I’m the lead scientist (known as a Principal Investigator/PI) for a small R03 grant application going to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I want to look at how people make choices when premiums don’t matter. I’m just finished reviewing the final pages. I sent the document to my pre-award grant administrator. She’ll review everything for format and then send the files to the main University level review/grant administration team. They’ll give a thumbs up and submit the entire grant for the February cycle sometime this afternoon.
It has a cost cap of $100,000 in total expenses over 2 years. Costs are split between direct and indirect costs. Direct costs are my salary and other costs of my employment (health insurance, 401K etc and the stipend for the graduate student who I want to hire) The University of South Carolina receives a 49% indirect rate for federal grants. Basically every $2 of direct research costs leads to $1 of federal support for the USC research infrastructure. Those research infrastructure costs are wide and varied but they include paying for the library and a lot of IT support as well as maintaining the buildings where the research happens plus the ethics and administrative supports that the feds (rightly) require.
I am extremely unlikely to be awarded these funds in this round. That statement is true in this factual universe, it is true in a counterfactual Harris or Biden presidency universe, and it is true in a universe where NIH is acting as it was from 2017-2020. It is a true statement because it is the first submission of an idea by a new PI. The typical R03 goes back and forth for review and revision between the PI and NIH multiple times if it will ever be funded. First submission funding is WEIRD!
My objective for this round is to get good feedback that I can incorporate into a second round in the Fall.
Once the grant application goes to NIH, it is screened to make sure it is administratively sound. Is it the right budget for the grant mechanism? R01s are big budgets (~$2 million for 4 or 5 years, R03s are tiny, and R21s are in-between). Is it an application with a clinical trial component going to a non-trial grant mechanism? Does it have all the appropriate signatures? Once it is administratively clear it is assigned a “study section.”
The study section is a group of respected researchers with skills in the broad area of a bunch of common applications. My grant will be in a study section of health economics/behavioral social sciences grants. Over the next couple of months, at least three members of the study section will read the entire application and grade it on two key criteria — is the proposed research Important and is the proposed project Doable? Every grant application is graded. The grades are then collected for all grants and the top half of the grants advance to the next review round. The entire panel meets either in-person or virtually. Here each of the top 50% proposals is discussed for 10-15 minutes and the entire study section scores and ranks each grant.
Each study section sends its scores to “Council” which is run by NIH and most of the recommended grants get funded and some grants that did not score high but covered really important topics might receive funding too. All the other grants are then sent feedback from each of the three reviewers.
Assuming I was to be funded on this grant, I would receive a Notice of Award (NOA). The NOA would tell me when the money would arrive and kick off a bunch of new administrative tasks. I would likely start the research that I want to do in September or October. I would have funds to cover six or seven weeks of my salary per year for two years and I would be able to hire/fund a PhD student for a good chunk of their time during the grant period.
The most likely case is that I get good feedback this cycle so I could revise the application. I might have a decent chance of funding for the Fall submission window so the money would likely arrive at this time next year.
This is the short and straightforward/hopeful version of the academic grant writing and funding cycle.
AM in NC
My friends at Duke and UNC are all saying the Universities are FREAKING OUT, and with good reason.
I’m just glad that the red states are more dependent on these dollars as a percentage of their economies, and we are already seeing pushback against this particular face-eating move (Senator Babyvoice comes to mind).
Thom Thillis is allowing rats to eat our seed corn. And I want him to choke on it.
Phylllis
I like this approach, in that you’re getting feedback from peers and experts to continuously hone your proposal. And you know upfront that you will likely not be funded in your first attempt.
Probably not as applicable to research grants, because by their nature there has to be a lot of technical language in them that AI would likely render nonsensical, but I’ve been wondering about its impact on grant writing in general. Well-crafted narratives have been the driving force for most of the sector. Now that anyone can plug the requirements into an AI system & get back a serviceable narrative, do you think funders will move towards more data-driven checklists and demonstration of previous outcomes/success as opposed to who can write the best ‘everything around here is awful, the earth is both scorched and salted, but if you give us money for our program, everything will magically improve’ system now in place?
Steve LaBonne
@AM in NC: Speaking of Sen. Babyvoice, I believe that the University of Alabama at Birmingham (a nationally prominent academic medical center) is the largest employer in Alabama. Nom nom, leopards.
matt
There are a lot of systems run by the government where grants are critical where you wouldn’t necessarily know it. Many years ago I worked for an operation called the Space Telescope Science Institute that among other things administers grants – every scientist who uses the Hubble Telescope (and I’m assuming later space telescopes) receives grants to enable them to get paid for analyzing the data that comes back from the telescope. It’s hard to see how these systems get used without the grants continuing in more or less uninterrupted fashion.
David_C
Excellent summary. I’m on the Program side. Hopefully, the PI will have found a Program Officer from the funding institute to talk to, at least to get feedback on the Specific Aims. If the application is not funded, the assigned PO can offer some useful feedback beyond the Summary Statement. If a grant is funded, the assigned PO will track progress and guide the PI to other funding opportunities.
Folks at universities aren’t the only people freaking out.
rk
This may be a dumb question, but what if they restore funding to red states and not the blue states? Or siphon off everything to the red states. Is that possible? Anything seems possible in this crazy times.
raven
I’m in Athens, Georgia and, like many others, I have many friends associated with the University and they are very worried.
rikyrah
@AM in NC:
Uh huh
Uh huh
West of the Rockies
I wish scientists (and teachers, medical workers, veterans, et al) did not have to experience this insane, hateful Trump Trash Era.
NutmegAgain
The work I used to do (years ago now) was all funded by soft money, i.e., grants. And most of the grants were from NIH and other Federal alphabet soup agencies. (There are a few private organizations that will fund research on this level, like Sloane or Ford in my area, but nowhere near enough to make up the deficit.) I’m quite certain that people doing similar work now are pulling out their hair, which is tragic. Everybody up and down the food chain is usually way underpaid, and doing work that takes a lot of dedication. If you’re a PI or otherwise in a senior research role, you have probably spent years, if not decades, to get where you are. Moreover I believe that part of the reasoning behind these cuts is to carve away the overhead that goes to universities. Ostensibly for office overhead, photocopying, heat, lights etc., it’s still a significant chunk of money in many departments. (One Uni I worked at charged an overhead rate of 30-35%.) Take away the grants, and grad students training to do research don’t get funded, along with everybody else. It’s eating your seed corn. The US will become seriously behind in research initiatives. Well, the Christian dominionists don’t really believe in science anyway.) Blerg.
Sure Lurkalot
Thanks for the grant writing process explainer and good luck with your grant, Mr. Anderson.
The Trump chucklefucks will applaud any cuts to universities which only serve to house liberal elites with pronouns and then there’s that icky science being done there too.
Now when their kid with a childhood cancer has no chance of a cutting edge treatment or their job disappears because their metro was decimated by the cascade of woe brought by eliminating its major employer, they at least have their genius businessman to thank for bringing them this utopia of freedom and prosperity that Fox News tells them is here at last.
dmsilev
That’s a more civilized process (under normal circumstances) than what NSF uses. There’s a similar panel review on the proposals, but typically not a huge amount of actionable feedback if the review consensus is “not good enough”. Further, the panels are often told by the program officers “we only have funding for the top 15 or 20 percent”, so they have to rank-order and be pretty brutal about it. Further further, the panels are different each year, with different perspectives and opinions. I was once on a panel where we were reviewing a resubmitted proposal that explicitly stated what it had changed in response to feedback from the previous year’s reviews. And, our consensus was basically that they had severely over-corrected and gone way too far in the opposite direction. Poor folks undoubtedly had proposal whiplash.
On the news of the week. Yes, mandating a 15% indirect cost ratio is absolutely going to hammer universities and hospitals. That undoubtedly is the idea. And it’s diabolically clever, because it sounds to the ignorant like just good financial management. “Fifty or sixty percent in overhead is much too much. Cut the waste!”. Easy slogan, especially since most people and most media won’t bother to look into what “overhead” actually is and why the rates are what they are. It’s not fancy dinners for university leadership or the dreaded “DEI seminars”. It’s all the stuff David mentions, plus a lot of accounting and oversight to make sure that funds are being spent in accordance with federal mandates.
NaijaGal
For an R03 as an early stage investigator, the odds might be more in your favor than you think. Good luck and thanks for sharing this information so clearly.
I’ve had two NIH R01 grants: talking to the program officer was key for each one. In one case, the program officer suggested that I switch my submission from one institute to another because the study section at the institute I submitted to wasn’t going to be big on machine learning work (this was in 2015 after a resubmission produced a slightly better score – I’d planned a title and slight scope change based on reviews). I listened to her and submitted elsewhere. It got a much better reception and was ultimately funded at the new institute. Pay attention to program officers.
I used to serve on a council (last meeting was canceled and who knows what will happen). Just amazing work by everyone and I don’t think people realize what a talented and geographically diverse group of people come together to review grants at all levels. Institutes also make sure that funding is geographically distributed across the US – as I’ve said before here every single US state benefits tremendously from NIH research. Every one.
Ruff the dog
I’m in federal acquisitions. Negotiated indirect cost rates are used on the contracting side as well. There are well established regulations for negotiating them and dedicated, knowledgeable civil servants at DoD and HHS ensuring transparency, honesty, and reasonableness in an astoundingly complex and varied economic and fiscal and organizational environment. This blanket 15% rate is jaw dropping stupid, clearly the product of people who don’t know what they don’t know combined with those who do know and aren’t telling the first group.
dmsilev
Oh, and NSF reviews on two primary criteria, Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts (yes, with an S at the end; their website will literally reject the submission if you leave it off). Intellectual Merit encompasses the two NIH review criteria David mentions, “is this worth doing” and “is this doable”; Broader Impacts includes things like potential spin-off technology, the potential for student training and postdoc mentoring, public outreach opportunities, and a bunch of similar things.
Phylllis
@West of the Rockies: Folks in my district are already asking about funding for next year. I honestly don’t know. K-12 education funds are forward funded, so if they either continue the funding resolution or pass the omnibus budget, then we’ll be okay for at least another year. If the government shuts down, who knows what will happen. We usually get the next fiscal year allocation numbers* in early March.
*Initial funds are distributed July 1st and final distribution on October 1st.
ArchTeryx
I’ve of the unpopular opinion that the entire rotten academic research edifice needed to be killed with fire. Universities were unsustainably parasitizing more and more of those grants and pushing scientists into a tighter and tighter corner to fund their labs, their staff, their salaries. Worse, rich M.D.s had infiltrated and captured the entire grant system, so more and more R01s were going, not to Ph.D.s trained in research, but to M.D.s that then hired those Ph.D.s to do the research for them – at a fraction of the salaries the grants would have paid directly.
What Trump and his crew did was extreme. It was designed to do just this – burn down the entire basic medical research edifice of the country – but in a way that it could never be recovered or rebuilt.
My emotional side, being an exile from that world, is “BURN, MOTHERFUCKER, BURN!” But my bitterness isn’t the important thing. Wrecking the country’s entire basic research infrastructure isn’t reform. It’s just payback. A lot of innocent people are going to be hurt, and heaven help us if another pandemic begins while basic medical research is collapsed. No matter how much I say, “Karma’s a bitch, motherfuckers,” the collateral damage is too high.
Just like this entire pResidency, writ large.
kindness
I had read elsewhere that the law and the contracts for grant recipients did not allow the reduction of indirect cost funding by Executive branch fiat. But that gets to the heart of Wall Street’s uncertainty of the Trump Administration. Trump routinely ignores laws & contracts he doesn’t like. Wall Street was fine with this until it starts affecting their turf. Leopards Eating Faces. Rinse, repeat. I think Wall Street’s interests in maintaining contracts as unbreakable was plausible denial for Establishment types. At some point some of those Establishment types are going to lose big $$s. Will the rest of Establishment circle the wagons or come out fighting? We sadly will see.
raven
@ArchTeryx: How to you really feel?
WereBear
It’s kind of eerie… honestly, the way they keep threatening to secede, yet continue to vote for what is happening now.
Which is up-ending so many lives. Just as we warned them.
My phrase of the day: Extinction Burst. The principle is solid and a viral TikTok (I’m just sourcing here, people) says this is Republicans resisting all the more fiercely and ridiculously, as the realization sinks in about how much of a lie they have been living in.
David Anderson
@dmsilev: My “home” institute at NIH, AHRQ typically has a funding line below 10% (the top 8% or 9% of proposals are funded in a cycle). Other institutes are higher. National Institute on Aging has funding lines in the mid 20s for Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia projects with bonus funding for early career researchers. Somewhere in the mid-teens is not unusual.
The feedback varies. Sometimes it is amazing. Sometimes you’re not sure if they read the same grant or kept up on the difference in difference literature in the past decade. Most of the time it is in between
WereBear
@rk: Blue states send money to Federal for Red states. Without Blue money, they canot run many vital programs.
Kansas finally threw out Brownback after he ruined Kansas schools. But here they are, again.
Chief Oshkosh
David, that’s a great synopsis. If you don’t get it this round, be sure to note in your Biosketch that you’re a BJ Frontpager – that’ll get it funded for sure! ;)
Baud
Blue states have sued over this. Filed in Massachusetts.
Gvg
Part of the problem is that people don’t know how they are connected economically and how much things really cost to “produce” on their shelf’s to buy. They aren’t being taught that the cost of maintaining roads and a law abiding society and school systems that are used by your customers and employees children are a legitimate part of every thing you buys price. Without those background things, you can’t get supplies to trade for, your customers or workers move away and everything collapses.
one of the best newspaper articles I ever read was decades ago in the Orlando Sentinal. All it did was explain why the cost per mile of a high way seemed so high. It went into how much concrete, what strength it has to be to support the weight of cars and semis for different size highways, in Florida heat, what mechanical equipment was needed, how many workers and the different experience/skill sets they had to have with the average salaries for that skill set and the number of miles per day they could build of their part of the Highway sandwhich. It also went into how much it was costing to buy the land to widen highways through already built up areas where they were having to condemn buildings and tear them down or compensate for lost parking. It went into utility costs and drainage improvements too. It was a making article. I was in my teens, and did not appreciate how rare that kind of info would be, so I did not save it. I have regretted that many times in the decades since. That was what journalism should be.
So now we are naming destruction, but I think most non news junkies still are not going to get how this will impact them. They are going to ask, why does it matter if the Hubble data is analyzed? We have got to explain everything.
laura
I’m confused on a number of points- who wants this- is it that Elon wants our all our money and here’s some, or is it Heritage Foundation shrink and drown the government, or is it Stevie three shirts or Putin or others Smash the Administrative State? The absolute silence around the fact that this cavalier elimination of so many jobs, and the knock on effects to jobs that support those who’s jobs will be gone. I mean, the outrage over reducing dependence on coal was centered on the fact that there’s still coal miners, and so long as there’s a coal miner living, we must continue to make mining work available to him. What happens to these workers when their work goes away- their homes, cars, insurance, savings? Will a republican ever stand up and push back, or will it just be sad mouth fundy baby voices a wishin and a hoping? How does this not kick the slats out of the economy?
dmsilev
@laura: This particular fuckery is a Project 2025 thing; their roadmap had an entry which said, more or less, “hobble universities by cutting the indirect cost rate with the excuse that we’re eliminating DEI spending”.
Ramalama
@Chief Oshkosh: Yes – it’s part of his outreach efforts, which was/is? one of the countless factors in funding a proposal. Probably just a scent of a percentage but the PIs I worked for all had to include plans for outreach.
Ramalama
When I worked at MIT the indirect costs percentage was determined by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), I think. It wasn’t MIT deciding that.
ArchTeryx
@raven: If you had the slightest idea what the Ivory Tower and the bigots and psychopaths in those labs did to 20+ years of my life, believe me, you’d not feel any different. Maybe they’ll have to fire some of that huge overhead of deans, provosts, and regents they hired with NIH grant money in order to keep their research going.
Even my psychiatrist, who is an M.D./Ph.D. and did neurology and neurobiology research, thinks the whole thing is a racket. But burning it all down illegally, as satisfying and karmic as it is, is just replacing one grave problem with a worse one.
tobie
Did this make the news? I just saw that 22 states sue NIH over the cut in grants for indirect costs.
https://bsky.app/profile/joshgerstein.bsky.social/post/3lhtm6m5t5k2q
These are the 22 states: MA, MI, IL, AZ, CA, CT, CO, DE, HI, ME, MD, MN, NJ, NY, NV, NM, NC, OR, RI, VT, WA & WI.
raven
@ArchTeryx: I was just pokin ya. I worked in Higher Ed for 20 years.
ArchTeryx
@raven: Then you know. When it comes to Trump vs. academic administration, that’s just straight up evil vs. evil. While I plenty understand the value of basic research, the institutions themselves have been denigrating and defunding it for ages.
I’m the wrong guy to look to for sympathy for Tier I universities. I save my sympathy for the students and postdocs caught in the tornado. THEY are the ones who will truly suffer, and they are the ones that deserve the help and support.
Anonymous At Work
As someone whose job is in the line of fire but whose regulatory job functions only get higher by the year, this is insane. If I had to guess, Musk et alia only see the budget and see “indirect” as “admin overhead” rather than the infrastructure that lets researchers actually research. And researchers (rightly but in a bad overacting way) complain about all the administrative burdens to applying for, obtaining, and then using grant funding. Wait until they have to be their own IRB/IACUC/IBC office, program officer, research librarian, post-award monitor, compliance director, and IP attorney.
And the geographic AND DEMOGRAPHIC impact will be huge. Young people aren’t coming to Iowa to grow corn but work at Iowa U or ISU. UNC/Duke created a “Research Triangle” that’ll become vacant. The spillover from the job losses will wreck Birmingham, Charleston, Salt Lake City, Lexington, and other cities. Ironically, if this was about sticking it to the Ivy League, the Ivy League is best set up to weather this storm.
SpongeBobtheBuilder
Don’t forget the conflict of interest reporting and the ethics training! I was part of a team that had a $1.2 Million NSF grant and we had to report any financial interests over $5,000 that were even remotely related to the research being done. $5,000 is literally a piece of dirt on the bottom of EM’s spaceX and tesla shoe.
For this we got a small summer stipend (about $3,500 per summer) over 5 summers, and some money to travel to the big conference in DC in the summer, and a regional conference that we rented a van and drove to. We had to do on-line ethics training every (2?, I think?) years to keep in compliance.
NaijaGal
@Gvg: I think that you are absolutely right – the public needs an explainer of what the costs mean and where they go. This allows us to separate some of the issues that ArchTeryx raises from the need for a university to have funds that don’t come from tuition to maintain a functioning sponsored programs and finance office for pre- and post- grant and contract award management, IRB, IACUC for animal safety, payments to CITI, etc., for humans subjects research training and regular monitoring of this (so we never have another Tuskegee or Stanford Prison experiment), librarians who assist with data preparation and monitor compliance with the NIH’s new mandatory data sharing rules (which is fantastic for AI/ML, by the way), rent payments for off-site research facilities, etc., etc.