CA spends around $11B on the University of California system. The NIH budget is $47B. I haven't done the math, but I would hazard that the total amount of money spent on science by the Federal and the individual state authorities would be comparable.
It's just that historically the Federal government was leading with the fundamental research, but if push comes to shove, states can start spinning up replacement programs.
I foresee three big challenges to funding science at the state level.
Shifting to state-level funding would require states to independently raise new taxes. Each state would have to work within the constraints of its state level constitution for levying that tax. Research would no longer be pork. This seems politically difficult.
States would have to either coordinate on which grants to fund or accept a siloed, fragmented system. That seems inefficient.
Institutes at lower-income states would not be subsidized by higher-income states and fail. That seems wasteful.
> Each state would have to work within the constraints of its state level constitution for levying that tax.
Interstate compacts exist. For example, states can make an agreement that a company can receive grant funds only if it's incorporated in a state that spends a certain percentage of the budget on scientific research.
San-Francisco (in a ham-fisted way) tried to do something similar, by prohibiting city-sponsored contracts with companies in states that restrict abortion.
That's not quite correct. The judicial practice in the US is that the intestate compacts (agreements) require Congressional authorization only if they infringe on the sovereign Federal powers.
One good example for the 2nd Amendment lovers: states are free to make reciprocal agreements with other states for concealed carry permits. It doesn't require any authorization from the Congress.
Another example are the laws for taxation of multi-state corporations that the neighboring states can negotiate together.
California spends $4.7B in general fund revenue on the UC system. Tuition is a bit more than that, but it’s paid by students for their personal benefit so you can’t just repurpose it because some billionaires want tax cuts.
That covers everything from paving roads and mowing grass to paying for their pension system and monitoring for wildfires, so the proportional increase for research funding would be even larger than it sounds because federal funding has been the backbone for that since WWII.
While you’d be looking at a significant increase in tax demand for them it’d be much worse for almost everyone else because California is also the richest state in the country, almost twice as rich as the second (Texas). There’s no way that isn’t a bloodbath for American science.
It's just that historically the Federal government was leading with the fundamental research, but if push comes to shove, states can start spinning up replacement programs.