Gov. Maura Healey and leaders of University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School say the federal government’s cuts to the National Institutes of Health have already had ripple effects in the commonwealth.
“As a result of the cuts that have happened already by the Trump administration, UMass Chan has had to cut its class sizes, withdraw offers to individuals to come study here and do research,” Healey said during a visit to the medical school on Tuesday.
Senior leaders and researchers said the NIH cuts would also hurt the research underway in gene therapy, rare diseases, digital medicine and neuroscience.
Chancellor Michael Collins told the governor they’ve had to pause faculty recruitment, and they’re not sure what can continue to be funded.
“Research brings hope to the human condition,” Collins said in his remarks. “It is shocking to an academic community like ours that research would be attacked. Particularly, by folks who believe that America should be the best.”
UMass Chan Medical School is a major center for research and the largest recipient of federal grant funding in central Massachusetts, with $197 million in NIH funding in fiscal year 2024.
UMass Chan professor Craig C. Mello, a co-recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in genetics, attended Tuesday’s news conference to share his concerns about the work that will be stifled as a result of lost funding.
“My heart breaks every day for the patients and the families who could benefit from the work that’s going on here and elsewhere inside of academia. We have at our fingertips now really transformational medicines that are based on genetics,” Mello explained.
The Trump administration also announced it froze more than $2 billion in federal funding for Harvard University after the school said it wouldn’t comply with a series of demands from the administration. Healey said federal cuts to the Cambridge university would be felt across the commonwealth, including at Harvard teaching hospitals Mass General Brigham and Beth Israel hospitals.
“We’ll have to see what happens with the funds being frozen, and we’ll see what Harvard University does with that,” Healey told GBH News following the news conference. “All of these cuts are devastating. The federal cuts are absolutely devastating. Particularly the ones to our research and other institutions that create a lot of jobs and make a huge impact on our economy.”
According to the governor’s office, a congressional budget resolution is expected to make cuts to Medicaid, which approximately two million Massachusetts residents and nearly half of the children in the state rely on for health care, including hundreds of thousands of patients who get their care at UMass Chan affiliates.
