A recent report by the National Science Board (NSB) on the burden of administrative activities for federally funded researchers was the focus of a joint hearing between the House Subcommittees on Oversight and Research and Technology. Dr. Arthur Bienenstock of the NSB was joined by Dr. Susan Sedwick (Federal Demonstration Partnership), Dr. Gina Lee-Glauser (Syracuse University), and Allison Lerner (Inspector General at the National Science Foundation). The NSB’s report found that in a survey of more than 13,000 principle investigators (PIs), federally-funded researchers self-reported spending up to 42% of their time dealing with administrative requirements associated with their grant awards.
Bienenstock listed several of the report’s recommendations, including changing the requirements for grant applications to make the preparation process less onerous. Currently, for example, NSF grant applications include sections such as mentoring plans, detailed multiyear budgets, and data management plans. The NSB suggested and the NSF is sponsoring a pilot program of “pre-proposals” which are stripped down to only what is necessary to determine whether the grant will be funded or not; applicants subsequently provide the necessary administrative paperwork once the application has passed the first merit-review hurdle. Other suggestions included reforms to existing regulations for grant administration (particularly those involving human or animal subjects) and to disseminate best practices across universities to help reduce the administrative workload on both staff and PIs.
The witness responses were attended to with interest by both parties. Republican members expressed an interest in removing unnecessary and duplicative government regulation in the process, while Democrats focused on the time that administrative work takes away from researchers who are already competing harder for pots of federal money that are shrinking each year. Although the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology (FIRST) Act and the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act were mentioned by witnesses, there was praise only for the provision that would create an Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) task force to streamline funding regulations; Bienenstock specifically asked the Subcommittees to remove language specifying the inclusion of things like mentoring plans from grant proposals, in keeping with the NSB’s recommendation that proposals in general be simplified.
Lee-Glauser pointed out that seeing their professors struggle both to obtain funding and deal with the administrative tasks associated with grants is discouraging for students in STEM fields, who may come into grad school with the intent to teach but instead abandon academia for industry. “Students see advisors coping with stress of uncertain funding environment and most are choosing to pursue non-academic careers,” she said, noting that the problem particularly affects women and minorities.
Lerner argued the importance of the auditing process and emphasized that any overhaul of the current system should include auditors from the beginning, pointing out that it’s always disappointing when they are brought in late forced to veto reform plans. She noted that the NSF is currently working with other agencies to simplify the auditing process, promoting single audits for PIs working from multiple funding sources in order to preclude multiple agencies from conducting simultaneous audits. However, Lerner maintained that the current practice of requiring receipts and accounting for even relatively small expenditures is necessary to prevent fraudulent purchases (since there have been cases of misconduct where many small purchases added up to hundreds of thousands of dollars of misused grant funds).
Members of both subcommittees and both parties appeared to find common ground in the desire to reduce onerous regulations and shift researchers away from dealing with administrative paperwork and back toward performing the basic science their grants fund. Chairman Bucshon (R-IN) said that “Reducing burdensome red tape caused by an overly entangled bureaucratic web on the research community is an important subject for all of us” but cautioned that “we must also ensure that we maintain processes to safeguard accountability, transparency and responsibility in handling taxpayer resources.” Representative Maffei (D-NY) echoed this, saying that “there are plenty of places to pare back on bureaucratic burdens,” but also pointed out that “by failing to provide more robust funding we consign many researchers to hours of unfunded effort,” specifically mentioning decreased funding levels for basic research in the FIRST Act and the President’s 2015 budget request.