New White House rules restrict use of grant funding to deal with COVID-19 impacts

[flamingdem]

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/new-white-house-rules-restrict-use-grant-funding-deal-covid-19-impacts?utm_campaign=news_weekly_2020-07-02&et_rid=325825488&et_cid=3387196

New rules on how U.S. universities manage federal research grants leave them with less flexibility to cope with the pandemic. The changes, which rescind many temporary measures adopted this spring as COVID-19 shuttered campuses and froze the economy, come despite continued uncertainty over the fall semester and the status of research on U.S. campuses.

“I am speechless because I just don’t know” what lies ahead, confessed David Mayo, head of sponsored research at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), during a meeting yesterday of a top-level advisory panel to the National Science Foundation (NSF) at which the changes were discussed.

In March, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) authorized a slew of short-term exceptions to its long-standing guidelines on how federal research dollars could be spent. Most significantly, as personnel costs are usually the largest share of any grant, institutions were allowed to keep paying the salaries of researchers from their grants even if their labs were shuttered. OMB also eased an immediate cash crunch for grantees, allowing them to get reimbursed for travel, meetings, and other activities that had been canceled because of the pandemic. In April, another OMB memo allowed grantees to replace medical equipment they had donated to hospitals to fight the pandemic.

The goal was to preserve as much of the U.S. research enterprise as possible in the face of the unprecedented disruptions caused by COVID-19. “Many of the operational impacts and costs are unknowable at this point,” OMB Deputy Director Margaret Weichert wrote in a 19 March OMB memo that detailed 13 categories of “administrative relief” offered to universities conducting federally funded research.

But there was also a downside. Drawing down on their grants meant once their labs reopened, scientists would have less money left to do the promised research.

Science advocates hope agencies will give researchers more funding to finish their projects. But that would require additional money from Congress, which is divided over the next COVID-19 relief package and also has yet to pass spending bills for the next fiscal year.

In the meantime, university administrators say it’s no fun being left in the dark. “The [March] OMB guidance was hugely appreciated,” says Pamela Webb, a research administrator at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. “But there’s also a huge amount of angst and uncertainty over what will happen next.”

[I_UndergroundPanther]

1. Republicans are pro death

And all the things they do to undermine fighting this pandemic proves they want masses of people to get infected and die. To them it's culling the herd. Like we are a bunch of cows,and they want to kill off the old sick,non white,the poor,the disabled. This virus is thier death camp,without the camp.

[Nitram]

2. It used to be this would have been an Onion piece...

[2naSalit]

3. +1