EPA Seeks Greater Interaction With Research Community

One issue that Environmental Protection Agency director-designate Carol Browner will be assessing is the dual nature of the agency's mission. It is a regulatory agency, but through its Office of Exploratory Research (OER), within the Office of Research and Development (ORD), it also funds some basic research. This double focus has made EPA a difficult research partner for environmental scientists, several top EPA managers acknowledge. Unfortunately, EPA's grants program for investigator-initiated research is woefully underfunded, say scientists both inside and outside EPA. During the last few years, OER has funded about $20 million worth of grants. Attempts to get the congressional allocation increased by $7 million a few years ago were unsuccessful, says Robert Menzer, acting director of OER. The budget increase wasn't fought for by the administration, Congress, or the academic community. Investigator-Initiated Grants In fiscal year 1991, 229 applications, out of 603 received, were approved for funding by peer review panels. But only 84 grants were ultimately awarded, a success ratio of about 14 percent. Menzer cites funding problems as the main reason that scientists have been discouraged by EPA's grants program. "We fund between 11 percent and 23 percent of proposals," he says. "When you get down to 11 percent, people begin to think it's not worth competing. That diminishes the quality of the proposals--you don't get the best proposals because the best people know they can get money more easily here." Menzer says that when OER was created in the mid-1980s, it had a goal to devote 15 percent of EPA's research and development funds to exploratory grants. So far, less than half that figure has actually gone to the grants program. Also, Menzer says, there have been years when EPA had commitments to grantees that it wasn't able to meet, and reduced some grants and ended funding for others early--though, he notes, this hasn't happened in the last three or four years. Several scientists interviewed for this article say they have experienced difficulties and delays in obtaining funding from EPA. Robert Howarth and David Rudnick of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., received a two-year, $220,000 grant from OER in 1991 for a study entitled "Controls of Dimethylsulfide Production in Marine Ecosystems." But they had to sweat it out, says Rudnick, a senior research associate in the microbiology department. "We submitted a proposal," he says, and "it was well-reviewed and accepted for funding. But EPA ran out of money--they had to fund grants approved for funding in previous years but not funded, which were in a sort of queue. We were told to wait, and waited at least six months. Then we were told that EPA didn't have enough money that year and was changing its system so that approved grants were no longer queued up." Rudnick and Howarth resubmitted their proposal, were again highly ranked, and eventually received their grant. Since that time, they have had no problems with OER, Howarth and Rudnick say. Despite the difficulty, says Howarth, a professor of ecology and systematics, in the end "it was worth having diversity in one's funding sources. It makes you less vulnerable" to cuts by one source. EPA Labs The exploratory grants program consumes just a tiny fraction of EPA's research and development funds. Far more money is available to outside scientists through EPA's 12 laboratories scattered around the United States. These labs (see accompanying table) have their own scientific staffs and perform mission-oriented research, trying to make EPA's regulations more soundly based in science. The laboratories have two main funding mechanisms: cooperative agreements and contracts. In contrast to grants--in which the government gives a researcher money and has little further contact with the scientist beyond regular reports--cooperative agreements require greater interaction between the outside scientists and EPA. Jay Messer, deputy director of one of the EPA labs, the Atmospheric Research and Exposure Assessment Laboratory in Research Triangle Park, N.C., says that in a cooperative agreement, EPA might furnish use of expensive facilities to graduate students or professors, or might provide chemical analysis of samples. Cooperative agreements are usually initiated by requests for proposals (RFPs) from the laboratory offering the money. Sometimes, these RFPs are advertised in specialty journals or through direct mail to scientists on EPA mailing lists. By law, the RFPs must be published in the Federal Register and the Commerce Business Daily. In many respects, cooperative agreements work like grants, usually lasting two or three years--if rapidly shifting EPA policy doesn't redirect funds to a different research area--and providing $50,000 to $100,000 or so in direct funding a year. EPA and its laboratories use contracts for some research services, such as chemical analyses or animal-care facilities. These contracts have often been of a sort known as "level-of- effort" contracts, in which EPA essentially buys a technician's or scientist's time. Such contracts have occasionally led to poor research management, says Messer, who notes that their use is being reduced in favor of cooperative agreements. That is partly a result of recommendations made to EPA administrator William Reilly last March by an advisory panel on science at EPA. The panel urged the agency to involve the outside scientific community more closely to give its environmental regulations a firmer footing. Scientists Hold The Key The key to better collaboration with the outside scientific community, according to Lawrence Reiter, director of EPA's Health Effects Research Lab in Research Triangle Park, is greater support for the grants program. There is backing for a revitalized grants program within ORD, he says, and it is up to university scientists to demonstrate their concerns to Congress. In fiscal year 1993, Congress loaded EPA's research and development budget with $22 million worth of earmarked items--a greater amount than the exploratory grants program budget. Of that total, $9.8 million went to New York University for equipment and facilities to support the university's neural science research program. Information about 1993 Exploratory Research grants can be obtained by calling OER's automated hotline, (202) 260-7474. OER seeks proposals in biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, and socioeconomics. Deadlines for applications are February 1 and August 2. Billy Goodman is a freelance science writer based in Upper Montclair, N.J.

EPA Seeks Greater Interaction With Research Community

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