The Nuances and Challenges of Federal Funding for Research — Guest Post by An Academic

Briggs note: Since my take is that the government ought to get out of science grants altogether, I owe it to you to provide an insider’s view (since I am as far outside as one can be) of the grants process. I think this is as fair as summary as you’ll ever see. This author mentions how researchers bend their work toward the dangling money. It is for this reason in this environment I stand by my argument that government grants must end.

Prior to the reelection of Donald Trump, the grant-getting game went something like this.

The primary researcher, the principal investigator, and his team would look for grant opportunities. The first step would be to go through grants.gov or to go the listings of specific agencies, like NIH, and look up key words that could be associated with one’s research agenda. The queen of all grants is the multi-year R01 funded by an NIH agency. Lesser grants are made for small projects, fellowships, career development and training. The grant opportunity listing includes information on who can apply, what the limit is for funding, and desired research themes (priority program areas). A cursory glance of grant opportunity titles shows that the themes of open grant opportunities are not necessarily in-line with the priorities of the funders (i.e., the American people). This evident incongruence will not be dealt with here.

In some cases, foundation funding might be the answer, but many universities gatekeep access to foundations—that is, that a researcher cannot approach a large foundation independently; such a request would have to go through a dean or a development (fundraising) office. Foundation funding may be excluded from high indirect cost rates, but that depends on the rules of the institution.

With an opportunity targeted, the PI and the research team pull together an application. Generally, this would include a 10-page narrative of the proposed work, a shorter summary of the work, biosketches of the key personnel (a biosketch is a truncated CV that highlights a researcher’s experience related to the proposed research), budget materials, scope of work (for each entity that has a budget). It is a complicated process. The NIH has advised supplicants that it takes 40 hours to complete an application; however, this figure may be a low estimate. The application guidelines have to be followed precisely—with regard to font, margins, etc. A poorly assembled application makes it easier for the reviewers to move it to the “no” pile.

Prior to January 2025, for an NIH grant, one could create a budget within a specified limit, and then just add on the indirect costs to the top. So, in theory, a grant application for \$500,000 would be submitted as \$785,000—that is, to top the thing off with 57%. Other agencies, such as Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation, capped the awards. Say that the grant amount was \$500,000, the indirect costs (calculated at the same rate) will have to be built into the budget. As this is being written, the indirects for NIH and now NSF are being reduced to 15%. More on this later.

The budget also tries to estimate the time that personnel will spend actively working on the grant, and as the grant is in place, there will be be oversight by the university to make sure that an individual’s time spent on grant activity is billed accordingly.

Once the application is submitted, with generous support of the parent institution (layers of bureaucratic requests for information or clarification and approvals), then there is The Wait, which these days in generally about six months. During this period, the application is with the agency where it is reviewed by a scientific committee. The outcome can be a flat-out no, an eh, maybe, or yes. With a “no” the team can re-invent the application with a new approach—but it has to be substantially different from the original, rejected application. The “maybe” applications are invited to re-submit with a certain time frame. The committee will deliver its comments to the PI, and they can fix up the application to make it more attractive to the committee in the next round. Lastly is a “yes”–but often it’s not not a true “yes”–there are still hoops. A common response is–”We love your research, but can you do it for \$50,000 (or \$100,000) less than requested.”

There are ways to build in some wriggle-room in a grant—to have a pocket of funds that can be redirected to something else in a case like this. That said, salaries and fringe benefits are generally so high nowadays that there is very little fat available to cut in the first place. This will mean that the scope of work will be modified—to have fewer participants, reduce recruiting sites, and redirect personnel activity.

Now a word about universities. Universities encourage grant-getting. Even in this climate of uncertainty, administrators continue to encourage the grant-getting activities of their research faculty with the same passion as they did before January 20, 2025. As mentioned above, in the budget, there are specifications of the time a researcher is expected work on a project. The university is hiring someone for their skills, expertise, and ability related to a certain activity—but at the same time, is declining to pay this person for their worth from their central budget.

The grant-funding mechanism is broken. Salaries for faculty in many cases are very high. There are some scientists who on the lower end of the stick, and they are the ones most likely to depend of grants to wholly fund their salaries.

The research itself is largely driven by the funding agencies. They are the ones who come up with the RFPs to study X and Y. The scientist-researcher—to a large degree—does not chose the arc of their research, but they bend and manipulate their true interests to fit the grant opportunity language. This is not to say there are not instances of serendipity, where agencies want to fund exactly what the researcher wants to do.

Then, some hand-waving—the research is conduced. This can take years, and sometimes years and years. There are results. The conference presentations. The white papers. The journal articles. The advice to policy makers, etc., and etc.

One of the metrics a researcher is judged on by his bosses is the paper output. In this space, it has been mentioned that some papers have a blinding number of authors. And, it also has been mentioned that there is a proliferation of active journals. Any researcher with the smallest bit of ambition can likely get a paper published somewhere—that is, until they reach some kind of magic number of papers published on a single dataset. Editors and reviewers, who are not intimately connected with the research, can decide unilaterally that “enough” papers have been published on a specific grant, and they regretfully decline they cannot accept the paper for publication. “Enough” is a subjective term. Some datasets are very rich and can generate results for a very long time. Others have a very obvious moment when the data is tapped out.

Comments and observations related to DOGE and the new challenges of funding:

Indirect costs. These are often framed as “the cost of doing business” and are used (in theory) to support the administrative core that helps the PI get the application into the system for electronic submission and to defray the costs of keeping an office going (the lights, the computer, the internet, etc.). Some institutions flow back part or all of the indirect costs to the local operating budget of the PI as motivation to seek out more grant opportunities.

In any case, slashing the indirect cost rate of 57% to 15% on federal grants is significant and it is causing much consternation among institutions that have a long record of grant-getting. The reaction seems to be “let’s sue” and not “let’s work together and find some common ground.” It will take years for lawsuits to reach SCOTUS, and it really is an open question on which side the decision will fall. Furthermore, could a president of the Democrat party undo what is currently being wrought?

In the opinion of this writer, the government could have taken a step approach—to keep at 57% for the current year, drop to 35% the next, to 25%, to 15%. This would have spread out the pain a bit, and potentially be easier for institutions to accept.

Another tactic that the government could use is to have some threshold—say \$30 million or \$50 million of combined funding across all units (this number could vary by institution based on a variety of factors, such research classification, student body, and endowment), and then after that predetermined target was hit, the rate would raise or drop according to some formula. This might be more difficult for the universities to handle with regard to distribution of funds, but they are well staffed, and some agreement could be reached. But, coming to the proverbial table is a much better solution than stocking up on pitchforks and lawyers to extort 57% from the federal government.

The university reaction to the reduction in funding seems to be, “Oh, but there is so much that we fund to support research that the agency doesn’t.” This is dangerous territory as it suggests that the budget lines for personnel may be erroneous. But, if they are talking about the light bill, the contribution to the library to support journal subscriptions, and the copier, they need to state that clearly. Moreover, it would be helpful to calculate a true overhead rate—how much overhead would a 15% rate not cover?

Individual research agendas. Research agendas, as it has been demonstrated above, largely depends on the types of projects that federal agencies seem willing to fund. To many researchers, this is a black box—and they do the best they can reading the grant opportunities and finding key word matches. Maybe there should be more communication between the agencies and the individual researchers and teams about what their capacity is (lab space, and so forth) and what their specific mission is for research. The point here is not to lead researchers into areas where they don’t have a fundamental interest—but to better support research where they have experience, a history, and, ideally, an interest.

Can universities support research outside of federal funding? This is an honest question. Should universities even be in the business of conducting research that necessitates federal funding?

The paradigm is breaking. How should research be conducted? Who should conduct it? Who should pay for it?

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