ROCHESTER — For every person in the Rochester area labor market, Mayo Clinic and other researchers receive $1,237 from the National Institutes of Health.
That’s the greatest amount of NIH funding per capita in the nation, according to a recent analysis of NIH funding and local employment by the nonpartisan Brookings Institute.
“The (cities) that receive large amounts of NIH funding are generally not massive communities,” said Phillip Levine, a nonresident senior fellow at the institute, an economics professor at Wellesley College and a coauthor of the analysis.
Many of the other cities with the greatest funding per capita are home to universities, Levine said, including Iowa City, Iowa ($996), Raleigh, North Carolina ($1,183), and Madison, Wisconsin ($681).
“Now, the Mayo Clinic is not a college town,” Levine said, “but it’s the same idea, where there is a major medical center in a community that is not that large.”
Such communities are vulnerable to job losses if the NIH’s budget is reduced, the analysis found.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released its 2026 proposed budget, which would include reducing the NIH’s budget to $27.5 billion, down significantly from its current $48 billion budget. (House Republicans, though, have not included the cuts in their latest spending bill, Axios reports.)
Much of the NIH’s budget is redistributed to universities and research institutions through grants. Mayo Clinic is the second largest recipient of NIH funding in Minnesota.
The Brookings Institute analysis found that, if the NIH’s budget is reduced to $27.5 billion, those cities with the most NIH funding per capita would lose jobs in the immediate future. Levine said Rochester would lose an estimated 2,700 jobs.
That is roughly the same number of jobs — 2,953 — added to Southeast Minnesota’s labor market between 2023 and 2024, according to data from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.
The projected job losses would encompass the whole Rochester labor market, not just the medical sector, Levine said.
“It could be a scientist at the Mayo Clinic, it could be a food service worker in a restaurant down the street,” Levine said. “If there’s fewer people around with less money in their pockets, they buy less stuff, and that affects surrounding businesses.”
In response to the analysis, Destination Medical Center — the public-private economic development partnership — said in a statement that it was created to ensure the Rochester economy’s long-term strength and resilience.
“Our focus is on building that resilience by investing in infrastructure, creating programs and tools and strengthening partnerships that attract new health science companies,” the DMC statement reads. “We are developing a unique ecosystem that only Rochester can offer. One that grows jobs, diversifies our economy, and positions Rochester as a global destination for health and innovation.”
“We believe that it is premature to guess what any impact, if any, will be to our marketplace, pending congressional action,” added John Wade, president of the nonprofit Rochester Area Economic Development, Inc.
The Post Bulletin reached out to Mayo Clinic but did not receive a response before deadline. However, Mayo Clinic’s new Mayo Venture Partners initiative could play a role in replacing lost NIH funding, trade publication Global Corporate Venturing reported in August.
“Mayo is at a time of tight capital markets and increased scrutiny from a (National Institutes of Health) funding perspective and a flight to quality in the capital markets,” Audrey Greenberg, a partner in Mayo Clinic’s business development arm, told GCV. “So, Mayo is really doubling down and standing behind its innovative technology.”
The NIH budget and labor market analysis comes after the federal agency has already scaled back some of its spending.
In early 2025, after President Donald Trump took office, his administration began terminating NIH grants related to COVID-19, vaccines, foreign research and diversity, equity and inclusion. To date, about $2 million in grants have been terminated, CIDRAP reports.
Those cuts have already resulted in academic job losses in other U.S. cities. Several research universities, including Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Stanford and Columbia, have laid off staff as the result of federal funding reductions, Inside Higher Ed reports.
This summer, the University of Minnesota’s Board of Regents approved a 7% budget cut, with most of the reduction coming from eliminating jobs, Minnesota Public Radio reports. The university, the state’s largest NIH funding recipient, has lost millions of dollars in research grants this year.
However, out of more than 5,000 known NIH grant terminations, only a handful of Mayo Clinic grants have been affected, according to Grant Witness, which tracks NIH and National Science Foundation grant cuts. Just three terminated awards were specific to Mayo Clinic in Rochester.
In January, the Post Bulletin reported that Mayo Clinic had 499 active NIH awards worth more than $342 million. As of Sept. 5, per NIH’s awards database, Mayo Clinic holds 434 active awards, their combined value just shy of $302 million.
Mayo Clinic self-reported that about 40% of its research budget comes from federal and state sources, as of 2024.
With Mayo Clinic as the powerhouse, health care is a key part of Southeast Minnesota’s economy. Over a quarter (68,183) of the 247,013 jobs in Southeast Minnesota are in health care and social assistance services, per DEED.
