Saving the Bay State’s innovation economy

FUNDING CUTS

The authors write that Massachusetts’ life sciences sector alone supports 143,000 jobs. PHOTO METRO CREATIVE SERVICES

US National Institutes of Health Director Jayanta (Jay) Bhattacharya testifies during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, earlier this month. Hundreds of workers at the NIH signed a letter to Director Bhattacharya openly protesting the Trump administration’s cuts to the agency that “undermine the NIH mission” and “harm the health of Americans and people across the globe.” PHOTO BY TING SHEN — AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

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By Alan M. Leventhal and L. Rafael Reif

Massachusetts is facing a crisis that threatens the innovation engine that has powered our economy in the 21st century. The state has already had about a thousand National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) research grants worth $2.6 billion cancelled by the Trump administration.

State leaders in all sectors need to face the unpleasant fact that federal funding for scientific, biomedical, and engineering research is likely to be cut further.

These cutbacks are coming at a difficult time for Massachusetts. While it still has the second-highest per capita Gross State Product in the nation, research by the Pioneer Institute found that its growth has lagged the national average since 2020, and the state is ranked third worst during this period for private sector job creation.

Massachusetts cannot afford a severe decline in its research-dependent growth industries. Together, education and health services employ a million people in the Commonwealth. The state’s largest non-government employers are health systems with academic medical centers: Mass General Brigham and Beth Israel Lahey Health.

The University of Massachusetts is number three, followed at number five by Harvard and at number nine by MIT. Because of our concentration of excellent research universities and academic medical centers, Massachusetts received the highest per capita NIH and NSF funding in the nation in fiscal year 2024.

The citizens of the Commonwealth have seen the critical impact of this funding. Great research institutions have attracted the best and brightest young researchers from around the globe. Labs have been set up, technologies have been invented, life-saving therapeutics been discovered, startups have been launched, and an entire ecosystem of jobs has been created. Massachusetts’ life sciences sector alone supports 143,000 jobs.

But all of this is at risk with federal cutbacks in NIH and NSF funding. It is imperative that we act now to preserve the research infrastructure that Massachusetts has built so carefully over the last decades. This is the time for the Commonwealth’s leadership in government, academia, business, and philanthropy to join forces and take bold action. We are all in this together.

This is what we need to do:

First, it is imperative that the governor and legislature send a message to the universities and academic medical centers that a plan for short-term bridge funding is in process. Such funding is the only way to prevent labs from closing, clinical trials from shutting down, and scientific and medical talent from leaving the state. Once research laboratories are closed, they will be difficult to reestablish.

Second, the state should approve a plan in this legislative session to provide one year of funding equal to half of the federal funding cutbacks.

Universities and medical centers should be required to match the state support. These academic institutions will have to either use endowment money or raise research funds from their individual and foundation donors.

Third, the plan should be simple. There’s no need for review panels. The research that will be funded has already been thoroughly vetted by scientific experts before receiving federal grants.

The state funding will only be used for research projects whose approved grants have been pulled by the Trump administration.

Fourth, Massachusetts also needs to plan for the new reality of a sharply diminished role for the federal government in research funding. The governor should convene a panel that includes government, academic, foundation, and business leaders to design a roadmap for the future.

The time to act is now. Decisive action will enable us to preserve our world-leading research infrastructure and protect the economic health of our Commonwealth for the benefit of all our citizens.

Alan M. Leventhal is the founder of Beacon Capital Partners and served as United States Ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark from 2022-2025. L. Rafael Reif served as president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2012-2022.