CIRM's Not-So-Simple Multibillion Dollar Finances and How a Direct Democracy Tool Shapes Them

Nearly a half-billion dollars for 2024-25 expected to be approved next week

Directors of the $12 billion California stem cell agency will approve a budget next Thursday for the next 12 months, but the ultimate spending on research awards owes much to a Los Angeles physician who died in 1937.

The proposed spending plan appears straightforward on the surface, as it does every year. But the agency’s finances are far less straightforward, courtesy of a direct democracy tool—the 17,000-word ballot initiative that controls the agency’s existence.

The nearly 113-year-old tool was championed in the early 1900s by a Los Angeles physician, John Randolph Haynes, a socialist who regarded it as a prescription to ward off special interests.

Today, Haynes’ Rx controls the daily doings of the state stem cell agency, limiting its ability to spend in certain areas, controlling how it awards billions in research dollars, and whether the agency lives or dies.

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), as the agency is officially known, was provided with $8.5 billion to spend ($3 billion authorized in 2004 and $5.5 billion in 2020). All of it consists of money borrowed by the state through ballot initiatives approved in those years and now codified together.

But there is more than one catch to those billions. CIRM can receive only $540 million in bond cash each year. Plus some of it goes to pay the interest on the state borrowing. If CIRM does not give away or spend all of the $540 million each year, it can squirrel away the “savings” for future awards.

The financial complexities of CIRM do not stop there.