to labs across the country.
New York researchers received more than $3.5 billion from the National Institutes of Health last year to fund studies at the vanguard of nearly every area of medicine and biotechnology, money that supports roughly 30,500 jobs, according to a new analysis from United for Medical Research, a national coalition of research institutes and health advocacy groups. Home to 17 medical schools and hundreds of life sciences labs, the state is one of the biggest recipients of NIH funding – and one of the most prolific scientific innovators – in the country, a status industry insiders warn has never been more precarious.
In his first weeks in office, Trump signed executive orders to pause trillions of dollars in grants and loans flowing to states and cap funds coming from NIH in an attempt to shrink government spending. The cap, a 15% cut-off of so-called “indirect costs” – money used to keep labs’ lights and heat on and maintain federal biosafety standards, among other uses – has been suspended by a federal judge pending further review. But business and scientific leaders say the cuts will devastate New York’s academic medical institutions and life sciences ecosystem more broadly.
“It’s the largest funder of science in the world and it’s just not clear how you shift those costs to some other source,” said Jonathan Teyan, president and CEO of the Associated Medical Schools of New York, a nonprofit consortium of the state’s med schools.
The 15% cap alone would cost the state an estimated $632 million, according to a recent analysis by James Murphy, a policy director at Education Reform Now, a nonpartisan education think tank. The looming funding gap accounts for just part of what keeps Teyan and other research leaders up at night. Also on their minds is the fate of all future projects, for which the grant award process has been completely halted since Trump took office on January 20, according to Teyan. NIH has not posted an advisory council meeting to the federal registration in more than six weeks, he said, short-circuiting the review procedures used to determine what proposals will get funding.
“Everyone is in a bit of a holding pattern here,” he said.
Unlike some other large states, New York lacks its own multi-billion research fund to support the types of projects currently backed by the NIH. For example, California’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine has awarded close to $3.9 billion over the last two decades to fund stem cell and other disease research. Texas’ Cancer Prevention and Research Insitute is another $6-billion, twenty-year initiative. New York’s own Stem Cell Science Program ceased funding in 2021 after awarding $400 million since its founding in 2007.
While New York’s research institutions are practicing a wait-and-see mentality with bated breath, the cuts would ultimately mean the drumbeat of scientific breakthroughs coming out of the state could slow dramatically. Because of the blanket cap, the cuts are expected to hobble institutions big and small and stifle research across the board. Some institutions may have to began making plans to deprioritize some areas of study in order to preserve others, but that exercise has not yet occurred, Teyan said.
In the near term, the cuts would be especially damaging to early career scientists who already struggle to get research funding in competition with more established academics. Those scientists will inevitably look outside the United States in search of backers, which could trigger a brain drain to Europe and other parts of the world, Teyan said. Medical schools in some states have already started scaling back graduate school admissions, but New York’s institutions have yet to take that step, he said.
