University of Maine President Joan Ferrini-Mundy and co-panelists — Gabriel Paquette from the Office of the Provost, Giovanna Guidoboni from the Office of the Vice President for Research, and Jenny Boyden from the Office of Finance and Administration — participated in a panel forum about state of federal research funding, recent federal policy updates, and new federal initiatives on March 9 in Wells Conference Center.
The slides presented at this event are available online.
Due to technical difficulties, there are segments of the recording where audio is not available.
Full transcript of event:
Giovanna Guidoboni:
Thank you for making the time and being here. You see here President Ferrini-Mundy, Provost Paquette, CBO Jenny Boyden, and senior advisor to the president, Jason Charland.
We have a few slides for you to discuss together. These are the major topics we will cover, not necessarily in this order. You will not be overwhelmed with slides. The goal is to leave ample time for questions and discussions.
This is research forum. Let us just remind ourselves where we are with the R1 endeavor, which as you know now, basically boils down to two major metrics, achieving $50 million or more of annual expenditures for research and development and graduating 70 doctoral research students per year or more.
We are very well on track on that. Just as an FYI, we recently submitted our report to HERT. This is provisional for FY ’25 because it has not been approved by the NSF yet, but we are reporting $217 millions, which is then way above the $50 millions and higher than last year. We are on track for the doctoral degrees, projecting around 80 for the upcoming year.
What did I do? [laughs] Yes, sorry. This is a summary of what I just said, and here you have the number. In the interest of time, I move forward and I pass it to the president.
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
I’m about to pass this to Jason Charland, but just to say that this event is offered in the spirit of the town halls that we held with the research community last year. When the new administration came in, everyone had lots of questions about how we were handling things.
Would it be better if I stood someplace and people…You can hear me. That’s fine. OK. Henry said no, so I won’t. Basically, to bring together our research community, and our full research community, of course, is a part of this discussion. It’s great to see you, and I’m trusting there are folks out there on Zoom.
A lot has changed in a year, and Jason will take a moment now to tell us a snapshot about the state of federal research funding. Of course, we’ll be wanting to take questions, so we’ll try to keep presentation to a minimum, but Jason?
Jason Charland:
Thank you, President Ferrini-Mundy. Much of UMaine’s research enterprise is fueled by federal funding. We’re paying very close attention to the federal budget.
This chart is very extensive, but really, the point is to show you what’s happened over the last couple of years and comparing FY ’25 four numbers to what just landed in FY ’26. I’m not going to go through each agency only to say that there are some changes.
Then you’ll see on the far-right column is UMaine’s history over the last five fiscal years. Not focusing on the top line numbers necessarily at each of these agencies, but what are they communicating to the research community as far as priorities? Then how do we stay competitive, staying true to what we have a great track record with?
Our partnerships, whether they’re in the state around the country or around the world, and then thinking how we can adapt to changing RFPs or changing priorities within agencies.
We do have a DC consulting firm, Cornerstone, who we’ve had for the last three years. They’re helping keep tabs on things that are coming through, whether it’s solicitations, requests for information, or major reports from agencies.
We are, again, paying very close attention because the federal funding is so important to our research enterprise. I’ll turn it back to the president.
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
Thank you. I’ll just add a little bit to this. First, I want to thank Jason as well as Jake Ward, who couldn’t be here, as well as many, many of you who are a part of watching this closely. I’ll explain it in a little bit more depth.
You see there, ’24 enacted, which was the last year that there was an actual federal budget up until ’26. Then you see what the president proposed for fiscal year ’26, and those were major reductions. If you look at that agency by agency, you will see what the administration’s initial intention was.
Then when you see ’26 enacted, that’s the result of the work of Congress, where a lot of different voices are at the table in helping the Congress to understand the value of the federal investment. You see big differences there.
That’s the first thing I want to point out, that that’s an extraordinary set of activities that happens as that goes forward. Then finally, if you look down through, you will see the agencies that have had fairly large reductions from ’24, which is the last year we had this budget passed, until ’26.
That affects us and our research community, those at least who access these federal funds, in serious ways. Jason was just bringing me up to speed. The RFP volume, so the RFPs, RFIs, NOFOs that are coming out of the federal government right now are at about 50 percent of their numbers last year.
The agencies are still in different places in terms of their spending and their spend plans for ’26. Folks who have proposals pending right now, I think it’s going to be a bit of a wait, my sense, just because the agencies are still getting ready to lay out these budgets, but the work for ’27 at the federal level is well underway.
This is constant work. I wanted to also acknowledge Cornerstone as well as APLU, which does a very, very good job of tracking where things stand and to assure you that there’s a lot of engagement there.
This does not speak to another big piece of our work, which is the congressionally-directed spending or the earmarks part of the work, or appropriations requests that are another part of the work, and we could go into more depth on both of those.
One piece of very, very good news that I believe everyone has heard — and a lot of people in this room will be affected by this — will be the $45 million earmark secured by Senator Collins in her role as Chair of Appropriations for a new health and life sciences complex. Those dollars are in the ’26 budget and will be forthcoming.
We have some very good news, but the strategies around seeking funding right now are needing all of our collective attention. More on that shortly. I think I have the next one. Yes.
Many of you are tracking closely on F&A. I’m just curious how many are. I’m always interested in it. This is essentially the reimbursement for…its cost recovery for the cost of doing research that for decades now, the government has funded.
You know this, when dollars come to universities to do the direct work of research, there is additional money added in to pay for what it costs to do the, essentially, facilities and administration part of that work. There has been a big set of discussions going on since the new administration came in about the negotiated F&A rates.
Every system, every university has a rate that’s agreed to, an audited rate agreed to with the government that’s renegotiated periodically. This past year, there’s been quite a lot of interesting activity.
There’s been government guidance and decision-making with agencies to lower their rates substantially.
There has been work by the academic and research communities to create what’s called the fair model, which is an alternative for consideration by the government that would not reduce to the 15 percent that has been proposed by the administration, but indeed would result in a reduction and a somewhat major change in how the work would be done.
All of that has been in serious discussion at lots of different places, lots of different levels. Finally, what happened in the ’26 appropriation — and there’s detail on this slide if you care to look at it — is blocking language to block F&A rate changes of any kind until an alternative model can be developed which the entire university community can agree on.
It won’t surprise you to know that the FAIR model, which is the one that’s been worked on in the past year, although there’s widespread support and agreement, it’s not really unanimous agreement among universities as to whether that model is workable.
That work will presumably continue, but it varies a little tiny bit by agency. Then of course, USDA has a separate arrangement completely. F&A is very much up in the air right now. We’re confident about ’26, but all of this ends at the end of September, and then we go back into what will happen with F&A.
I wanted people to know that you have people here very, very actively engaged in understanding and tracking being a part of these F&A discussions.
The next slide, just very quickly, and you can see it, some of you, at a distance. Basically, the green is the dollar value of new awards, the light blue is the F&A budget for those new awards, and the dark blue is grant expenditures.
You see what that’s looking like, and you see where we are in ’26. We’re down because fewer grants are coming in. Probably people have been very busy doing many things, and so maybe the spending isn’t at the same rate, but we are tracking where that all stands.
These are pretty serious pieces of our budget for ’26 and for ’27 and well beyond. I’ll let Jenny go to the next slide.
Jenny Boyden:
Thank you. As all of you know, research has expenses and overhead costs that are part of our budget. The federal F&A recovery is how we pay for some of the lights, the labs, and the administrative support for our scientists and student researchers.
We’re projecting a $1 million reduction in F&A recoveries next year. For FY ’26, the current year, we have a budget of $24 million, and we are on track to achieve our budget for this year. For FY ’27, we’re projecting $23 million. Again, a reduction of a million dollars.
This means that we must be even more efficient in our grant management to ensure that our research infrastructure remains self-sufficient. We are monitoring all of the things that the president has mentioned, including the number of grant awards that are available, the budgets at the federal agency level, what’s happening with the F&A rates.
We’re trying to factor all of that into our going forward forecasts to monitor and track what our F&A will be in the future. As we have talked about in the past, last month, we talked about our FY ’26 budget. I’ve mentioned that we are on track to achieve our F&A budgeted revenue for FY ’26.
However, our overall FY ’26 budget, we are trending about $9 million short. We are pursuing multiple avenues to balance the FY ’26 budget. First and most substantially, I’ll just run through all of them since we’re here.
We are going to pull back attrition savings, so savings from vacant positions will be pulled back centrally. We think that will cover slightly more than half of the $9 million shortfall. We’re also looking at other dedicated funding sources to move appropriate E&G expenses to those funding sources.
We’re reviewing financial aid distributions. If we have lower tuition coming in, if we have fewer students, we’re looking to see if there are fewer financial aid awards being made and if we can adjust that budget number.
Then the final piece is the F&A distribution plan that we talked about some last month. There were a few parts of that discussion that didn’t seem as challenging as others. We talked about pulling back balances for faculty who are no longer here at the university. That’s about $269,000.
Another $43,000 associated with transfers from this year for faculty who are no longer here. Then the last item on this list is staff in large centers would no longer receive their own return of indirects if the center itself receives a portion of their indirect.
What we talked about last month was pulling back portions of balances depending how far away from the median that balance was. People had a strong reaction to that, and we listened to you.
Giovanna and I met with a variety of groups. Jen and I met with the research faculty senate group, and what we are coming forward with now is a revised plan based on the conversations that we had.
For FY ’26 and FY ’27, we’ll be returning two percent of indirect to the faculty instead of what was four percent. This will become part of our budget process from here on out to review what we’re budgeting each year to determine what is financially sustainable based on where we are with federal grants at that time.
Jason Charland:
Do you want to say anything further? Hi, everyone. Just to add that as with any approach, any policy, there are going to be specific situations and unique circumstances that will have to be considered on a case by case basis.
There will be an opportunity for reconsideration in particular cases. You should know that not only is my door open for that, but I know that Giovanna and Jenny’s is as well. Giovanna, I don’t know if there’s anything else you want to add on that.
Giovanna Guidoboni:
Another thing that we are working on together with the OVPR office is a policy that we can post on the website that describes what this ICR return is about and how it is implemented.
Another thing that was discussed in various meetings that we had with multiple constituents of the community was to make sure that the two percent, or four percent, or whatever percent is agreed upon is reviewed annually based on the federal landscape, the budget as Jenny was saying.
The language of the policy anyway is forthcoming. Understanding that the policy per se, as I said, will not include a specific number, but the language that the percent return will be reviewed and approved on an annual basis based on all the factors that were considered.
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
We can go to the next slide then to talk about a range of other ways that we’re considering as we think of ways that we’re looking at as we think about…
Man 1:
A major milestone for this university this year is the historic agreement, the Graduate Workers Union on a contract, which is a first university as a way that our graduate workers will be supported as peripheral [inaudible] .
There has been concern that we’ve heard from you about where the source of funding come from for the other spends. Anyway, the source of funding for the graduate worker ratification bonus for workers who are covered are [inaudible] awards or state awards.
I just want to assure you that through a series of conversations, [inaudible] these that will not get awards. If it has, [inaudible] . That is a one time where these [inaudible] to be able to help back.
The other piece that I would mention that’s not here on the slide is that several of you have expressed your concern about understanding tales of maybe [inaudible] the agreement so that you’re able to respond appropriately in your day-to-day work with graduate students. The labor relations team will have [inaudible] .
The labor relations team at the system is working with us to prepare appropriate FAQs and training materials. I realize that many of you are writing proposals right now, and you want guidance and advice about exactly how to put in fringe benefit costs, how to put in stipend costs, and guidance is forthcoming on that.
It’s not only UMaine where we have to make this work out, but Chris Boynton has graciously said, because voluntold him to be available directly for your questions as you prepare your budgets if you’re putting proposals together now. He can give you the range of information you would need. Right, Chris? Just say yes. Thank you.
The second point I wish to make is that through the partnership that we have with the leadership of the system, we agreed that there would be a $2 million request that would go forward to the administration of the state of Maine, to the legislature and then governor, of course, as a part of the supplemental budget that is being considered right now in Augusta.
So far, we’ve had very good effectiveness with a request for a one-time $2 million research increase, infusion of dollars into our system, which would, of course, largely be here to help with the fact that the federal directions are shifting substantially.
Not everyone sitting in this room, and I’m looking at our star researchers here, not everyone will be able to seek and effectively get funding for the things that they’ve been doing. There will need to be some shifts in direction, and that doesn’t happen overnight.
There are needs for bridge funds. There are needs for seed funds. There are needs for dollars to help create new partnerships to get to places to work with colleagues that may be new.
Those $2 million, if they come through fully, will be available through a process of request and so forth for people to have some seed funding. We’re very optimistic because the reception in the education committee thus far has been very, very positive. I testified on this a couple of weeks ago. You can read that if you really can’t fall asleep.
Then finally, just fairly briefly, our UMaine Foundation has stepped up and has provided a variety of different kinds of funds — they’re listed here on the slide — where they are soliciting donors directly to provide dollars that have some flexibility for us at the university level on the research front.
We have every intention of trying to support all of you in every way that we can in a very rapidly-changing federal context, and I wanted you to be aware of that. Giovanna’s next.
Giovanna Guidoboni: This is the reality of where we are right now. You can see two graphs here, the total dollar value of the proposal submitted and the total dollar value of the awards received. The current year is the spaghetti line that doesn’t arrive till the end, so the thick gray line as you see.
Basically, in terms of total dollar value of proposals submitted, we are trending similarly to FY ’21. For what concerns the total dollar value of the awards received, when compared with other years at the same time, we are somewhere in between ’21 and ’22.
Now, things are going to improve as we move towards the end of the year. There are several awards that are in the pipeline that are under review. Also, this includes all the volume of the proposals and the words that go through ORA, including, for example, the proposals that go in response to approve the CDS.
Those, even though approved, have not necessarily translated into an application and a submitted proposal. We expect the trend to go up, but it is important to bring in where we are right now.
Why it is important that as we think about how we support our research enterprise across the whole institution, we need to realize that we need to be agile on both the creative side of submitting proposals and responding to the national priorities, as well as internally to support that ideation and also the submission of those proposals.
How can we do that? This is just one example, but it is an important one. A few weeks ago, myself and President Ferrini-Mundy participated in a national summit for the launch of this Genesis Mission.
This has the goal to really leverage AI and support AI for the advancements of science, technology across a very wide variety of different applications. You see on the left, even if you cannot read all the details, but these are the 26 lighthouse challenges that are part of this Genesis Mission.
If you look through, you will see that there are several items or several of these lighthouse challenges in which we are already very strong. For example, in advanced manufacturing, or for example, the operations of building and building science, energy, and power grid and more.
The discussions that were happening at the summit were from how can we educate and train the workforce of the future that will enable such a revolution to how do we support the energy and data science hubs.
On the side of supporting the deployment of AI to design labs in science, in chemistry, in biology that can run 24/7 in an autonomous manner leveraging AI.
This specific mission is an example of something that is clearly a national priority. It is championed by the DOE, and present at the summit were the secretary and the undersecretary of the DOE, but it is meant to span across various agencies.
It is also something for which right now, there is only an RFI that was sent out to gather information from the institutions. Support in forms that are not clear yet has been promised with the intent of having a call for application coming out in the next month or so with teams possibly formed during the summer.
We are closely monitoring that and already preparing on our side to be able to submit proposals as soon as the calls come out. However, so I encourage everyone to keep an eye on that, to get informed, and to think about responding to this. How do we do that?
I would like to emphasize two things. One, the fact that beyond the specific content of this Genesis Mission, I was particularly excited by the shift in paradigm in support of R&D that was championed at the summit.
Basically, a fourfold partnership including academia and education more in general, so universities, but also community colleges, high schools and so on, so this bucket. Industry, from large industry to spin offs or startups, the impact in the economy, both as supporters and partners as well as an outcome of the research.
National laboratories expected to be critical partners again in this new paradigm, and private philanthropy. At the summit, there were indeed various representatives from different foundations.
One thing that really excited me was the fact that when divided into various work groups and people from different institutions were talking about how to think about this paradigm, the University of Maine is already doing it.
If you think about the various partnerships with industry, with philanthropy, including the Harold Alfond Foundation that supports various parts of our institution, not limited to that.
I feel like we have an advantage with respect to many other institutions, meaning the fact that for us, this paradigm is part of who we are. We want to have an impact on what we do because it is part of our mission.
In the next weeks, we are investing time to actually capitalize on what we are already doing, making sure that the stories that we put out there represent these partnerships and make them known.
Please feel free to reach out as you read more about these initiatives and feed us, in a sense, with information and ideas. One practical manner to do that is to be part of this COFFEE and Concept initiative, so Sol, Alan, and Danielle O’Neil are the contacts here.
Basically, the idea is to help fast ideation of concepts, but also ruling out those that have no legs and try to coalesce those that could be addressed in teams by developing quick quote charts one pagers before investing in the writing of a whole 20-page proposal.
Hopefully, by having this kind of fast mindset of idea generation, but also concrete in the sense that it translates in one pagers that others can look at across the university, we will position ourselves to be agile in a sense in creating teams across the universities as new calls come up.
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
Thanks. Thank you, Giovanna. I think that the Genesis Mission with its coherence and clarity and getting out pretty early in this administration with a plan is something that we will see as both an anchor for other agencies and for where funding will come, as well as a model for other agencies that will be looking to be clear about where they’re going.
Nothing unusual about this with the change of presidential administration. I do want to point that out. There have been several other priority areas, which all map into Genesis as it happens pretty much, but that have been laid out by this administration.
Those are AI, as you would expect, plus workforce development in the context of AI, advanced manufacturing, polar studies, critical minerals, nuclear energy-related and facilities-related questions, quantum, health and biotech, and national security and cyber.
We do pretty well in our already funded research portfolios in these kinds of areas. I think what Giovanna is explaining is that she’s put in place a mechanism to try to offer focus both for the Genesis work, but for any areas that are of interest going forward.
I would add that our emphasis here is heavily on federally-funded work, but we are also stepping up our efforts with philanthropy and corporate philanthropy, corporate foundations for those whose work is more amenable to those kinds of funding sources.
If in the COFFEE and Concepts, some of the ideas that come up are better-suited to corporate philanthropy, we’re putting in place the mechanisms for how to seek that kind of funding. I believe that’s it.
Giovanna Guidoboni:
I would just like to add a few things about the COFFEE and Concepts so that I anticipate some of the questions. This idea came before the Genesis Mission.
We, together with the director of ORD, we originally thought to run a pilot this semester, so it was basically started upon invitation on two particular themes. One, AI manufacturing and materials, and the second one on health and life sciences.
Some of the invitees have not been very responsive, some have been very enthusiastic. I am now opening the call to everyone also because now that this idea seems to be helpful in being agile moving forward, this will be followed up with an email again expanding the cohort with the specific invitations.
Anyway, so just in case you are wondering why that was the case, well, here it is.
Again, even if we are not able as a university to work on this COFFEE and Concepts all at the same time, what I would be very happy to work also individually with center directors and institutes and with deans is maybe something more targeted towards priorities that you identified that are aligned with some of the national priorities.
The important thing is alignment. The goal is to try to be as responsive as we can as fast as we can.
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
Let’s open this up now to questions. I believe we’re well set up to take questions from this audience, and let’s begin there. There is a mic over here if you’d like to step there. Yes, Ben.
Benjamin L. King:
I had a question about this. This is a question about the graduate student bonus. A few weeks ago, I had heard, and it was a rumor, that the University of Maine system would only fund that bonus for students that were covered by E&G funds but not research funds. That’s been changed, so it’s all students?
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
Thank you for that. There was a lot flying around at that time about what was going to happen, including, I heard that, what Ben describes. I also heard that that bonus would be funded for all graduate workers, but that for those who are on research grants, it would be funded by their research grants versus from any other E&G sources.
That’s what I was trying to explain here, which is to say, first of all, the collective bargaining agreement requires that, and double check it with Scott, but that the ratification bonus would go to all graduate workers, yes?
Scott:
Graduate workers employed at the time of the grant.
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
It would go to all, but for those that are funded on grants, it will not be that the grants are the source of that funding. We’ve negotiated that with the system, that it will be other funds that will cover that. That won’t affect us.
Benjamin L. King:
Thank you.
Heather Leslie:
Hi.
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
Hi.
Heather Leslie:
Heather Leslie. School of Marine Sciences at Darling Marine Center. I just wanted to echo Ben’s thanks for that negotiation, and also thank you for holding this forum and for listening to the comments that he’s telling about [inaudible] .
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
I’m still waiting for the question, Heather, but thank you. Suggestions, too, folks. We are all in this together, and it’s a very challenging time. If you have ideas or ways that you feel that we could be doing this even more effectively as we navigate through.
I will say that for those of us who are watching this really closely, we’re seeing a bit of a shift. The grant review task force isn’t needing to meet every day anymore. We’ve been through that wave of terminations, suspensions, individual PIs facing a number of questions, and I want to thank all the people who’ve been a part of that.
FAST, which is the Federal Action Stakeholder Team that I’ve convened that was meeting, what, weekly? Twice a week. That’s meeting now less frequently, about once a month. We’re looking at a wide, wide range of federal issues as they come up and engaging general counsel and others and so forth.
The need for focus has shifted to watching the funding priorities for the federal government, at least as one big piece of where we’re putting attention now, and we all need to be doing that. More questions?
Do we have a means of bringing in questions from the Zoom? Good. I haven’t gotten a text that the power is back on yet.
Jenny Boyden:
I can say it was confirmed to be a Versant issue, not a UMaine issue, which makes me happy. Should be a lower cost issue for us.
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
Yes, William.
William Gramlich:
Maybe it’s on now. I think it’s on. Good. I will echo the appreciation of listening about the indirect cost return changes. One thing is also good to hear about the aspect that there’s going to be a little bit more clarity given on how those are determined going forward. I haven’t been here long enough.
I remember when it didn’t happen, and then there was an original discussion of description of there’s this much money that we need to have, we have to keep aside. Anything over that, we’ll be giving back.
Was it actually proposed in the past that departments and colleges would actually get some of this money back? As a clarification question, when it comes to determining the amount of indirect cost returned, it sounds like there’s a methodology for doing that.
Is there a target amount of indirect cost or F&A that the university must get to maintain everything? Then beyond that, we’re trying to get money back to folks? Or is it more we’re going to look at what we end up getting for indirect costs and then determine how to distribute that to people? I’m just trying to get a little bit more clarification regarding that.
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
I’m going to start an answer to give Jen time to chime in, but Will accurately describes what happened because I inherited that when I first got here. There was this number, and Cody explained it to me, that the plan at the time was if we get above that number, then we’ll try to distribute it back out. A couple of the people who were here then are nodding.
That is an unusual approach to doing this because it assumes that we can predict in a given year what we would need to recover even when the research landscape is changing quite a lot, and the costs of that research change.
We did go with that for a while, but that was never very popular, as far as I know, in the research office. I’ll turn to Jen before I go any further and get myself in trouble. I think actually, what you’ve raised speaks to the fact that, as the provost mentioned, we will have a review process. We’ll need to look at this every year.
We need to do some benchmarking to what other places do. It’s all over the map in what other universities do. The real point is to be sure that we’re able to afford the research that we are doing.
I think Jen can say more, but I heard at least one volunteer, perhaps for a committee to look with us every year to think about what will make sense when we take a look at all those metrics. Jen?
Jenny Boyden:
There has been two different versions that were used. One was a fixed pool, and that the more competitive we got and the more indirect we gained, the smaller that sliver was for everybody. It had the reverse effect because it was a fixed pool, and so your more successful research got that bigger fix.
That’s when we said, “OK, we got to do across the board.” There have been versions where we talked about giving it out to a greater population, that being departments, but unfortunately, about the time that we want to implement it was when we saw the budget challenges that we’re facing now.
In order to do that, you have to carve that out of our regular E&G distribution, and we weren’t able to make that change. Did I address?
William Gramlich:
My question is mostly about how going forward, of how is this going to be figured out? What are the metrics essentially going to be used to determine what balance comes in? There’s a bunch of different ways to doing it. Is there a best way, a good way to do that?
Jenny Boyden:
We’re talking about is to bring a group together to look at it with the budget-building procedure, is what is the cost of us doing this indirect cost of this research, what is the projection for indirect recovery, and what can we portion off?
The more that we portion off to return to departments or faculty means that — and I’m overstudying my bounds here — but is a larger cut to the departments. There’s only so much E&G.
That’s why we’re saying we need to bring people together during that budget build analysis and process to determine what is that indirect cost of the research, what is that projected recovery, and what can fairly be portioned off without a larger impact somewhere else?
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
I think that’s a perfect answer. Giovanna is going to speak and I’m going to speak, so obviously, we’ve all got a lot of thoughts on this. I would just add that another factor, so lots of variables here, the rising costs of compliance and reporting around research have been quite significant over the last few years, and that has to get picked up this way.
In the very big, big picture, if there’s a cap at 15 percent and indirects become part of direct costs as well as other very project-specific costs, which could be how this could go. If your project is going to require that you build a new zebrafish lab or something, then here’s how that gets costed, very tightly tied to the specific projects. We just don’t know what that will look like.
For those who are interested in this very, very deep and interesting piece of research administration, we’ll need to pull people together.
Giovanna Guidoboni:
Just wanted to clarify that the policy that I was talking about that we will post on the website describes how things are currently now.
I just wanted to clarify that there has not been other decision-making done for a change. The change is in the percentage. The two percent for this year’s return that have yet to be distributed, so not what is currently in the account, as well as the year after, Jenny, if I…
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
26.
Jenny Boyden:
26.
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
Yeah, we did.
Giovanna Guidoboni:
I just wanted to verify. Anyway. Then moving forward, we will discuss.
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
The landscape could be very different by that time.
Giovanna Guidoboni:
Also, another thing that I wanted to add is it was interesting how in listening to various people in the community, some were very aware of the amounts in their accounts and others did not know about that.
If nothing else, one positive outcome of these lively discussions has been raising awareness that there are some funds in the accounts, and so I would like to encourage everyone to consider these funds as incentives for their own research.
I know that some have been accumulated over time, maybe with the intent of supporting a piece of equipment or maybe students. Basically, I am encouraging to utilizing those funds.
I know it is difficult to do especially when the situations are tough, but I think that continue to support research, and creativity, and activities, it is crucial to make sure that we steer even more upward our trajectory.
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
More questions?
Woman:
If you don’t mind, I have a couple from online that I’ll cut in with. These are kind of historical.
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
One second. Let’s get one from online.
Woman:
The first is from Justin Demmel, and this was from earlier in the presentation. “Do we know whether the enacted funds for 2026 are being spent as directed by Congress?
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
Jason can answer that one.
Jason Charland:
The short answer is the spend plans on ’26 are not yet public. We’ll be monitoring that for sure.
Woman:
As a follow-up then, what does it mean for EHR that $600 million more were enacted than what was requested? How will these funds be awarded given the drastic reductions in programs, e.g., STEM K-12 replacing six-plus programs, and funding limits, e.g., $750,000 for STEM K-12 compared to $5 million plus for DRK-12 alone?
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
This is a very inside agency question. How many even know what this is about? I actually do, but kind of. I’m going to turn it to Jason to give a general answer, but it’s a great question. First of all, the director at NSF that he’s referring to has a new name now. It’s not any longer EHR. It’s EDU.
Jason, can you give a general from what you can tell so far about how this will go? It’ll be different, folks. It’s just different.
Jason Charland:
Sure. I think the president had mentioned this when that chart was originally up. You have what’s proposed by the president, and then you have what action is taken by Congress. What we’re seeing on those different levels, ’24 was the last budget that we’re comparing to.
You may recall FY ’25 was a full continuing resolution. ’26 now is a solid budget. Those numbers change based on what Congress is able to finally put through in the appropriations. I think on the agency by agency, it’s important to keep track of the levels from year to year and what these changes mean.
I think for agencies now, absent a spend plan, it’s hard to speculate. The pace of RFPs is also down, but I think a clear signal of institutional priorities within an agency is reflected in what RFPs hit the streets.
Some of those will be what we’ve seen in the past, and others will be more than likely the new priorities that come through the science administration.
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
We’re seeing fewer in general. Imagine ways that agencies might also be trying to think about how to perhaps do fewer.
Then the last thing I would say, and I’m sure Justin does this, but for others who are interested, NSF has an excellent subscription service where you can basically check off every single part of NSF that you care about, and you’ll get a daily or regular reminder of what they’re doing.
They post RFIs. We need to be responding to those, in my opinion, RFPs, of course, but also other webinars and places where we can stay abreast of where they are.
Audience Member:
I wanted to change the conversation to the new life sciences building. It’s fantastic that we have that congressionally-directed spending amount, but the building is going to be expensive, I would imagine. What’s the vision for finding the rest of the funds? Is there a timeline as well?
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
We’re very thrilled to have this. This is the anchor funding, of course, for what would be a substantially larger complex, ideally.
We will soon be naming two different committees with also a kind of overarching group, one that will have the major responsibility of trying to look at programmatic themes and inclusion within that complex.
The other that in tandem, will be looking at the space, the numbers of buildings, the actual costs, the ways that we will get started as soon as we possibly can on the $45 million piece and make the plan for the capital investment that will likely include multiple kinds of sources of funding as we go.
That’s this week if we get there. Not all figured out by any means, but we’re very interested in folks thinking on this.
Audience Member:
Another question. To go back to some of the charts that were presented with the number of proposals and the amounts that Giovanna, you had shown, I assume those were all new proposals.
I was wondering if this would be quite a task, but to somehow project with current awards when they’re going to end. Also for new awards that are awarded, what’s their timeline? Having a better idea of, especially looking into the future, a year down the road, how many of these currently active awards are still going to be active?
Because otherwise, we might be able to anticipate some major some major dips. That would be really critical to know well in advance rather than just hoping it would work out.
Joan Ferrini-Mundy:
I think Giovanna and Jenny probably can speak to that.
Jenny Boyden:
We do try to do some of that modeling in the finance office. It’s one of the main areas that we were looking at last year when we were also talking about going to a 15 percent cap.
We were looking at the very reduced president’s budget submission, coupled with a potential 15 percent cap. With our current spend rates, where would that put our F&A out over the time of our multi-year forecast?
It was pretty alarming, really. It was bringing it down from 25 to 26 million down to probably 15. Col and Corey can nod if I’m on the right track.
Man 2:
[inaudible] 15 percent, right?
Jenny Boyden:
Yeah. With the 15 percent and the reduced federal budgets, it was getting substantially lower than it is now. We do monitor that on a regular basis, and we…
