US Government Shutdown, NIH, NSF
The US Government is in shutdown right now. What does that mean for researchers funded by the NIH and NSF?
This notice explains what to expect with respect to the NIH. If that link is down, here’s a PDF link.
Do you have a grant deadline coming up?
For the duration of the funding lapse, applicants are strongly encouraged not to submit paper or electronic grant applications to NIH during the period of the lapse. Adjustments to application submission dates that occur during the funding lapse will be announced once operations resume.
Review of grants at both the NIH and NSF are in limbo.
Here’s a message from Sally Rockey. Grant drawdown still works, for most but not all grantees.
Science has some information and links.
More from the Chronicle.
UCSD has some info as well.
I’ve figured out more than one person’s reddit usernames. So many of you have already read this, but here’s some more information for the rest of the Labrigger audience.
Source:
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1nikjj/scientists_please_discuss_how_the_government/
From 99trumpets:
PART 1:
My PSA, having been through this in 1995:
Anybody relying on continuing funds from an ongoing federal grant should be prepared for a SLOW spin-up and a long delay in getting your FY2014 funds, possibly 6-8 months delay even if the actual shutdown is very short.
Anybody who has submitted a proposal for a new grant should (IMHO) consider the possibility they won’t get it and should have a fallback plan in mind for other support for 2014. (I was just told unofficially by one program officer that they are planning to skip new proposals this year completely). (edit: not trying to panic anybody and it may well be that new reviews will proceed after only a small delay. But my advice, and it’s advice only, based on 95-96 and FY2013 sequestration, is to have a fallback plan for a potentially long delay in funding new grants. For example – one of my proposals last year was ranked #1 in its program way back in November, but due to sequestration, formal approval did not occur till June and funds did not arrive till August. That’s a ten month delay.)
So, my historical perspective: I was a grad student during the 1995 Clinton/Gingrich shutdown. That shutdown played out as 2 fairly brief shutdowns, something like 3 weeks total that ended by mid-Jan. We were in the 3rd year of a three-year NSF grant and the Year 3 funding normally would have been released in October. Even though the shutdown ended in January, we did not finally get our funds till THE FOLLOWING JULY. This was disastrous since we had April-May fieldwork in the Arctic. (One thing Congress never gets is that you can’t just postpone fieldwork. You either go in the right month or you don’t go at all. You can’t tell the birds to come in August instead of April! And you can’t just “do it next year” because all your grad students and postdocs have scattered to other sources of salary by next year.)
I’ll post my present situation in a comment below this one to keep this from getting too long.
PART 2:
OK, so here’s the main things I’m worrying about now. One is scheduling fieldwork that cannot be shifted to another month. The other is keeping low-paid employees from having trouble meeting their rent.
Example, I have 2 ongoing federal grants. One has already been delayed 6 mo by sequestration, and due to that we already had to completely scrap the entire 2013 field season. (The animals are only studyable in August & September; the funding was delayed 6 mos but you can’t just go tell the animals “could you please postpone your breeding season till February? thanks”. And you can’t always just bump things to next year – maybe the boats aren’t available, your lead grad student or postdoc will have left already, etc.).
Then there’s the low-paid employee issue. The thing that terrifies PIs is that you feel so responsible for the people working for you. My main priority is to keep salary going seamlessly for my research assistant and post-doc. They’re both being paid off long-term continuing grants, but the problem is that the federal agencies only release 1 year’s funding at a time. Every continuing grant in the US is relying on the next batch of funding arriving this Oct/Nov, as normally happens. The last batch of funding (FY2013) formally ended yesterday. Some grants have leftover funds they can live off of for a while; some PIs have other sources of money they can shift to, but a lot of us don’t. And the thing is, lowpaid employees can’t just go unpaid for a month and then come back later and get paid late; they have to pay their rent and they have to buy food. My postdoc and assistant are both paid so little and are living hand-to-mouth already. They are young, they’ve got student debt they have to pay, they don’t have much savings. It is NOT TRIVIAL to tell them to just go without salary for a month, even if they’ll (maybe) get paid later. The other issue is that a few-weeks shutdown can delay release of the next year’s funding by MANY MONTHS, much longer than the actual duration of the shutdown, because of all the confusion involved in offices shutting down and starting back up.
Anyway, in my case, both my postdoc and my research assistant will run out of salary in a couple months if next year’s funding doesn’t arrive. So this morning I went to my boss and basically begged for our home institution to cover my salary for a few months so that I can bump my salary money to my postdoc and my research assistant, and thank god he agreed, which is only possible because my home institution happened to have a good year for gate receipts this summer (basically, a lot of people brought their kids to our aquarium. THANK YOU, EVERYBODY WHO LIKES AQUARIUMS!!).
some other tidbits:
Just heard my program officer has been furloughed completely
Also I just noticed the program officers of some NOAA divisions have been “secretly” emailing their personal email accounts to their researchers, so that we can still send them urgent questions privately w/o NOAA knowing about it and without it counting as “work”
NSF and NIH grant reviewers were all told yesterday to grab every piece of info they need off the NSF & NIH websites immediately, because those websites are being shuttered. Scuttlebutt is the entire proposal year may be skipped, so, maybe no new grants for anybody?? My program officer told us privately last week that he’s expecting to completely skip FY2014 re new grants.
the main gateway websites for new grant proposals have been shut down. Research.gov and grants.gov are both dark.
Go to the reddit page for further discussion. Or post here.
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